It’s not a riot because Serco – the company who would be fined for a riot – told the Corrections Minister it wasn’t a riot – unbelievable! Instead of the Corrections Minister ‘grilling’ Serco – how about the media grill the Corrections Minister on the $1billion spent on Serco?
I’ve been covering the privatisation of our prisons since they were first mooted by National when they came into power in 2008. The warnings, the issues and the counter productive outcomes have all been ignored but the current implosion at Serco should come as no surprise to those who have paid attention.
The only surprised person here seems to be the Corrections Minister
Yesterday the Corrections Minister knew nothing about prisoner abuse in Serco. Yesterday he didn’t know about a death. Yesterday he’d never heard of ‘dropping’.
Yesterday all that was required was just a stern telling off of Serco with acknowledgement those rascals in prison were drinking and smoking drugs.
Butter wouldn’t melt in the Minister’s mouth as he alternated between ‘I-know-nothing’ mock shock and shrill accusations of ‘playing politics’.
Today, a different story…
…so how much do we now actually trust the Minister when he says the staffing isn’t a problem? How much trust do we have in this giant corporate prison to give a damn? How much is this right wing experiment costing us our ethical value as a free egalitarian nation?
If you refuse to accept that incentivising incarceration for profit sets up some perverse outcomes, then look at what 2 guards per 50 prisoners and a corporate culture of hushing up mistakes with a corrupt record produces for us.
A Lord of the Flies fight club that insults every concept of civil society.
That’s why we have a public system, because philosophically the State should always be directly accountable for anything that happens in the prisons as the detention of another human beings liberty is power we want to be able to directly influence if it is abused.
Right now the Minister can hide behind Serco rather than be held directly responsible for this madness.
That’s why the Minister must resign if he has been found lying. The threshold must be the same as it used to be, we should reject outright any claim by the Minister that he wasn’t aware, the Government changed this system from public to private, if it had happened in a public prison the Minister would have resigned by now, we should refuse their redefinition of responsibility because they’re the ones who made the change.
This is a Government that stripped prisoners of their rights to vote in NZ elections, so these prisoners can’t even vote against the system that is placing them into fight clubs.
It just manages to uglier and uglier doesn’t it?
The Minister was verbally told last month in a open meeting about the prisoner allegations, Serco knew about the fight clubs for 18 months, Guards were complaining in 2012, 2 previous investigations have been completed but not released, there was a riot and now allegations of total Gang dominance inside the private prison.
A corrupt company with an appalling record on prisoner abuse who covered up a prisoners death demands a response that the Minister seems incapable of grasping.
And while we are on the topic of corrections, isn’t the true incarceration numbers actually far higher than officially recognised?
Have our 3 categories of home detention (Home, Community & Intensive detention) become a shadow prison population?
The introduction of, and/or beginning of recording of Home Detention statistics, these 3 categories of external detention has now grown to fully over 100% the size of the actual prison population. That was reached in 2010 when the total number sentenced to one of the 3 home detentions exceeded the total number of prison sentences. In 2014, the number in home detention was 127% higher than the total prison population as far as sentences handed down goes (16,176 / 7,114).
So our true incarceration population when we include those on community, home and Intensive detention isn’t just the 7114 prisoners in prison. It’s also the 16 176 on detention.
So that’s a real prisoner population of 23 290.
How’s this prison nation of ours looking now? When do we start asking some hard questions about our system of ‘Justice’?
Let’s start with a new Minister for Corrections.
I have just a couple/few/alot of question’s for you Sam Lotu Iiga Corrections Minister … this month.
Do you oversee serco to check they are keeping to their contractual obligations?
Or do you think they know what they are doing and to best leave them to it.
Or none of the above and only appear to have control as corrections minister.
How can serco operate with all accountability and transperancy
when they are the ones doing a review on how bad they are doing?
Sack serco
Go hard Kelvin Davis keep asking those awkward questions but keep away from that giggling gurty tory on tv3.
Serco are mobsters, if you check Wikipedia.
Yeah Go hard Kelvin Davis and get them out because they are corrupt and the manager doesnt care.
I went to three Parole Board Hearings and they were a strain and stressful as the security guards play sick games.
The security guards at Mt Eden Prison are vicious and nasty to my husband and I when we were there to pick up a mokopuna who was released and the guards were playing sick games.
The manager of the prison is an idiot too.
Not only does he look a bit like Sergeant Schultz but he uses the same catch phase:
“I know nuuuuuussing!”
And while I strongly support your flaying of this twerp and the neo-nazi government he represents, please don’t forget to include that majority of Kiwis that put these dickheads into power.
They are EQUALLY responsible for this death.
Look at his predecessors Tolley & Collins – I bet they knew what was going on but turned a blind eye also.
“Right now the Minister can hide behind Serco rather than be held directly responsible for this madness”. – Yep, the beauty of privatisation, have a convenient whipping boy for your governments piss poor decisions. Just wait until the crazy privatisation of social housing, what a cluster with innocent casualties that will be!
But just look at the company Lotu-Iiga keeps in National, look at the examples set right from the top down. What hope did he ever have with this lot? None of them can string a coherent honest sentence together. They all talk in riddles and half truths, if we are lucky that is! This government is rotten to the core.
So I for one am not surprised Sam is tripping over his words, its par for the course with National!
I know exactly what will happen shortly – National will claim that the criticism is a disguised racial attack on the minister, Labour is now turning its racist attacks from the Chinese community to the Pasifika community. When you are totally f…d, play the race card.
“That’s why we have a public system, because philosophically the State should always be directly accountable for anything that happens in the prisons as the detention of another human beings liberty is power we want to be able to directly influence if it is abused.”
I’m not opposed to private prisons as such but that’s a damn good argument why we shouldn’t have them. I might have to rethink my view on them.
Privatising prisons was always a crock of shit and Lotu Iiga is out of his depth and has been set up to fail by Jonkey and the gang. Yes he should go but he is the fall guy for this debacle.
Questions need to be asked about the relationship between Serco and National MPs. How many nats are there with ties and /or interests in Serco?
The buck stops with John Key.
Yes, you have to wonder where the dumb ideology stopped and “facilitation payments” as National prefer to call corruption began.
There has to be some tangiable rea$on why we are paying $ERCO so much for so long for what is a predictable mess by the privatisation of jails. They must be laughing!
The CEO and Chairman of SERCO Group PLC attended the Bilderberg meeting along with John Key.
Follow the dotted line!
While i can fully understand the academic opposition to the State selling its responsibilities when it removes the freedom of its citizens to any private organization for those who’s freedom has been removed there is little material difference in how their time is served between private and State penal institutions,
I am tho interested in this ”2 prison officers for 50 inmates” aspect of the Post,
Having done two lags in Pare Max, one in the 1970’s, the other 1980’s, i know for a fact that in the State’s maximum security prison that such was the staffing level for A, B, and, C blocks,(48 cells divided by 12 a side on two floors with the 2 screws pretty much confining themselves to their office in the right hand corner of the lower floor of cells),
When the cells were unlocked we were free to roam the whole block, including the downstairs dining room/rec room/hobby rooms and pretty much get up to anything our little hearts desired,
To my knowledge, the same situation exists today with the exception of the installation of surveillance cameras on each landing of 12 cells, and probably such surveillance of at least the dining room downstairs,
Would similar behavior happen in the States facilities as what Serco has apparently overseen ???, while i was incarcerated in a number of
them during the 1970’s, 1980’s, Definitely…
I’ve no reason to disbelieve you, but we are now in 2015, and expectations have changed. Do state prisons today have the same staff to inmate ratio as Serco?
If essential social services are contracted out to commercial enterprises it will always result in the service delivery, whatever it is, being compromised by the necessity to make a profit. The extent to which the service deteriorates depends on the ethics and culture of the provider. Why did we even engage with serco when they came with such a terrible reputation from their British prisons?
Oh don’t get me wrong, i have no reason to believe that Serco isn’t maximizing its profits by running Mt Eden Remand with low numbers of screws,
But, here’s just a few incidents from Pare Max, supposedly highly secure and with higher numbers of screw per inmate which would suggest that 3, 2, or 1 lazy fuckers in a uniform per X amount of inmates leads pretty much to the same result no matter who is running the jail,
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11443813
http://www.stuff.co.nz/…/convicted-murder-Nikki-Roper-critically-injured-in-...
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/…/prisoner-attacked-at-paremoremo-prison-20080911...
http://www.pundit.co.nz/content/corrections-woes-grow...
http://www.sunshinecoastdaily.com.au/news/man-shanks…prisoner2424925/
That’s just a small snapshot of a little of the violence in the States Paremoremo Maximum Security Prison, simple punch ups between inmates, most of which are not even noticed by the screws,(which is the way most of us like it), get hardly a mention,
Sure Serco is bad, this from a couple of years ago says that it’s so,
http://www.brookingblog.com/…/serco-leaves-prisoners-to-fight-among-themselves/
While i know that the number of reported assaults, inmate on inmate, at the Serco run Mt Eden remand facility are higher than in other prisons with around the same number of inmates i would suggest that this would not be so if you looked at the figures for remand inmates through all the country’s remand units, on a per 1000’s of inmates basis,
Just looking at such figures on a yearly basis will skew such numbers higher for the Serco run remand unit year on year simply because Mt Eden has a far higher number of remands going through there per year than most other State run remand
units,
The death of inmate Faave at Paremoremo maximum was said to have been as a direct result of the actions of the State’s screws, Faave was supposedly not meant to have been unlocked from his cell while any other inmates were unlocked, he was, either by accident or design, thus allowing those who wanted to harm that inmate to do so,
To my knowledge no screw employed by the State was ever disciplined over Faave’s death…
But for a few things. Privatizing was “sold” to us as a means to “reform” prisons and to see to it that inmates were “rehabilitated” and readied for life outside the system, and to reduce recidivism rates. Do you see any prospect of that in the revelations of recent? I don’t, all I see is a govt washing its hands of responsibility for what the state and the state only should have responsibility for and somehow reducing costs.
They then have these responsibilities at arms length, while accusing anyone who criticizes the system of being “political”
This is no surprise. Dear old Sam sees his boss the prime minister do this all the time with little or no consequence.
National has a very bad habit of breaking things when they DON’T NEED FIXING!
Hell ! – they don’t even fix things when they need fixing.
Housing crisis
Workplace safety
Child poverty
Unemployment
Speculation
EQC/Christchurch
Illegal spying
Dirty Politics
Biased media
Feel free to add to a very long , long list of the shortcomings of the most corrupt NZ govt of all time.
Oh…and now prisons.
@KimDandy – suggest you read The Wrecking Crew by Thomas Frank – breaking things is exactly what they do, it’s all part of the plan.
Or watch him here – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoG7J3r9Bqc
It looks as if I sussed Corrections Minister, Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga, perfectly in my May 3rd blogpost; https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2015/05/03/the-nation-reveals-gobsmacking-incompetence-by-ministers-english-and-lotu-iiga/
So whoever signed the bottom line on the contract on behalf of the government, handing prison services over to private corporation Serco, should also take the fall here, along with Corrections Minister Sam Lotu Iiga and PM FJK, where the buck stops.
NatzKEY literally has blood on its hands, with the unnecessary death of Mick Evans. The result of which was caused through lack of appropriate monitoring of prisoners.
So Corrections Minister, Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga is not really a minister, a drink of Claytons anyone!
death in a state house, death in a state prison. pretty soon the headline will read death in a state school.
That’s the problem when you get politicians who have no understanding of how public services work.
Great article. Privatisation does not work. It is taking taxpayers money and giving it to Serco to go offshore, instead of spending it on wages for more NZ guards and jobs within the prison to keep it safer.
Now people are being murdered and no one is being held accountable.
If this the corrupt country we want to be?
Not to mention the dead toddler that Tolley knew nothing about who died partially caused by poor conditions in their state house.
New Nat policy – just pretend you know nothing – (although not hard for a Nat).
Go Go National privatize everything and take our country further into a dark and sad place. Tolley and Collins are a disgrace and hold much responsibility here. Those two women ! ! They disgust me every time I see or hear them.
You forgot one………….. do I need to elucidate?
What I want to know is, even if, for the fleetest of seconds, we believe the deceased man fell and was not dropped, truly how much difference is there in him running for his life, being chased and falling and actually being dropped.
And why was he transferred to another prison? Excuse us for thinking cover up, what else do you want us to think – that it was the scenic route to the hospital?
Wakey, wakey, minister.
No investigation?
Really?
I’m inclined to view the Corrections Minister a sap whose job is to do the dirty work, take the hits, and remain loyal to the end.
When you become a minister of this government you can automatically expect to participate in lies and deceit as a matter of course.
Lotu-Iiga – “Dead” Minister Walking…!
I am inclined to await the outcome of the reviews the minister has put in place before making my judgement call. I suspect the state prisons are similar – they have just not been able to get their acts on TV.
Kelvin Davis may think he knows everything (similar to most posting on this blog). Labour are desperate for some positive press or Andrew Little at 8% will be the “dead man walking”.
In which case, Grant, there is no point in contracting out prisons to private corporations and paying them big profits if nothing changes. The point of privatised prison services collapses if there is no difference.
Thanks E-clectic, will do! I am quickly becoming very disillusioned in this ‘system’ we live in.
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