New report of violence in prison highlights how damaged our spiteful social policy has become

Benjamin Lightbody after his assault at Mt Eden Corrections Facility

While we treat beneficiaries as subhuman, the damage we allow to continue within our prison system has become endemic…

Violence at New Zealand prisons highlighted in Ombudsman’s latest torture reports
Prisoners in New Zealand are subjected to high levels of violence, unacceptable conditions in some units and a lack of constructive activities, according to a government watchdog.

Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier today published the third full inspection report since his officed beefed up monitoring last year. The report looked at Christchurch Men’s prison.

His office also published follow-up reports on conditions at Arohata, Manawatu and Rolleston Prisons. Fewer than half of the changes recommended had been implemented at each site, the report said.

The Ombudsman monitors prisons and other places of detention such as locked mental health wards under the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture, which puts international obligations on New Zealand to ensure people held in detention are treated humanely and with decency and dignity.

…this after the National Government quietly dumped reoffending rates as a measurement of the private prison empire they have built…

Government shifts crime reduction goalposts

…the National Government who had ACC invest in 30% of the private prison at Wiri and who brought private prisons into NZ and who had to remove Mt Eden from their control after corruption and violence issues quietly removed the reoffending rates as a measure of success???

What a gutless back down!

National set 25% as their target to reduce reoffending and could barely get 4.5%. They sold the neoliberal private prison reforms on how amazing they would be to reduce reoffending, the truth is they have failed abysmally and the National Government will now hide the stats so NZers can’t see how much of a failure they have created.

So who is to blame for this counter-productive cluster fuck?

Let’s start with the Corporate Mainstream media who love to manipulate your sense of anger and injustice with their ‘if it bleeds it leads’ mentality. Their crime porn myopic news headlines are designed to stoke emotion, anger and sense of injustice all for ratings.

That anger and emotion quickly gets manipulated by ‘get-tough-on-crime’ politicians who sell suffering and draconian prison time as the solution. We, the voters, get sucked into this vortex of media-politics and elect anyone who promises to punish the people we are media trained to fear and hate.

That leads to anger and hate seeping into social policy, that leads to a private prison system who send the wrong market signals to the State agencies invested in them.

We have allowed knee-jerk legislation that seeks to hurt to replace well thought out social policy.

The bail law changes which mean prisoners are spending longer and longer amounts of time in our damaged prison system. The lack of rehabilitation programs, the tying of the limited rehabilitation programs they do have to parole eligibility, the tying of prison labour to parole eligibility, the tying of an admission of guilt to parole eligibility.

All of these factors have combined to see a prison system that is releasing prisoners far more damaged than when they went into prison.

This is beyond counter-productive, it’s a kind of insanity.

Can a Labour government that didn’t expect to win change this septic wound of a social policy?

We can but hope otherwise we will continue to release men back into the community more dangerous than when they went in.