Election 2023: Prison numbers will balloon if ACT elected at cost of $1 billion, David Seymour says
ACT leader David Seymour says the prison population will rise if his party is elected to power in October.
Appearing on AM on Thursday, Seymour said New Zealand had “descended into lawlessness” and locking people up was the unfortunate answer.
“I’d just make the point that, if it keeps the streets safe, it may be the best money you ever spend.”
ACT is promising to roll back Labour’s 2017 plan to reduce prison numbers by 30 percent over 15 years. Part of that involved spending $1 billion on building another 500 prison beds to “ensure there is sufficient capacity for dangerous people to be locked away from law-abiding New Zealanders”.
Ummmmm.
ACT wants to stack prisoners into THIS underfunded, corrupt and violent prison system?
‘Disconnection at all levels’: Ombudsman’s scathing review of Corrections
Chief Ombudsman Peter Boshier has issued a blistering critique of the Department of Corrections’ top brass, who he says are failing to drive meaningful progress.
Boshier started an investigation into management at Corrections, after the 2020 Waikeria Prison riot. He said it became clear that previous recommendations for change at Corrections had not been actioned, and so investigated management and culture within the department.
“Waikeria was one of many prisons I had inspected over a number of years where despite countless recommendations for change by both me and other oversight agencies, the same issues kept coming up, again and again,” he said.
He said Corrections’ senior leaders knew what needed to be done, but had not ensured any improvements were made to the conditions of prisons.
…look, I appreciate that many of you are frightened and angry by the post covid crime wave that is hitting us, just as it is in Australia, UK, Canada and America. The sacrifice of Covid was unequally shared in an unequal society and those distortions are manifesting now.
The Chief Ombudsman is warning that the current prison system is so busted and so broken that the basics of living inside the prison are in critical meltdown.
Do you understand what he’s saying here?
He said there needed to be a greater focus on ensuring basic human rights for prisoners, with poor conditions in the prisons making it more dangerous for staff and prisoners as tensions rose.
The living conditions become so squalid that the prisoners will revolt and you will spark prison riots!
That’s what happened at the Waikeria prison riot! The living conditions, even for a prison, became so run down and inoperable that it collapsed.
He said the riot at Waikeria prison was fuelled, in part, due to the poor living conditions and human rights abuses at prison…
“Those issues included unreasonable lock up hours, a lack of privacy in toilet and shower areas, and, in the case of Waikeria, decrepit conditions in its high security areas,” he said.
In previous reports about Waikeria, Boshier said he had highlighted those concerns and they had been accepted by Corrections. Yet he said there hadn’t been much, if any, progress to addressing these issues.
“This troubled me so much that I felt a deep dive was necessary to understand why the department hasn’t been able to make meaningful and long-lasting change,” he said.
…National and ACT if elected want to plough thousands more people into our broken and dysfunctional Prison Empire with zero costings and no way to fund the enormous spike in the Prison population they are about to embark us upon.
Watch for the calls to privatise the prison system.
An underfunded, violent and corrupt prison system will only produce more damaged men. ACT’s claim they are open to rehabilitation misses the reason why it’s not happening in the first place!
You can only get rehabilitation in NZ if you admit your guilt. Many men refuse to admit their guilt so are never eligible for parole, so they serve their entire sentence with no rehabilitation whatsoever and come out and explode in society.
All National and ACT are promising is a tsunami of broken men being released more damaged into society than when they went into prison.
Is our need for vengeance so blinding that we will honestly embark upon this vast mistake?
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