NZs a funny place isn’t it? We are so easily manipulated it’s embarrassing.
Take our prisons.
We changed parole conditions as part of a knee jerk law and order campaign in the early 2000s so that those who don’t do rehabilitation programmes can’t get parole. What this has morphed into are larger and larger numbers of prisoners refusing their guilt, getting no rehabilitation and thus serving their full sentence and leaving prison more damaged than when they went in. We have built a prison nation that is counterproductive so why are we surprised when the results show more and more damaged people being released?
With ACC owning 30% of the private prison at Wiri. we have a Government Department seeking revenue streams from incarceration.
We have allowed cheap anger and media peddling the worst elements of our nature as entertainment to cloud our judgement and produce spiteful social policy.
NZ doesn’t need a Trump to inspire this hate, we’ve managed it all on our own.
We didn’t do it on our own Martin, we had the help of Garth McVicar !
Perhaps the prisons extend much further than some of us may wish to believe, they extend into people’s homes, where they sit and sleep as inmates of an enslaving economic system, a brutal, oppressive, extortionist neoliberal market place, where we are mere numbers, like wheels in a huge machinery, to “function” and generate output for the bosses and rentiers.
I sense a wider reaching social problem, where intolerance, tension, aggressiveness and so forth are growing, as people try to keep up with the pressures, like ever increasing expectations, high housing costs and the endless drive to keep up with the Jones’.
Of course, prison inmates, once released, are facing a life at the very bottom of the pile, and rehabilitation only works if society allows it. Sadly too many out there, led by such as the “Sensible Sentencing Trust”, do not believe in true rehabilitation, they are sitting and looking out, to find any fault, and to attack those who are released, and try and prove, they cannot be trusted.
When society is not prepared to give people a second chance, the prison doors will remain to be revolving doors, forever, no matter whether some alcohol or drug program may have been offered and attended for a short sting inside.
Yes agree New Zealand doesn’t need a Donald Trump but we have a John key who is just as nasty and divisive.
John Key IS Donald Trump, but just in a more subtle way.
The problem is the people who end up in prison are damaged goods, they come out even more damaged, we as a society have given up on caring for people particularly people in the lower socio-economic sectors of society, hence we are seeing more problems.
When people can not earn enough money to pay the rent and put food on the table people look to other means to supplement their income, unfortunately many of these activities are not legal.
However now prisons are private I guess it is in the Governments best interests to keep them full.
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