Waatea News Column: Corrections NZ – from White Supremacist Uprisings to Māori Nationalists – who is the actual threat?
Corrections this week were quick to back away from notes made at a 2017 meeting that Māori Nationalism was a terrorism threat inside prisons.
It’s not odd that Corrections is trying to ascertain how many prisoners might become terrorists because of the oppressive and violent environment they create, what is odd is that they aren’t looking at how their environment creates that extremism nor that they seem to have learnt anything about the inadequacy of their so called ‘intelligence’ abilities.
Cast your mind back to just before the year 2000, Corrections NZ insanely believed that a white supremacist uprising was going to occur at Christchurch Mens Prison. In response to this nonsense, Corrections created a special team called the ‘Goon Squad’ who would be able to enter the prison during this uprising and beat the prisoners into submission.
The ‘Goon Squad’ practised and trained how to use extreme choke holds and extreme force that other state servants couldn’t. The training was so bizarre it involved a staff member stapling their testicals to a table as a sign of how tough they were.
This would all be grotesquely funny if it hadn’t ended in tragedy.
In November 1999, during one of the live training sessions at Christchurch Mens Prison, the Goon Squad accidentally killed a prisoner, David Haimona, when they entered at night and purposely terrified the prisoners and worked them up into a frenzy so that the could use their training on angry prisoners.
When Haimona’s death and the antics of this paramilitary squad were made public, Corrections immediately shut down the unit and never explained to anyone how they got the belief there was going to be a white supremacist uprising so badly wrong.
It looks like Corrections have learnt nothing in 20 years.
Prisons, like welfare, is one of those things the right like to thrash so it makes them look smart and intelegent. So they don’t need to study very hard for the cameras because finger waving and facial features is enough authority for there base who just want to have a crack. The short of it is they are few in numbers and rely weakness to recruit new people into there mob mentality.