NZ’s prison population booming
Plans are afoot to house men in a jail’s gym and add prison beds for another 60 women, as the inmate population climbs inexorably towards 10,000.
With the pressure on, the Corrections Department is having to go back to the job market to employ more guards after laying off almost 200 less than a year ago.
Plans now being negotiated with the guards’ union include double bunking another 200 inmates at various lock-ups.
NZ has one of the highest proportion of prisoners in private prisons than any other country on the planet. These private prisons are effectively forced labour camps where Prisoners are refused parole if they don’t work for slave wages.
What’s more disgusting is that ACC is a major investor in this corporate nightmare out at Wiri.
The more NZers imprisoned for longer, the more returns for ACC. We have a Government Department that has a vested profit motive in seeing NZers locked up.
Our hatred for prisoners whipped up by the Sensible Sentencing Lynch mob, tough on crime politicains and a crime porn media has left reason at the door.
We have built a bitter empire of despair where rehabilitation is secondary to making money for incarceration.
When fear and anger warp social policy the product is a harvest of spite. As state tenants are thrown out of their homes for gentrification, as homelessness and begger numbers soar and as thousands are disqualified from welfare, no wonder our prison population looks set to hit 10 000.
This is the Tax Haven NZ that National built.
I hope there is room for Key and his fellow tax cheaters.
100%SG+++++++ Time for a revolution for sure.
More people in jail the bigger the profit. Not only do we need to look at the conditions of our privatized jails but we need to take a hard long look at each judge who makes the order for a jail sentence.
It’s time to name the judges and list the sentences.
Without a complicit judge the profit margin drops.
Bit like fixing matches really.
Are the judges really to blame for this?
It’s the people who are obsessed with being ‘tough on crime’.
Throughout UK, USA and NZ, we’ve had leaders on the ‘left’ become ‘tough on crime’.
Blair, Clinton and Clark – their they were happy to use crime to get votes. And we know the right will always be worse. As a result, we’ve had both sides of mainstream politics promoting prison as a solution to social problems.
I think the judges are just doing the last job on our prison factory line…
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