It’s clever marketing to claim the ‘mega-prison’ at Waikeria has been ‘scrapped’ – this sort of marketing was woefully lacking during the Budget (why on earth didn’t the new Government use the power of budget day to sell the benefits to Māori, women, workers, beneficiaries and the middle classes?) – the truth of course is that there will be a prison built – just not a ‘mega’ prison – clever move by Government.
While Labour desperately work out how to sell the new prison build there to their activist base who are already disenchanted by the National lite Budget (I’ve suggested how Andrew Little should spin the new prison announcement here), we shouldn’t take our eye off the ball of what is happening in Christchurch Men’s Prison….
Fourth Christchurch prison official on ‘special leave’ after investigation
A senior prison guard has been placed on “special leave” following allegations of misconduct towards an inmate witness for an investigation, which revealed spying and favouritism at one of the country’s largest jails.
Principal corrections officer Alastair Wood joins three senior Christchurch Men’s Prison staff, including the prison director, who are subject to employment action as the fallout from a major inquiry at the facility continues.
The investigation – dubbed a security review – unearthed “extremely serious allegations” relating to a “number of substandard management and security practices” at the jail.
It found elite guards – members of the Site Emergency Response Team (SERT) – used unauthorised hidden listening devices to spy on inmates. A gang member was given access to a cellphone during a covert information-gathering operation. Cellphones are contraband in prison.
…there are shades of the SERT teams becoming the infamous horror of the Goon Squad…
SERTs were set up at several of the country’s prisons after an inquiry into a riot at Spring Hill Corrections Facility in Waikato in 2013. There were concerns the teams had a similar mandate to the Emergency Response Unit, dubbed the “goon squad”, which operated out of Canterbury until it was disbanded in 2000 amid complaints of bullying inmates and aggressive treatment of members.
…remember the ‘Goon squad’ NZ?
Oh the joys of the Goon squad.
You won’t believe what I am about to write, but the pure idiocy of NZ in action is worth remembering.
NZ Corrections became convinced that a white supremacist uprising was going to occur in the Christchurch prison in the year 2000, to counter this white supremacist uprising they created a tactical team, the ‘Emergency Response Unit’ or the ”Goon’ squad who were specially trained to beat the shit out of rioting prisoners. They were trained in an obscenely unorthodox manner (one staff member stapled their testicles to a table as a way of showing how tough they were), and they set about creating explosive moments in prisons to train their anti-riot tactics.
During one such training session, the Goon Squad hilariously killed prisoner. David Haimona
You read that right sleepy hobbits, our Goon squad killed a prisoner during one of their training sessions in 1999.
The entire issue blew up and a bullshit whitewash report immediately implemented.
We have the same situation occurring once again in the corrupt Christchurch Prison where the same mentality of the Goon Squad.
This is happening again and allowed to happen because NZers have been so conditioned by media crime porn and politicians whipping up their anger with get tough on crime rhetoric that they no longer see prisoners as human beings with intrinsic rights.
National proudly stripped prisoners of their voting rights and muddle Nu Zilind applauded.
Labour appeasing their activists by removing the word ‘mega’ from the prison they are building in Waikeria is nice, but the underlying cultural belief that prisoners should suffer and are abused by a public service that knows the public won’t care if prisoners are abused remains utterly unchallenged.
Whether the sensible sentencing trust likes it or not, despite their actions, these criminals are still human beings with intrinsic rights and until we start to acknowledge that and work towards healing these broken human beings rather than allow them to rot and suffer, we will go no where.
The Goon Squad is evidence of that.
I would go further than you here about prisoners not being seen as human beings with intrinsic rights and suggest that under the National Government, all poor and socially deprived persons were perceived in an inhumane way, hence eg hunger, child poverty, increases in third world health problems and major homelessness, while that govt consistently denied that there was even any housing crisis. And oh how Hurimoana Dennis got screwed for showing a nasty Nat minister how to address an officially non-existent problem.
The Goon Squad report triggered by Mr Haimona’s death is horrific reading about a band of vicious redneck thugs. They sound like psychopaths. As Parliament does sometimes.
Paul Quinn introduced the bill depriving prisoners the right to vote saying they had transgressed against society and it was time to “draw a line in the sand.” In other words, let’s punish them a bit more. Why ?
This vicious piece of legislation further alienates prisoners from society, but Paul might have been too dumb to see that, or he just didn’t care, because maybe it made him look like a law-abiding sort of man – like the Goon Squad and their pathetic antics with penises and scrotums- harking back to their childhood games of peeing lines in the sand and buggering around in the dunes.
Depriving citizens of the right to vote transgresses the Bill of Rights, but that’s not even the point. The point is why enact a law to further divorce prisoners from the society into which the judicial system should be aiming to re-integrate them ?
Hopefully the legal challenge against Quinn’s folly will be successful.
Hopefully there may be some legal redress available for the prisoners deprived of this very basic right.
Hopefully there will be an apology by the Crown.
100% Martyn
There will be a re-branded prison built. Maybe half the size with dotted lines on the site plan where the second half goes 😉
This is because the vast majority of prison inmates are violent offenders that nobody wants outside of a cell.
It highlights the lack of intellectual capacity of this government, when they said they would halve the prison population without having the faintest idea how to do that.
ANDREW;
Yes they will rebabilitate the infirmed dont you know wnhat they are planning?
We need to give hope to everyone not the national Party system of hate hate hate, as this is just a vicious cycle dont you know this????
Two wrongs dont make a right.
The types of offences aren’t really as black and white as this.
That’s what scaremongers want everyone to think, but Justice Dept stats show interesting major fluctuations between age groups and the types of crimes committed.
Bill English said our prison numbers reflected a moral failure on the part of society, and he was right – even if his govt could have done more than they did to ameliorate the principal drivers of crime.
[…] Daily Blog is right about Christchurch Prison’s problems and a lot hasn’t come out […]
It was good to hear Kim Workman on the radio today saying that prisons should, in principle, be small, housing only around 200 people. He prefaced this by saying that of course he knew this could not happen. Christchurch Men’s (I am a volunteer there) holds about a thousand and you can find every kind of view or attitude there. We run a Family Pathways Centre aimed at bringing families together to reduce penal harm and recidivism. What is needed there is a mandate for change; a new generation of leadership.
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