Our 2011 election manifesto - Labour Party

Corrections
Promoting safety: Inside the wire
Our prisons must keep society safe from criminals. They must also achieve behaviour
change in criminals so that reoffending is reduced. That latter function currently receives
inadequate resourcing and insufficient attention.
Virtually all of our prison population will eventually leave prison. The State fails in its duty if it
does not do everything reasonable in its power to minimise the risk of re-offending. This
requires programmes in every prison that promote behaviour change by addressing mental
health, substance abuse, illiteracy and innumeracy, and a basic lack of skills.
International evidence indicates that this approach can work. Given that 6,708 prisoners are
serving custodial sentences in New Zealand prisons in October 2011 and each prisoner
costs taxpayers $91,615 per year, we simply cannot let New Zealand prisons continue to
grow.
84% of prisoners released in the 2010/11 year had served a sentence of fewer than 24
months, with 59% serving sentences of fewer than 6 months. Prisoners serving sentences
of up to 12 months receive little or no assistance in respect of skills training, behaviour
change, drug and alcohol programmes, and mental health treatment.
Labour will operate a “nip it in the bud” approach in New Zealand prisons.
Programmes to address issues of mental health, substance abuse, illiteracy,
innumeracy and a basic lack of skills amongst inmates will operate in all prisons with
the objective of „rewiring and reprogramming‟ offender behaviour. The overarching
aim will be to prevent a return to prison and this criterion will replace sentence length
as the determinant of whether an inmate is eligible for such programmes.
Our prison officers are confronted on a daily basis with violence yet, as one officer has put it,
“all we have to protect ourselves with, in the case of an immediate attack, is our cotton shirt”.
Prison officers are entitled to a safe working environment. National has recently made some
protective equipment available to prison officers, such as stab proof vests and spit hoods.
But these are limited in number, and are not always readily available to prevent injuries.
Appropriate basic procedures, and the use and deployment of protective equipment, need to
be standard across all prisons. Appropriate training should also be available.
Labour will review standard operating procedures, training, and the use and
deployment of protective equipment in prisons to ensure that corrections staff are
adequately equipped to deal with adverse situations.
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