by David Clendon
What an unfortunate photograph of Corrections Minister Judith Collins in this morning’s Herald.
Striding along in her black leather boots, grinning gleefully at a wall of steel and razor wire which is apparently the best solution she or her government can think of to the national disgrace that is our ever-growing prison population.
Aotearoa / New Zealand, the country where some would have us think that it is okay to keep pigs locked up in crates, cows locked up in cubicles, and human beings locked up in glorified shipping containers.
The image is all the more extraordinary coming in the same week that a highly successful facility for rehabilitating serious youth offenders was closed down because it cost too much.
Te Hurihunga has achieved 100% success with a zero re-offending rate, and has been described as a world leading, unique, bicultural facility. The ‘excessive’ cost quoted by the Justice Minister includes the capital cost of the facility, a completely bogus way to evaluate a programme, and if applied to new schools for example would deliver an equally nonsensical ‘cost per head’ figure.
We have one of the highest imprisonment and recidivism rates in the world, and until we get real about investing in education, rehabilitation, drug and alcohol treatment and other mechanisms for dealing with the underlying causes of crime, the future looks bright for the manufacturers of razor wire and shipping containers.
Published in Justice & Democracy by David Clendon on Thu, February 4th, 2010
Tags: corrections, imprisonment, Judith Collins, Prisons, recidivism, Te Hurihunga
More posts by David Clendon | more about David Clendon
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
100% success with a zero re-offending rate!
Out it goes!
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Collins in a sow crate? Scary!
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Steve
You stupid comment annoys me so much because you have put no thought into it!!
What is wrong in putting criminals i.e those who have committed crimes that society say is wrong – people like you and me, into adequate facilities which cost at this stage 40% cheaper than other accomodation and likely to improve on on cost.
Again, why is that wrong?
Do you really think they should be accommodated in 3 star motels?
Tell us voters please.
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What the hell happened to my 9:55pm comment!!!!
[frog: I've looked and don't see it anywhere, so maybe a network problem? Separately, note that if you log in to comment, it will appear immediately, rather than hitting the moderation queue.]
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Pentwig, who the f*** is Steve? (Apologies to Roger Daltry and Pete Townshend).
No “Steve” on this thread – at least yet!
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Steve
I will try again and see what the moderaters do this time.
Prove the success against excessive cost and justify it.
Does $600k trying to reform one criminal justify 600 patients having to wait for a hip replacement?
Does $600k justify 1000 children going without adequate food and clothing
just to to try keeping a criminal from reoffending.
There is an obvious missing link somewhere (excluding the moderaters of this site).
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Damn
David has a double and that double is a friend of mine called Steve.
Uncanny really but my fault for getting the two confused.
I will repent by not smoking the evil weed for a month. Satisfied?
But what is with this moderation thing?
Surely you are not doing a RED ALERT and too embarrassed to answer the hard questions?
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Given that the NIMBYs have been opposed to new prison building, what do you suggest should have been done to house all the additional prisoners that exist at the moment? Ideally, the container approach should only be temporary while an additional prison or two was constructed to accommodate them.
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Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
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FFS. Five million on eight scumbags? The building cost was only 1.4m of that figure.
Has this country gone insane?
Lock them up. Cheaply. And make them earn their keep. Not for their good, for the good of the rest of us.
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Has anybody thought of taking the shipping container idea a step further, and putting the prison containers on a ship anchored at sea.
That should cut security costs.
It could come into port for visiting day if they behave.
And nobody has to have a prison in their area.
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Downvotes, eh. So green, recyclable container housing is now “out” with the greenies?
That fad didn’t last long, did it.
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Any escapes from the prison ship would result in delight.
From sharks, mostly.
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No, just silly straw men as usual.
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pentwig: It was a pilot, and as such it is bound to cost more because it’s the first one – all the initial setup costs are included. I think that in this case that 600k thing even includes the cost of a special building, which is a pretty distorted way to calculate the cost. I could be wrong about that tho
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BluePeter – to save on the cost of prison guards, you could sail to Somalia where there is a rumour they guard and feed people on ships for free, that is unless you decide you WANT to pay a ransom.
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bwahahaha
maybe not so much with the feeding, but still…
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Here’s my calculation:
– $5m – $1.4m for the building = 3.6m of operating cost
. (I’m ignoring recruitment costs, so this is too high)
– 8 graduates plus 4 who are nearly out, and may be by July = 12 people
. (I’m ignoring the remaining six months of operating costs, which may cancel the other caveat)
=> $300k per graduate
What I don’t know (for comparison) is:
– what does keeping a person in prison for a year cost? (operating cost, to compare with the above)
– how many years of prison would a matched set of untreated youth offenders be expected to serve?
Writing all of this into a ministerial would mean writing to at least two separate Ministers, so there would never be one piece of paper with a sensible answer on it. How do people think it should be confirmed and/or investigated?
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I think it costs about 60k per year to keep someone in prison? But they’ll spend more time in prison because of the recidivism, so the comparison becomes trickier. Not to mention the cost to society of their extra criminal activity in the prison scenario.
I don’t know the details of the programme, but intuitively it seems that if it went beyond a pilot and out to nation-wide it would be much cheaper per participant. The prototype of a new car usually costs many times more than the mass produced version. I don’t see any estimates from National of how much the pilot would have cost ‘for real’, just a simple “no, too expensive, get lost”
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Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
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(Feeding the trolls; mark this comment down when you get bored.)
BigBro, have you read the Robert Heinlein book about six dimensional time travel, where our hero doesn’t *always* kill people for bad table manners? Would you like to live in that world? I wouldn’t; I’m not perfect enough. For example, I fixed a typo in the preview of this comment.
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photonz1, I like the cut of you gib.
Free prison guards! You’re on a roll…
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Valis,
“glorified shipping containers.”
What’s wrong with glorified shipping containers? He makes it sound like a bad thing. We are comparing them with a concrete prison cell, not a luxury suite at the Hilton.
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There is everything wrong with glorified shipping containers.
They should not be glorified at all, give them a blanket, a bucket to use as a toilet and that is it.
I am so sick of our soft on crime stance in New Zealand.
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I think the dilema comes down to whether people think restorative or retribitive justice works better. There seems to be a strong “eye for an eye” sentament regarding public opinion at the moment but in reality i am not sure it works. They use capital punishment in some countries yet people still do the crime. If you are going to have harsh penalities they should at the very least reduce prison numbers otherwise part of the citizens (including victims) tax is being wasted. I personally believe “an eye for an eye leads to more blindness”
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louise says “They use capital punishment in some countries yet people still do the crime.”
No they don’t, at least not after the capital punnishment is carried out.
We need a staged system, where the worse the crime, the higher stage you get placed in.
Criminals then have to work their way up to the next stage by good behavior, learning skills, or imrpoving social behavior.
Each stage has better conditions, until the last stage which might have some sort of day release to ease prisoners back into society.
They would not get to this stage until they had learnt skills that would make them useful in the workforce.
Similarly they have to work their wage though each of the intermeduiate stages. They don’t get to an easier stage without passing progressive skills tests.
That way those with the right attitude and skills can lessen their sentence, and the worst losers, evil and violent people will end up with much longer sentences.
Those who can reform themselves will get rewarded, and society will be protected from the worst people for longer.
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The real issues are about how we can firstly prevent young offenders from going on to be career criminals, deal with the problems the overwhelming number of offenders have so that when they go back into society they don’t repeat their behaviour and to integrate offenders back into society as functioning human beings.
The rhetoric around ‘scum-bags’ etc ignores the fact that large numbers of prisoners could be dealt with more effectively by restorative justice.
This is a much more complex issue than the trolls in here will acknowledge.
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Good old John “Key-hole” eh. Do you guys know what ‘key-hole mining” is? They go in through a small entrance and then take out hectares and hectares of material, collapsing the mine behind them as they go! It’s kind of like a dummy bullet – small hole going in but a big mess coming out!
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PS why on earth have they suddenly decided it’s a good idea to mine the conservation estate anyway? Because some policy wonk at MED told Gerry Brownlee it’s a good way to decrease the income gap between us and the Aussies? Well, here’s some news -people are going to go to Aussie anyway. They’ve got good weather there!
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Sorry, it’s not ‘dummy’ bullet, it is ‘dumdum’ bullet. As in ‘dumb dumb’ policy.
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Whether it will hurt my bottomline…they need a bit more humane treatment…wouldn’t you want that if you were in their shoes?
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