The Horror of 260 lost jobs for private prisons

By
Martyn Bradbury
-
45
1

Unknown

And it begins…

Hundreds lose jobs as prison units close

Hundreds of prison staff will lose their jobs as units in Waikeria, Tongariro-Rangipo and Rimutaka Prisons are closed.

About 260 staff are expected to lose their jobs over the next year in a proposal announced today.

…these older prisons certainly needed closing and new prisons that can actually rehabilitate prisoners rather than just punish them is required, but what John Key and the National Party have done is privatise prisons. These older prisons are being closed, not to build new public prisons, they are being closed to allow the private prison at Wiri to start becoming filled.

This private prison at Wiri is an abomination. A huge, horrific, paradigm shifting evil nightmare that must be resisted with every ethical effort we can muster. The State is the only proper authority that should hold people against their will, never a Corporation.

The SERCO contract hasn’t been scrutinized by Parliament and we have little idea what we have signed ourselves up to for 25 years. SERCO told the London Stock Exchange in 2012 that they would be making $29m per year from their private prisons in NZ, over 25 years that’s $725m. That’s on top of the $900m to build this prison!

The argument that this will save us $170m over the life of the contract is optimistic beyond reason.

When Wiri is open, NZ will have the highest proportion in the world of prisoners in private prisons. This has happened with zero consultation over the long term implications of connecting corporate profit to incarceration.

There are numerous examples of abuse at private prisons, and a question this journalist misses asking is that will SERCO be more honest with us than they have been in Britain…

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…the most repugnant part of this is that ACC is a 30% shareholder in this private prison, that’s right, a Government Department has financial interests in locking NZers up.

We have a prison system that has a profit motive to lock more and more NZers up, at a time when the crime rate continues to plunge. Thanks to a mainstream media who warp news headlines into crime porn we have a lynch mob electorate that screams longer and harder jail time.

Our prison system will become an obscene corporate empire of suffering, and middle NZ will have cheered and applauded it.

We are too easy to manipulate to pretend to be a fully functioning democracy.

Shhhh, let’s bitch about MPs and their travel perks.

 

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45 COMMENTS

  1. Privatization rules supreme for National as they scratch each others backs and fill each others pockets. PROFIT BEFORE PEOPLE YET AGAIN.

  2. I have been to Mt Eden (as a visitor I hasten to add) more often than I care to remember. As a result of those experiences I am absolutely positive that all the publicity about private prisons being better is an utter pile of bollocks. Worse, it opens up a market in incarceration. These corporations are greedy, and will always lobby for ever more crimes to be included in the penal system. We see it in Australia with the criminalisation of refugees. Or the US with the criminalisation of…everything.

    Send these corporate bludgers back where they came from and give us a decent, publicly funded prison system that focuses on rehabilitation and recovery.

  3. This makes perfect sense.. To be handing over the prison system to the corporate raiding parties owners is just closing the loop.. The raiders have established the conduit whereby every aspect of our lives, and every function of necessary infrastructure will be used to fleece money from the 90% on the population who have no choice but to rely on it…

    That is what Johnny (the hateful clown) Key was sent her to oversee…

  4. And assuming that the profits that Serco expects to earn eventuate, those profits will go back to England; the balance of payments will deteriorate still further and the Government will have to borrow still more. If you want a rock star economy them’s the trade offs you need to make.

  5. The government is currently spending $20 million at Tongariro Prison. I have seen it…whats going on? Contractors have been there for months.

  8. Can NZs not see whats happening?,privatisation of everything.
    We are being controlled by profiteering overseas corporations.Key is showing his true colours now, handing us over has been his aim from the very beginning.
    Selfrighteous people will say criminals deserve all they get,do the crime pay the time. Every dog has his day ,white collar crime, cheating finance companies ,pedophiles (these get the most protection) will end up inside, courtesy of profiteers, that will soon change the opinions of these people, soon some judges will be handing down long sentences to line the pockets of private prison owners. It will probably cheaper to imprison beneficieries than pay them benefits , because the government profits from privatisation . Soon all hospitals will be private paying institutions, if you cant pay you get no treatment,just like America, this country has been sold down the river by John Key,hes almost completed his contract to hand NZ over. Key wont be around to cop the flack , he will leave that to some other sucker .

  9. Private prisons, private education. Next privatize the (public) health system and whatever else there is. If it doesn’t move, hand it over to the Natsy cronies to make a profit from. Doesn’t matter if it doesn’t work! Bingo, the corporate elite, will definitely have us by the short and curlies then.

    I believe the 260 staff from the affected prisons will NOT be able to apply for jobs at the new private South Auckland prison!

    But hey these are golden days (according to Key’s mate Hosking). We have a rock star economy, jazzing itself up with each passing day! Unemployment is down, we are going ahead leaps and bounds!

    Bill English needs to wake up and face the truth. He along with Key, Joyce et al, are contributing to flushing NZ down the toilet, taking us to wreck and ruin at a great rate of knots!

    • Even if they could apply, it’s not very likely they’ll be able to be able to finance a home in Auckland or that there’ll be there enough demand for them to sell their homes in the backwaters where some of these prisons are located.

    • We already have private health care. And private roading contractors, postal delivery services, etc etc etc. Private sector contracting by the Govt is a very well established and successful model. Long may it continue.

      • Nehemia/IntrinsicValue – you used to make the same point under your “Intrinsicvalue” pseudonym. And it still doesn’t stack up.

        The only reason we have “private roading contractors, postal delivery services, etc etc etc” is because state and council run services have been privatised. All part of the neo-liberal model. In effect you are using neo-liberal “reforms” to justify the current state of things.

      • “We already have private health care FOR THOSE WHO CAN AFFORD IT.”

        There, fixed it, Nehe. Reads much more accurately now.

  10. Perhaps I am cynical, but wasn’t National’s “three strikes” legislation supposed to send more people to jail? If all these jobs are not needed, then doesn’t it suggest that the legislation failed? National got struck out so to speak. On the same token if prison jobs are going and police stations are being closed down – what does that have to say about National’s nauseatingly familiar bravado about being tough on crime? Easy! that it is a load of bollocks – just like nearly everything else National says and does.

  11. What jobs to private prisons? Most of the jobs at Wiri have already been filled so they won;t go there. Other sites are having trouble recruiting and maintaining staff. Could this be due to conditions, wages, benefits, etc? So you tell someone in Te Awamutu that they still have a job…if they move away from their family and friends to say Christchurch? or Kaikohe? Cause that helps them with their work life balance.

    This IS privatisation by stealth, but it’s also the top, not really having a clue what actually happens at the front. SERCO says they employ more prisoners than other prisons. Because you pay someone their 20 cents an hour and call them a ‘worker’ doesn’t mean you’re employing them.

    In a year or two we wont have enough beds (oh wait! that happened only a month ago and continues at SERCO as we speak) and they’ll have to build another new (private) prison that will allow them to close more units at other prisons, that will cause another new…well I think you see what I mean. All the while, golden handshakes and wasted tax dollars going overseas to big business. If a couple of prisoners, or heaven for bid, officers, are injured or die along the way, oh well!

  12. “When Wiri is open, NZ will have the highest proportion in the world of prisoners in private prisons. This has happened with zero consultation over the long term implications of connecting corporate profit to incarceration.”

    New Zealand is still being used as the large socio-economic laboratory it has been for a long time. They conduct experiments here, they do it with privatising prisons, and the people they keep there, they do it in welfare services, now increasingly outsourced.

    We now have WINZ send mentally ill to “Mental Health Employment Services”, offered by outsourced, contracted providers, to put them into jobs. While the overall intent may sound reasonable, to “support” people with such conditions, the real agenda is simply cost saving.

    With all this we get NO transparency re what really goes on, and what the “outcomes” really look like for the persons affected. But it is all according to the “investment approach” now, that is what counts, nothing else.

    One day we will stick the unemployed into poor houses again, and work houses, to get them “do useful things”. Wait, that is the thing to come, unless the sleeping Hobbits may finally wake up and take a stand. But until that happens, who will dare wake them up, they may be grumpy, like a grumpy voter, only interested in her or his benefit, not the fate of others.

    A sick society will breed sick people, and one day the whole shit will hit the fan, and the price we pay will be horrendous, but nobody thinks about tomorrow now, Master Key has spoken his spell, to not worry, it is all fine on Planet Key, it is all fine, just relax, switch off mind and emotions, it is “all fine”.

    • A friend whos husband has cancer and is totally incapacitated, gets absolutely no help from social services,she had to buy all the equiptment to assist her husband, he is eligible for retirement pension,she is younger and does not qualify. So she has to spend savings put by for retirement,when she has spent all the savings then she can claim help.what is the point of saving in this country.?

      If the man had broken his back in an accident he would get ACC help to provide everything, cancer patients get nothing ,this couple have to survive on one pension meant for one person .
      They have paid tax all their lives,she was a nurse caring for others
      now when she needs help there is none.
      They voted for National all this time,she says never again ,
      they are all take and no give. Shameful situation for NZ

      • This is why you DO NOT TELL WINZ ABOUT YOUR SAVINGS.
        The govt lies all the time; throw some of that shit back at them.

  14. The dispensing and administering of justice are two of the ultimate sanctions / powers of the state. Of the many aberrant wrong thinking of the NZ neoliberals their privatisation of custodial services is one of the worse.
    The evidence is that what efficiencies do result are only achieved by way of a deterioration in the conditions and rights of the inmates. While the eye for an eye rabble may see this as justified when considered in light of ethical standards such views are sadly lacking in compassion and foresight. Even if there were material efficiencies resulting privatisation of custody would be unjustified purely on the basis of where power should lie in a democratic state. If the elites wish to engender a disrespect for authority and undermine the masses belief in the fairness of the state they are going the right way about with this and their other attacks on community / compassion.

  15. “Shhhh, let’s bitch about MPs and their travel perks”.

    No no no, it’s BENEFICIARIES that are the big distraction issue of our times. Don’t you know? Every election and political discussion has to be about whether beneficiaries are ripping off taxpayers, and nothing else. Privatisation, deregulation, corporate welfare, crippling inequality and poverty, the surveillance state, climate catastrophe… these things don’t matter. Instead we have to search out examples of benefit fraud (but only the type committed by poor people) and devote 100% of our attention to that.

    • MARIA;

      Excellent link.

      A while back the USA had about 25% of total manufacturing product
      produced by prisoners being paid a small fraction of min wage.

      Back to real slave labour conducted by persons that have committed
      minimal crime,if indeed at all.

      Drug convictions that are pushed onto them by the control of the
      ‘powers that be’ that then want to profit by locking up the very
      victims they created in the first place.

      This truly evil system has to be stopped ASAP.

      http://nzfirst.org.nz/policy/justice

      Cheers.

  17. I woudn’t waste energy worrying about trash, semi-literate, ignorant drugged up prison officers and 4th rate public servants at head offce if I were you.

    Anything has to be an improvement on that incompetant, corrupt mob….

    • Is there a bitter backstory to this rant?

      Or were you talking about Serco, the company that failed at the last Olympics?

  18. I don’t get it.

    If we can teach our kids in ancient prefabs that saw the light of day in the 1950s and expect them to learn –

    why do we have to have new prisons before we can provide training and rehab? Why not now?

    When does the non-prison population become civilised? It’s certainly not a forgiving culture. Prison time seems to be only the first installment of the sentence. Is it any wonder that so many of the people coming out decide ‘might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb. They’re never going to give me a fair go’?

    How about we give the Norwegian system a go?
    http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/feb/25/norwegian-prison-inmates-treated-like-people

    And who is going to train the new employees in these prisons to get better rehab outcomes? Existing providers? Or a fresh set of mushrooms with ‘aspirational prices’?

    There are so many hidden social, structural, and financial costs in this short-sighted move.

Comments are closed.