Speech: Katene - Use of Court Cells Amendment Bill
te-pati-maori
Thu Nov 26 2009 13:00:00 GMT+1300 (New Zealand Daylight Time)
Speech: Katene - Use of Court Cells Amendment Bill
Thursday, 26 November 2009, 4:46 pm
Speech: The Maori Party
Corrections (Use of Court Cells) Amendment Bill
Rahui Katene; MP for Te Tai Tonga
Thursday 26 November 2009
The basic proposal in this Bill is that the Department of Corrections will have access to court cells to house over-flow prisoners by the first half of 2010, when they may be needed.
Once the Bill is passed today the Ministry of Justice and Department of Corrections will fast-track work, specifying the cells that may be used for over-flow prisoners, the circumstances in which the cells will be made available for this purpose, and how the cells will be operated.
So in many respects we are already well down the road to implementation while this debate proceeds.
This is not unusual of course.
Corrections has been forecast to run out of baseline bed early next year and so there is an immediate issue around prisoner accommodation and public safety.
We are in this situation because prisons numbers swelled under the Labour Government from about five thousand in 1996 to 8400 now.
Changes in New Zealand’s criminal justice policy in the past decade have been extraordinarily rapid. This rapid change is set to continue.
But there is another facet of this rapid increase in the prison muster which is of note.
From 1997 to 2007, while the number of those sentenced to prison increased by 37%, those remanded into custody increased by a staggering 214%.
This Bill, then, is an attempt to do something, and to do it quick.
We know that this Bill fits into the context of a range of other measures that are being taken to address prison population pressures, including approval for extended double-bunking at five prisons.
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However, there is some uncertainty about the ability to access the additional double-bunked capacity which may mean there may be insufficient accommodation for prisoners from June 2010.
It is estimated a further five thousand beds would be needed by 2018.
One of the more controversial options has been the proposal to establish a sixty bed container unit at Rimutaka Prison.
This is the first such project of its kind in New Zealand and the emphasis has been on the fact that it is cheaper and faster to construct than facilities for a new prison
We in the Maori Party are not convinced whether the recycled container solution is an effective solution to the overarching issue of prison numbers but we’re leave that – and the double bunking – for another time.
Today’s debate, then is basically the option of last resort.
The proposal is that once the regional capacity at Police jails is exhausted, court cells will be used to accommodate over-flow prisoners.
Although there are currently ten blocks of court cells, some 101 cells, which have been gazetted as parts of prisons, the Resource Management Act prevents them from being used for the overnight accommodation of prisoners.
The approval sought in this bill then is to amend the Corrections Act so that the requirements of section 9 of the RMA do not apply to the detention of prisoners in court cell blocks. In effect, this means that, where there is an acute shortage of prison accommodation, court cells can be used to accommodate over-flow prisoners without undue delay or cost.
The Maori Party is willing to give begrudging support to this Bill – support which is to basically ensure there is short-gap inmate accommodation in place for prisons to access if there is no other facility available.
The last thing we would want is for over-crowding in prison, triple bunking, or for our prisons to be under any more stress than is necessary.
But there is an important rider that we place on our support.
During the committee stage of this Bill, the Associate Minister for Corrections Hon Dr Pita Sharples, raised the issue of safety and spoke of some break-outs from court cells in the past. He spoke from his wide experience of some 35 years of working in the prisons and courts. But he made it clear that the Māori Party was supporting this Bill as a response to the crisis over prison cell shortages.
We recall that more than half of the most serious prison escapes in the 2006 financial year were made from Court cells. In that year, six of the eleven breakouts took place from courts throughout the country.
In one of the more embarrassing cases, two remand prisons escaped by breaking through the ceiling of their cell.
In another case, an inmate was just twenty minutes into a nine month prison sentence for burglary when he escaped from a holding cell at Waipukurau District Court.
Concern has been raised about prisoner deaths while in custody in court cells given they are multiple-occupancy.
So there are some real issues around public safety which may fall out of this new proposal, which I trust the Minister will give attention to.
Another key issue is that around the emotional and physical safety of prisoners located in cells
The Investigation of the Circumstances Surrounding the Death of Liam John Ashley reported that Liam, a seventeen year old teenager, had been held in a court cell with adult prisoners for the whole of the day in which he received his fatal injuries.
Action for Children and Youth Aotearoa, a coalition of non-governmental organisations and individuals interested in children’s rights, drew on this situation to petition the Law and Order Parliamentary Committee about the Department of Corrections.
And I want to draw the attention of the House to that recommendation, namely that:
The Department should ensure that when under-18 prisoners are moved to Court cells that either the Department or the Police ensure that they are kept separate from adult prisoners.
Mr Speaker, there is, however, a much bigger debate that needs to go on in this House, which forms the broader context for this Bill on the use of court cells for prison accommodation.
And that is the urgent need to comprehensively review the criminal justice system, and particularly the high levels of incarceration, and specifically that of Maori.
Many of the Speakers before me have referred to the fact that the Vote Corrections budget continues to escalate as a result of prison being the priority response to offending for both the former and current government.
The total appropriation for Corrections has increased by $368,731,000 million or 25.1% since last year (the total vote is now over $1.5 billion per year). This is a substantial increase given the context of the world’s deepest recession in at least sixty years.
Treasury projections for Vote Corrections 2020 are in fact a massive $2 billion per year.
So there are fiscal reasons we need to review the over-population of our prisons.
But there is a far greater moral and ethical issue about the rising trends in prison population.
In 2007, the Ombudsman, Mel Smith, carried out an investigation into issues involving the Criminal Justice Sector.
His report suggests a (Royal) Commission of Inquiry should be called to undertake a comprehensive review of the criminal justice system. The over-representation of Maori should be an area of significant focus of any Commission.
One of the reasons the Ombudsman made the suggestion for a Commission of Inquiry is that it will allow an opportunity to stop and reflect as to why the punitive treadmill seems to continue to pick up speed and, it is hoped, to find constructive ways to slow it down.
In the Maori Party we believe that crime prevention needs to be looked at in a different way – holistically; to try and change contextual factors as well as lowering the ‘outcomes’. A Kaupapa Maori Justice Strategy will be a starting point for doing things differently – doing things from a Maori values base of restoring and transforming.
The idea is to have a strategy that will address practical things that whanau, hapü, iwi, marae, communities, organisations, institutions can do to get going with the doing – of creating alternatives to police, courts and prison system.
The Maori Party supports the good work that the Associate Minister of Corrections has been doing to this end, and we will – as I said earlier – give begrudging support to this Bill to use court cells, as an emergency stopgap measure until a more enduring solution is available.
ENDS
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