Smoking, double bunking and sexual assault in prisons – stand proud Nu Zilind

We love to punish in Nu Zilind.

We love it.

For us as Nu Zilinders, it is more important to make a prisoner suffer than let an innocent person leave prison.

That’s the naked truth of our love affair with get tough on crime sophistry.

We aren’t a terribly cultured or deep society here on these shake isles. We have all the emotional maturity of a can of coke and the cosmopolitan sophistication of cow shit in a fresh river.

We prefer the tyranny of small words to the self importance of syllables.

Our ‘you-think-you’re-better-than-me’ negative egalitarianism has all the charm of burning books on a BBQ.

So it isn’t surprising that our lynch mob lust fed by ‘get-tough-on-crime’ politicians and a ‘if-it-bleeds-it-leads’ media now sees 10 000 in our racist and broken prison system.

The news yesterday that Mt Eden allowed a 19 year old to double bunk with a hard core criminal who then went onto sexually assault him is just another example of how our Corrections service are as interested in prisoner rights and safety as the stockmen who feed our abattoirs are with animal welfare.

Let’s remind ourselves why smoking was banned in prisons and how the banning has led to a huge black market for tobacco and has added to stresses inside the prisons.

It was sold at the time by National as being for the health benefit of prisoners.

That was a lie.

Our lust for prison and punishment is seeing more and more prisoners double bunked, and National were given advice that any Prisoner double bunked with a smoker could claim second hand smoke damages from the Government, so that is why smoking was banned.

Double bunking has now become a way of life with 30% of prisoners double bunked. You have prisons groaning at the seams, a huge black market in tobacco, massive stresses on prisoners, a rising and hidden suicide rate and a Corrections Department that knows the public don’t care about Prisoners so can do what they like when treating Prisoners poorly.

We the voters have been manipulated by the private prisons, by the lazy clickbait media and the knee jerk politicians for too long, we as voters are responsible for allowing our anger and fear of crime to be manipulated into the septic wound our prison nation has become.

We as voters must be the ones to fix this madness because the politicians and media are only interested in playing to our lesser angels than healing communities and people.