There’s a lot of shock and apologist attempts to explain away the fact that Corrections are illegally holding Prisoners whose time has been served.
First – the truth. The legislation is crystal fucking clear about when a prisoner’s incarceration date starts, it’s in a section called “Period spent in pre-sentence detention deemed to be time served”. Hardly language too dense to comprehend right?
So let’s drop the pretence about law that was too difficult to interpret, if “Period spent in pre-sentence detention deemed to be time served” is difficult to comprehend, perhaps you shouldn’t be working for the Public Service?
This isn’t a ‘blunder’ – it’s the truth about a civil service that has become uncivil. About public services that are supposed to be the bastions of egalitarianism essential to a progressive liberal democracy mutating into the cruelest of torture devices used by the State to keep the poor too terrified to fight back.
Just like CYFs abusing abused kids or Housing NZ evicting tenants for 12 months and then wondering about the rise in homelessness or throwing beneficiaries off welfare and not recording what happens to them or Ministry of Development giving the homeless motel bills worth $50000, just like all of them, Corrections didn’t care about the rights of the prisoners. As far as Corrections were concerned, even if they did keep these prisoners illegally in prison for extra time, who gave a fuck really right? No one cares about prisoner rights, look at the way talkback is already lighting up with fury over the reality that the Government is going to have to pay compensation to these men who were illegally locked up.
Prisoners, the poor and beneficiaries have no rights as far as our burnt out and mutated public services are concerned, and it’s their contempt for the vulnerable they’re obligated to look after that sees men and women illegally locked up by a State that an easily distracted audience never holds to account.
Let’s just dump the surprised routine and understand that any progressive Government coming back to power is going to have to strip these Departments down and start over again.
It probably has a lot to do with the chronic under funding of the Corrections Dept more than anything, like ANY government department under National (GCSB excluded). Under funding has the horrible side effect of high staff turnover and that means losing experienced staff who are in turn are replaced by inexperience who make awful decisions. It then becomes the blind leading the blind.
These tax cuts have to be paid for some how, they are not for free!
Anyway its just another example of Nationals legacy, just like the Ministry of Fisheries appointing the fishing industry to police the fishing industry. That is a far better example of pure corruption.
“Period spent in pre-sentence detention deemed to be time served” is difficult to comprehend, perhaps you shouldn’t be working for the Public Service?
+100.
It’s pretty darned simple.
Though, just now on The Panel (radio NZ) some learned gentleman just said that the Prisoners do NOT deserve compensation, but the guy on the United Emirates flight DOES deserve compensation. (The man stuck next to some guy who was clearly too large for his tiny seat)
For a once upon a time, so called classless society, we have some pretty sweet examples of Class War.
I share your anger.
And then we have Judith going on about how the victims are going to be pissed off the criminals aren’t going to do their full sentence, or get compensation for the longer prison time.
Since when do prisoners serve their full time anyway?
It ain’t no bloody Blunder is so spot on!! Agreed Martyn.
And consider this;
The drive to ‘contract out’ or policy shift of public / private ‘Partnerships’ (yer right) of all our Public Institutions and Social Services (DOC included), with hindsight already,( eg Serco), show that things will get far worse if these policies are not turned around.
If Corrections actions of this sort, Fisheries Ministry stopping genuine litigation
and the many other obvious abnormalities, the future is a nightmare waiting to
happen.
What gets me is that when all these programs have already proved to be failures
in UK and USA etc why are we still rushing them out?
Our Gvt,Labour,Greens,Act,United Dunne are nothing more than vassals putting
in place the Agenda’s of the UN/GLOBALISTS.Their opinion forming MSM in tow.
The sooner we ALL realize (blue and red now redundant) that we are faced with
the same ‘Shadow Government’ that afflicts all our Gvts is not benevolent to any citizen (Comfortable and poor) the sooner we can move to change.
None of the above parties will put a stop to things.
NZF IS the only hope if you love your children,grandchildren and theirs.
I get a whiff of that repugnant smell eugenics.
Cheers.
History note;
At the Nuremberg Trials after WW2, it was discovered the Nazi’s had a plan to
put toxins in the water,toxins in the food,and toxins in the vaccines.
They also dreamed of weaponized mosquitoes!!
Go figure.
No cheers.
“This isn’t a ‘blunder’ – it’s the truth about a civil service that has become uncivil. About public services that are supposed to be the bastions of egalitarianism essential to a progressive liberal democracy mutating into the cruelest of torture devices used by the State to keep the poor too terrified to fight back.”
Yep, pretty much so, it is damned BS, we know.
I have been waiting for months now to hear back from MSD re their blunder in calculating the accommodation supplement wrong for many years. Emails get passed on to unknown persons, and a response is never offered.
Also emails from MSD and their online service bear no name of the writer, they have NO name at all, some vague title as MSD bla, bla, bla service, and if you are lucky a number, which may assist identifying a person if one makes a Privacy Act request, but even then they may refuse to identify the person, for “privacy reasons”.
This government interprets the law to its own advantage, and as we see with prisoners held for longer than the law allows, it is breaking the law all the time.
We sadly have a useless Ombudsman and other toothless “watch dogs”, who struggle dealing with complaints and dismiss most as not needing investigation. They operate on budgets too small to do any real investigations and still hold up a fig leaf of credibility for justifying their roles.
The new Ombudsman was good at making great statements a few months ago, all we witness is, there is damned little progress in processing complaints even now, and no action where it should happen. So the government and their leader John Not The Baptist Key can lean back and relax, they are having it all under control.
I look forward to what magic solution this government will offer to address the injustices that the Supreme Court found. Judith Collins is in denial and only talks about the earlier Appeal Court decision that protected the government.
It is bizarre what goes on, a dictatorship of sorts that pretends to follow the rule of law and be a democracy.
People should be out in the streets, but as most are brainwashed now to only think of number one, and are divided with others on matters of importance, we see nothing happen.
I am more inclined to think it is a simple blunder. I don’t think the average pubic servant wants to make a deliberate error, if for no other reason than their wish to avoid endangering their own employment, and hopefully for more principled reasons as well.
Be that as it may. Some lawyers already making noises may do well out of this schmozzle; but I hope the scuttlebutt I hear is accurate, that any success they might ever have in getting compensation will then automatically be conveyed to the victims. I confess to a more tender regard for the rights of victims than of those who victimize.
(And btw, could someone remind cleangreen about the Godwin’s law?)
By the way, I cherished Martyn’s contribution as witness to the Colin Craig – Jordan Williams defamation case court hearing today, which TV3 covered rather well for a change.
Check out for the online version, which is not available yet, but the news for 6pm today should be found soon on this website:
http://www.3now.co.nz/shows/newshub-6pm/122217
Sorry, this is a bit off topic, but worth mentioning also, when we talk about matters of “justice”.
just like they treated the Gypsies, disabled, vagrants, Jews, and agnostics all during the Nazi “cleansing” purge during the 1930’s!!!
We are entering that same dark era with our new style of tyrant against the people!!!
Let’s be honest here’s a BBC coverage of this purge see the similarity Martyn.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/ouch/fact/the_holocaust_and_disabled_people_faq_frequently_asked_questions.shtml
Nazi propaganda in the form of posters, news-reels and cinema films portrayed disabled people as “useless eaters” and people who had “lives unworthy of living”. The propaganda stressed the high cost of supporting disabled people, and suggested that there was something unhealthy or even unnatural about society paying for this. One famous Nazi propaganda film, Ich Klage An (I Accuse), told the story of a doctor who killed his disabled wife. The film put forward an argument for “mercy killings”. Other propaganda, including poster campaigns, portrayed disabled people as freaks.
What was the fate of disabled people in Nazi Germany?
After the propaganda came action. On the grounds that disabled people were less worthwhile and an unfair burden on society, a widespread and compulsory sterilisation program took place. This began in 1933, as soon as the Nazis came to power.
It should be noted, however, that Nazi Germany wasn’t the only regime to practise the forced sterilisation of disabled people, and it wasn’t even the first. As disabled writer Jenny Morris explains in her book Pride Against Prejudice, as early as 1907 American states passed compulsory sterilisation laws covering people thought to have genetic illnesses or conditions. European states that followed suit in the 1920s and 1930s included Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Lithuania, Latvia, Hungary and Turkey. In Nazi Germany sterilisation was followed by an active killing program, which started in 1939.
View of Hartheim castle (euthanasia killing centre). © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)
How did the Nazis kill disabled people?
Under a secret plan called the ‘T4 Program’ (T4 was a reference to the address of the program’s Berlin HQ – Tiergartenstrasse 4), disabled people in Germany were killed by lethal injection or poison gas. The T4 Program saw a string of six death camps – called “euthanasia centres” – set up across Germany and Austria. These centres contained gassing installations designed to look like shower stalls.
A US soldier views the cemetery at the Hadamar Institute, where victims of the T4 program were buried in mass graves. © United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM)
Two of the most notorious centres were at Hartheim Castle in Austria and Hadamar, which is near Wiesbaden in Germany. The latter supported a staff of approximately 100 people. To conceal its real purppose, it also operated as a normal crematorium.
We are on our way here in New Zealand, MSD employs a Principal Health Advisor who beats the drum and shouts it out, work will set you free, is more or less the message, also for sick and disabled.
http://www.gpcme.co.nz/pdf/GP%20CME/Friday/C1%201515%20Bratt-Hawker.pdf
The benefit is like a drug, he thinks, and people need to be put to work, as that is “therapeutic”.
“Soft” beginnings, where will this journey take us, I wonder?
Remember, the GCSB legislation was too difficult and wordy when it said ‘the GCSB cannot spy on New Zealand citizens’.
Oh for pkain english laws!!!/s
Is this error for prisoners held only in government run prisons? Or does it extend to prisoners held in privately run prisons?
Because if it does then we have a situation where a private company has broken the law to hold it’s “clients” for longer than legally allowed, in order to make a profit.
If that is correct, then we would have in NZ a truly evil horrible situation where citizens are illegally incarcerated for private profit. And that’s evil.
They started getting prisoners work years ago, and Fletcher’s and other businesses are profiting from it already:
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/8238451/Fulltime-work-lined-up-to-keep-prisoners-busy
http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/10310448/Second-chances-on-chain-gang
” Corrections Minister Anne Tolley says education, skills training and careful reintegration are crucial to the Government’s target of reducing reoffending by a quarter within the next three years. “It’s always a struggle for ex-cons to get that chance. The benefits [of the programme] are pretty common sense. You get them used to working. You put them in a normal workplace and they have to mix with other people.”
After a recent nationwide roadshow pushing the benefits of the release to work programme, 13 companies have gone into “partnership” with Corrections. They include the timber processing arm of the Clelands Group and waste management company EnviroWaste. Fletcher Construction, which once had a flat “no convictions” policy, is involved, using Rolleston inmates to repair earthquake-damaged homes in Canterbury.
The company is also building a new public-private partnership prison at Wiri in South Auckland. Offenders serving time at Auckland Women’s Prison run the construction workers’ canteen, having completed a national certificate in hospitality. And dozens of smaller firms are giving inmates a go on fixed-term contracts.”
A PPP between Fletcher’s and Corrections:
http://www.fletcherconstruction.co.nz/projects.php?id=472&action=search
So the longer they are inside, the prisoners, the more human capital is available for work done in such schemes.
I have no problem with this sort of rehabilitation where inmates learn skills and learn a work ethic. I do expect the companies they work for while in prison to pay them at the minimum wage on their release from prison though. I have no idea whether this is the case, but if they don’t, surely these companies leave themselves wide open to being sued at a later date – I hope..
“This isn’t a ‘blunder’ – it’s the truth about a civil service that has become uncivil. About public services that are supposed to be the bastions of egalitarianism essential to a progressive liberal democracy mutating into the cruelest of torture devices used by the State to keep the poor too terrified to fight back.”
One thing the NACTs have done (along with its US imperialist masters) is to help prove that the capitalist state is not about serving the public, or acting as bastions of liberal democracy.
At its best liberal democracy is a figleaf for the dicatorship of capital.
The bourgeois theory of ‘separation of powers’ is a fiction based on the bourgeois ideology of the sovereign individual.
In reality, the state defends the property rights of bourgeois individuals, and ignores or suppresses the rights of all others which class with those property rights.
Prisoners are way down the list of individuals without rights.
Today as global capitalism faces its terminal crisis, the state has to concentrate its power and stamp out dissent. It does this by subordinating the legislature, judiciary and bureaucracy to the executive which concentrates that power, in NZs case as a spinoff of Westminster, into Cabinet or PM rule.
So the bureaucracy cannot even pretend to act independently in administering the state. Cabinet has removed the last shreds of the fig leaf so we see it in its nakedness.
To imagine that the capitalist state can somehow be tamed by liberals ignores the class nature of the state, and the extreme crisis that the capitalist ruling class faces necessitating the repressive role of the state.
That is, imagining that that crisis can be resolved for capital without the complete destruction of liberal democracy, is to ignore the fundamental causes of terminal crisis and the choice facing us of socialism or human extinction.
Dissent – ” hold or express opinions that are variance with those previously, commonly or officially expressed. ”
What is wrong with dissent when the systems ( and the state ) that have been operating for ions ( like unsuccessful bankrupt Capitalism and partially failing Socialism as well, etc. ) are taking the world into chaos and perpetual war and corporate greed ? They ( mostly Capitalism ) encourage inequality and perpetual war and profiteering off the backs of the people.
This is part of a plan implemented a long time ago heading towards world governance for profit based in greed and exploitation. Their motto – Profits before People – and this is worthy of much dissent and questioning and actions.
Who dictates to the ” state ” is the problem. Who owns and runs most governments and most media needs massive focus and and more speaking out about ending inequality and about peace making and not war making. What is needed badly is to stop these elite; criminal secret groups; families; psychopath corporate bankster families who are moving towards world governance. They are in control and they dwell in the fabric of most phases of life all over the show. Their governing body is the U.N. and their military arm is NATO. They lie, as John Kerry did recently , to maintain their illusion of power.
Who controls the ” state ” needs the focus because neither capitalism nor socialism will work when the foundations are rotten and criminally based. A brand new paradigm is needed, a new way of looking – new eyes that can imagine leaving behind the labels and the need to administer the ” state ” . The state and who controls and dictates to the state needs questioning and exposure and more whistle blowers and more ethical and truthful people speaking out and being more civilly disobedient.
I feel that there is a healthier way that does not include socialism or human extinction and it takes a willingness to behave and — ” hold or express opinions that are variance with those preciously, commonly or officially expressed. ”
Lets see TDB delete this comment
‘psychopath corporate bankster families who are moving towards world governance. They are in control and they dwell in the fabric of most phases of life all over the show. Their governing body is the U.N. and their military arm is NATO. They lie, as John Kerry did recently , to maintain their illusion of power’
Yes. And now that Russia has crawled out of the ditch it was kicked into by the psychopath corporate bankster families in the early 1990s, has cleaned itself up and has got its weapons in order, the final confrontation between the western corporate bankster alliance and ‘the others’ (primarily Russia, China and Iran) is underway; the façade of omnipotence that America was able to present for decades is rapidly collapsing. Let’s face it, nobody with a brain takes anything John Kerry or Barack Obama says seriously anymore.
We keep hoping that some individuals in the Pentagon are not as insane and full of hubris as the gang of thieves who are running America at the moment are, and that the US military won’t commit to full-scale military conflict with Russia-China-Iran in a futile attempt save the petrodollar from its inevitable collapse.
Where this places NZ is anyone’s guess, since Key, being a member of the loot-pollute-and-exploit club, is clearly backing the wrong horse(s) long term.
As usual – well said and I agree with you completely. There is a correlation between how our prisoners are treated and the world stage.
Russia is not the massive threat that the US continues on with their fear mongering and perpetual war profiteering rhetoric.
Prisoners all over are being used and violated and thanks Martyn for focusing on this.
Big bucks for U.N. meetings and UN priorities and 17 plans but limited funding for prison reform and proper social service spending. WHY ?
The lack of proper funding and proper priorities in the prison system and most social services are no accident. I sound like a broken record, but this is all part of a plan to economically and morally damage countries and govt’s. so as to lay the ground work for the UN and the N.W.O. idiot elite to set into motion their world dominance. People are not their priorities, profits and world control are ! !
The terrorists and the US and others are in Syria and elsewhere for the — OIL etc. and the US is their as well for their interests in OIL and other resources. This is not about trying to get better funding for prisoners and social services or fighting back ugly big bad Russia, this is about greed and interests in OIL and other resources. Young girls in Syria are being sold and sexually abused right now and this happens in every country that is being used and violated and militarily bombed and destroyed. Our tax dollars do not go where they should like prison reform and justice reform and social service reform. NOT PART OF THE ELITES PLAN.
NZ is being used now by the UN to bring attention to us as we are important to them in the World Domination plans. Helen and Jonky are disgraceful and embarrassing in their levels of selling out. This is not some game – the U.N. needs to be exposed and questioned.
Key has no choice about who backs who because he is already in their pockets and is a good little suck up puppet. He and Helen defend the indefensible and the U.N. and the upper 1% lot of greedy psychopaths who dictate to and own most governments and most media.
AFEWKNOWTHETRUTH – I hope you do not stop writing as you are one of the main reasons I keep coming back to the TDB.
At a cost of $91,000.00 per prisoner annually. Where does this money go?
There is open class/civil war coming that will make Brexit look positively civil… it ain’t gonna be pretty… denial and head in the sand thinking will only hasten it…
https://thedailyblog.co.nz/2016/09/23/the-daily-blog-open-mic-friday-23rd-september-2016/
“This isn’t a ‘blunder’ – it’s the truth about a civil service that has become uncivil…..”
Ain’t that the truth! And much of it by design and ideology.
I’m surprised opposition parties have not yet seen the bleeding obvious because the public/civil service is dysfunctional and RIPE for reform.
You’ll probably not find another issue where a public with varying political spots are in agreement.
Seize the fucking day as they say, but waiting waiting waiting …… till along will come a Natzi opportunist and claim the prize.
It’d be better than a nasty revolution after all.
And if we are to keep the corporate model (it’ll be short/medium term, but if we do – because it’s not only self-defeating and destined for eventual collapse ….) there seem to be some bleeding obvious things that could be done:
– such as CEOs and SNR management appointments subject to parliamentary scrutiny, rather than Ministerial whim
– a standard, and cross-party-agreed-to code of conduct (including what used to be some pretty basic and obvious principles)
– prescribed sanctions against the incompetent, the corrupt, and probably just shear idiocy that are actually enforced.
Actually don’t get me started. I’ve just come across a couple of incidents (like a Bet Lynch ex WINZ and a Nafe Guy worshipper), and the hypocrisy just astounds me.
It seems sometimes they get promoted sideways too – like being the MSM ‘go to’ people.
Ralstons Wildes Rankins pissing in the pockets – best left unsaid me thinks.
Very ugly people
‘I’m surprised opposition parties have not yet seen the bleeding obvious’
‘opposition parties’? Who? Where?
I haven’t seen any indication of serious parliamentary opposition to the global ‘neo-liberal’ agenda since 1980s, which is why we’re in the present shocking mess and why everything that matters is destined to be made worse faster over the coming years.
who cares?…criminals..have victims, victims RIGHTS don’t matter and boo hoo they spent more time inside than they should…sorry, reaching for my kleenex tissues and who cares??? (read: the bigger voting public!)..Tis why you guys in opposition and will remain so! …also, ‘the piece by Hager, and published by TVNZ was found to be inaccurate, unbalanced and unfair.”…can we get a post on this? will not hold my breath!
What is you stance with respect to the gang of criminals that constitute the bulk of the NZ government and the various criminals who hold positions of power throughout the NZ bureaucracy (especially CEOs of councils who promote continuous breaching of NZ Statutes)? Do you care that there is no accountability and that they go unpunished?
Do you care that the aforementioned promote rendering the Earth uninhabitable for humans within decades?
https://scripps.ucsd.edu/programs/keelingcurve/wp-content/plugins/sio-bluemoon/graphs/co2_800k_zoom.png
??? WTF are you going on about, I ask ???
Again – where is my reply to — AFEWKNOWTHETRUTH ?
What is your problem ? Why ? ? Come clean !
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