This should surprise no one…
Pepper spray use in prison rises throughout the country – Corrections figures
An explosion in the use of pepper spray is part of a big rise in the use of force to subdue unruly prisoners.
Information released to RNZ under the Official Information Act also reveals guards at New Zealand prisons are more often teaming up to tackle offenders.
The Department of Corrections information from June 2015 to the end of May this year reveals across that time, force against prisoners has increased by 150 percent.
In the 2019/20 financial year alone, that is the 12 months to the end of May, there were nearly 3000 incidents reported.
…to date Labour have been very clever in using National’s existing policies to start reducing the prison population.
National always allowed for prisoners of ‘low level offending’ to apply to serve their term at home under home dentation rules, the problem is that no one inside Corrections under National ever bothered to help the prisoners apply to serve their sentence at home so no one applied.
Under Labour, Corrections have been forced to help prisoners with the paperwork to apply for home detention and that’s why the prison population has stabilised and fallen.
The problem is that while Labour have been reducing the prison population by filtering out the least dangerous, the prisoners going in are more violent gang related prisoners.
The fundamental problem we have isn’t just over crowded prisons, but a violent culture within those prisons as well.
The physical lay out of most prisons aren’t conducive to the pacifying healing environment human beings require to change and challenge behaviour and the taxpayer cost to rebuild those environments into pacifying healing environments would be decried by an angry populace who don’t see the loss of liberty as punishment and instead want the prisoner to suffer as well.
Labour have been able to exploit loopholes in existing National prison policy to reduce the prison muster without losing any political capital, but if they want to start rebuilding the prison infrastructure so that they are less violent places, they could push for reform under the political radar because no one will be talking about prisons at the election and Labour could make prisons safer withe more healing environments without the usual sensible sentencing lynch mob backlash.
Someone has to start rebuilding our failed prison system, it may as well be Labour while no one is paying any attention!
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Hard working, decent people have to work in prisons with some seriously unpleasant people, if they need to use pepper spray or team up to tackle offenders, so be it.
Home detention is not the panacea the author seems to think it is, it is a privilege far too often awarded, an obligation free holiday wherein your crime must be conducted under a single roof, instead of in the community at large.
I read of appalling judicial sentences on a daily basis where some truly rotten offenders get what amounts to a slap on the wrist for devastating the lives of others – i’m talking gang assaults with weapons, repeated sexual assaults etc.
New Zealand seems to have an apathetic approach to crime and gangs, we acknowledge its bad but so long as it doesn’t happen to us, it’s all good, right? I’m absolutely in favour of rehab but don’t kid yourself if you think that’s what’s happening in home detention – it is but a brief reprieve for society that can’t afford to keep locking people up.
I see the right wing media teams are putting in overtime at the moment. If the first comment is regularly taken by a contradictory view then you know the team is functioning well. That fact that they managed to get in such a large comment suggests they might have scripts ready to go as well.
I agree, I’ve observed a spike in right-wing troll comments like this on this site recently, must be an election coming up…..
Talking of prisons reminds me of the George Carlin skit.
[In a very loud voice] “Build more prisons!!…[in a quite voice] But not here…” (NIMBY).
The fact is, with the economic arrangements that were established prior to the repro crisis of 2019 and prior to the Covid-19 crisis now falling apart at an accelerating rate, we must expect to witness a surge in petty crime -shoplifting, pickpocketing, burglary, opportunistic theft, obtaining goods and failing to pay for them etc. People who lose their incomes or who are forced to live on inadequate incomes will do whatever they deem necessary to survive (just as semi-starving peasants who foraged for food on ‘privately-owned land did in the past in Britain did -and got hung or sent to penal colonies).
The pacifying, mind-numbing distractions and consumer goods that kept the populace under control in recent years are disappearing fast (or have already disappeared), and the situation is clearly going to get a lot worse as far as orthodox thinking goes (a lot better as far as unorthodox thinking goes).
I think the situation in NZ is unlikely to get anything like as bad as in the US, where guns sales are at a record high, where the murder rate has surged, and where riots have affected 48 out of 50 of the biggest cities. However, I am sure the political parties in NZ are totally unprepared for what is coming -basically in denial- and have no appropriate plans to deal with what is to come. Therefore expect another round of crisis management and plenty of mayhem, with the inefficient and already overloaded court system likely to be completely swamped.
I doubt whoever is in charge later this year will even consider appropriate strategies to the predicament.
Meanwhile, the empire is having its revenge on a truthteller:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/09/07/the-stalinist-trial-of-julian-assange/
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