Behind Prison Walls

Signal Failure: Following the change of government in 2008, the "model" Spring Hill Correctional Facility’s inmate muster went from 650 to 1,038. In 2013, Spring Hill prisoners staged one of the largest and most destructive prison riots in New Zealand history. Under-resourcing in New Zealand's prison system is not confined to Serco's privately-run facilities, it afflicts the public prisons as well.

 

MAKING MONEY out of locking people up. How would you do it? Presumably, by making sure that the costs of looking after prisoners never amounted to more than the income you received for imprisoning them. In a more brutal society than ours, this would be easy. Those convicted of crimes could be sent to dank, dirty prisons, fed on slops, and allowed to die as Nature ordered. Very few staff would be required, and very little money need be spent. Provided none of the prisoners escaped to harry and harm the public, only a handful of simple-minded do-gooders would ever want to know what goes on behind prison walls.

 

The problem with making prisons profitable in today’s world, however, is that the State has an internationally mandated duty of care towards all incarcerated persons. Regardless of whether a prison is publicly or privately run, its inmates have rights that must be acknowledged and enforced by the people in charge. Unfortunately for profit-seekers, human-rights cost lots of money.

 

For those seeking to make a profit out of prisons, the challenge is, therefore, to present the State with a plausible plan for upholding the inmates’ rights, while surreptitiously cutting the institutions’ running-costs to the bone. Obviously, this requires a large measure of collusion on the part of the State. There will, accordingly, be plenty of scrutiny of the plans for rehabilitating their inmates, but very little, if any, of the budgets showing how these will be paid for. Likewise, the State will give lots of publicity to the private prisons’ promises; but none at all to their actual performance.

 

Why would the State collude so blatantly with private sector incarcerators? The explanation, sadly, is the same as the private sector’s: to make a profit. Except, the State doesn’t call what it does “making a profit”. It’s preferred term is “achieving a surplus”. In brute, political terms: it reduces expenditure on the prison system, which the public doesn’t like, in order to free-up funds for spending on things the public does like – such as schools and hospitals, or tax-cuts.

 

It requires a very strong-minded government to push back against this kind of political logic. A government determined to uphold its duty of care to prison inmates – even in the face of concerted public opposition. Rather astonishingly, in the light of recent events, New Zealanders elected such a government just 16 years ago.

 

Matt Robson - Minister of Corrections 1999-2002

 

In the Labour-Alliance Government of 1999-2002, led by Helen Clark and Jim Anderton, the Minister of Corrections was a man named Matt Robson. As a lawyer, Mr Robson knew a thing or two about the shortcomings of our prison system. Indeed, he is reported to have said that the best thing that could happen to Auckland’s dank and dirty Mt Eden Prison would be for it to be bulldozed flat. Sadly, that did not happen. What Mr Robson did do, however, was order the construction of Spring Hill Prison in North Waikato.

 

Spring Hill was to be a model, state-owned and operated prison for a maximum of 650 inmates. Each prisoner was to have his own cell, and the institution’s commitment was to rehabilitation through education and skills acquisition. The collapse of the Labour-Alliance Government, in 2002, brought an end to Mr Robson’s short stint as Minister of Corrections. He left Parliament in 2005 – two years before the Spring Hill Corrections Facility finally opened.

 

A year later, in 2008, a much more conventional Minister of Corrections was appointed to oversee New Zealand’s prison system. Judith Collins, like so many of those who had come before her, was determined to reduce expenditure on, and improve the efficiency of, the business of locking people up.

 

It was Ms Collins who contracted the global conglomerate, Serco, to manage the Mt Eden Corrections Facility. She was also responsible for the “double-bunking” of prisoners nationwide. This decision, bitterly criticised by inmates and criminologists alike, was seen as a sure-fire means of increasing prisoner stress levels through institutionalised over-crowding. The Spring Hill facility’s inmate muster, for example, went from 650 to 1,038. In 2013, Spring Hill prisoners staged one of the largest and most destructive prison riots in New Zealand history. Mr Robson’s “model” facility lay burned and broken.

 

The unfolding scandal at the Serco-managed Mt Eden Corrections Facility, while shocking, is only one aspect of the under-resourcing crisis afflicting our entire prison system. Yes, the privately-run facility is chronically under-staffed. And yes, the State does appear to be covering-up some of its deficiencies. But many of our state-run prisons are equally under-resourced. The State’s duty of care is being called into question on a daily basis – in both the public and private sectors.

 

As citizens of a civilised nation, we have a duty to care about what is being done, in our name, behind prison walls.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 28 July 2015.

The Price of Privatising Prisons

The Biggest Company You've Never Heard Of: Serco plc sits at the centre of a vast international web of business operations, including prisons, immigration detention centres, nuclear facilities, services to the US National Security Agency, air traffic control systems, railways, hospitals and schools.

ADAM RICKWOOD was just 14 years old when he died. His "carers" at Hassockfield secure training centre in County Durham found him hanging in his cell. Adam’s suicide, in August 2004, remains the United Kingdom’s youngest-ever "death in custody" case.

But it was much more than that.

The following year a judge ruled that, shortly before his death, Adam had been subjected to "unlawful force" by his so-called "carers".

The incident that led to Adam’s suicide began when he resisted being placed in solitary confinement. Employing one of the "pain compliance techniques" secretly recommended to Britain’s privatised secure training centres by the UK Ministry of Justice, Adam’s "carers" struck him violently on the side of his nose, causing it to bleed profusely.

Having administered their state-sanctioned "nose distraction technique", Adam’s "carers" then confined their sobbing, blood-covered "client" to his cell, where he lay, without medical treatment, for several hours. Alone, in pain, fearing further assaults and convinced that he would never again be free, the traumatised teenager took his own life.

The private-sector organisation contracted by the British Government to run the Hassockfield secure training centre is called Serco plc.

Earlier this week, our own Minister of Corrections, Judith Collins, announced that this vast transnational conglomerate, memorably described by Guardian journalist Jane Martinson as "the biggest company you’ve never hear of"; the same company in whose "care" 14 year-old Adam Rickwood was driven to suicide; would soon be running the Mt Eden/Auckland Central Remand Prison.

In a press-release announcing the contract, Ms Collins explained: "Serco has a strong track record in managing prisons. I’m confident that the company will bring the high standards of professionalism, safety, rehabilitation and security expected by the Government to Mt Eden/ACRP."

One wonders exactly how Ms Collins and her Department of Corrections define "high standards of professionalism" when the fatal brutalisation of a 14 year-old boy – but one of many cases of prisoner and detainee ill-treatment uncovered at Serco-run facilities in both the UK and Australia – is part of the corporation’s "strong track record in managing prisons".

One certainly hopes that the ex-police, ex-military, security guards employed by Serco to keep order in the "Aussie Archipelago" of Immigration Detention Centres (security guards who bear more than a passing resemblance to the Blackwater Corporation’s notorious "contractors" in US-occupied Iraq) are not what Minister Collins has in mind when she talks about Serco bringing in "new ideas and international best practice".

Serco will certainly bring a wealth of experience in the business of privatisation. Three-quarters of the 50,000 people employed by Serco across the planet are former civil-servants. Not that there’s anything like a one-to-one correlation between the state-sector employees Serco replaces and the people who end up on its permanent payroll.

As Bevan Hanlon from the Correction Officers’ union noted in his response to Ms Collins’ announcement., Serco take-overs usually result in about 30 percent of the workers formerly employed by the State failing to secure re-employment in the new, privately-run entity.

This is hardly surprising, since Serco’s ability to turn a profit on the "business" of incarceration is almost wholly dependent upon its ability to provide the State with an equivalent level of "service" with fewer resources and far fewer staff.

It’s a Devil’s bargain. Ms Collins must know that Serco’s loss-leading tender can only be recouped at the expense of the prisoners in its "care". When fewer corrections staff are available to perform their highly demanding and often dangerous duties, the international literature all points to inmates spending more time in dangerously overcrowded and unsanitary cells, receiving reduced rations of inferior quality, having fewer exercise and rehabilitative opportunities, and being afforded considerably less dignity than when they were the responsibility of the State.

And, of course, these cut-backs come at a price. For individuals suffering from mental illnesses and/or drug and alcohol problems – prisoners without the intellectual or physical resources to withstand the constantly degraded living conditions – the stress will quickly become unbearable. Violence – against staff, other prisoners and, most tragically, against themselves – will increase.

In recommending Serco to her cabinet colleagues, Ms Collins has – wittingly or unwittingly – injected a deadly toxin into our correctional facilities. The outcome is horribly predictable: "deaths in custody" will rise dramatically.

Sooner than she would wish, Minister Collins will be presented with an Adam Rickwood of her own.

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 17 December 2010.

Whanau Ora: Faith-Based Charity?

The architect of Whanau Ora: Encouraged and empowered by National's John Key and Act's Rodney Hide, Tariana Turia has constructed a culturally unassailable vehicle for the privatisation of social welfare delivery in New Zealand.

THE FIRST THING to grasp about the Whanau Ora programme is that it occupies in the New Zealand political environment precisely the same evolutionary niche as the so-called "Faith-based Charities" (FBCs) in the United States.

In the battle to wrest the provision of social services from federal and state authorities the FBCs acted as American Neoliberalism’s "Trojan Horses" – hiding the fundamental goal of welfare privatisation behind the culturally unassailable front of Christian community service.

Being a much more secular society that the United States, and being nowhere near as enthralled to the fundamentalist/evangelical Christian Right, New Zealand presented its home-grown neoliberals with a significant presentational problem. New Zealand’s established charities are by-and-large still relatively free of neoliberal contagion and in any case completely fail the "culturally unassailable" test – being as subject to media scrutiny as any other participant in New Zealand civil society.

Only one group in New Zealand is culturally unassailable – the tangata whenua. Any person or institution foolhardy enough to subject Maori to the same degree of critical scrutiny as other groups in our society runs the very real risk of being branded "racist". "Maori-bashing" has been politically ghettoised in the socially and intellectually disreputable milieu of the unsophisticated Right. "Respectable" New Zealand journalists and politicians are as loathe to attack Maori as American politicians and journalists are to attack Christianity.

All of which makes Maori community organisations the ideal vehicles to lead the private sector’s assault on the hitherto state-dominated welfare "marketplace". The concept of whanau ora is being advanced with exactly the same intention as the concept of "a personal encounter with Jesus": as a way of "turning people’s lives around" by means of an "experience" or "force" that is ultimately untestable – even supernatural.

Which is why the Whanau Ora Report is so full of what critics have called "waffle" and "psychobabble". It is proof positive that the policy we are dealing with is not in any way empirically mandated or scientifically verifiable. Tariana Turia and her hand-picked advisory taskforce are simply (and shamelessly) asking the rest of New Zealand to take "Whanau Ora" on faith.

And it’s working. A group of public servants who approached a journalist with the line: "Hi, We're from the Government and we're here to help" would be subjected to the most rigorous scrutiny – and quite possibly ridicule. But a few months from now, when someone says: "Kia ora, I’m from your local Whanau Ora service provider and I’m here to help" he or she will be received with unstinting respect and everything they say will be recorded at its face value.

The other thing which the presentation of the Whanau Ora Report has done is reveal the full measure of John Key’s political skill. His wooing of the Maori Party – like Ronald Reagan’s wooing of the Religious Right in the United States – has augmented the forces of New Zealand neoliberalism in a way very few people believed possible, and even fewer predicted.

Key had both the wit and the nerve to take on board what the more intelligent members of the neoliberal community (like the Business Roundtable’s Rob McLeod) were saying. That the Treaty settlement process was slowly but surely creating what Dr Elizabeth Rata calls a "neo-traditionalist elite" of tribal capitalists with sufficient economic power to co-opt the Maori middle-class – a group which, hitherto, had owed its primary allegiance to, received its salaries from, and been under the ideological guidance of the State Sector.

Key and his National Party colleagues (along with their ACT allies) have long understood that this situation conferred a considerable political advantage upon the Labour Party (whose connections to the State Sector are numerous and deep). But what if those connections were broken?

If the bulk of Maori middle-class employment could be transferred from public to private bureaucracies – especially bureaucracies masked by the culturally unassailable language of kaupapa Maori – then the outer walls of the public sector’s welfare delivery institutions would be breached, and the principles and practice of privatised welfare delivery firmly established.

No one can say we weren’t warned. The way GEO, the private US corporation which set up the Mt Eden Remand Centre, screened its naked profit-seeking behind an ethnically sensitive programme involving the tangata whenua showed us as long ago as the late 1990s how easily Maori could be persuaded to turn themselves into a culturally unassailable swipe-card for privatisation.

And just as privatised correctional facilities are on their way to becoming highly profitable cogs in the machinery of social control, Whanau Ora, too, will see private individuals, trusts and corporations (albeit brown-faced ones) profiting from the unrelenting institutional discrimination and structural inequality that drives working-class Maori and Pakeha alike into the arms of those who long ago mastered the art of doing well by doing good.　

Political Victims

"Crusher Collins": Trapped in her persona of the "tough" Corrections Minister, Judith Collins cannot now step back from the deeply flawed law and order policies of the National-led Government.

CAN JUDITH COLLINS be rehabilitated? Or is the Minister of Corrections an incorrigible ideological recidivist who should be locked away forever?

The questions are, of course, facetious. Collins is an intelligent and caring woman, whose private face bears scant resemblance to the fierce political mask of "Crusher Collins" – that steely-eyed, thin-lipped avatar of conservative New Zealand’s growing preoccupation with victims’ rights.

"The public expects the system – first and foremost – to punish those who have broken the law", writes Collins in a think-piece published last Wednesday in The New Zealand Herald. "Punishment for serious crime in the majority of cases should be harsh, because anything less fails to acknowledge that victims of crime are never truly released from their sentence."

Rhetorical red meat of this sort has become standard fare for Collins. Like the Sensible Sentencing Trust’s Garth McVicar, and ACT’s David Garrett, she long ago mastered the art of lubricating the man-eating machinery of the New Zealand prison system with the tears of its inhabitants’ victims.

Her defence of the Government’s new "Three Strikes" policy, for example, relies for its impact not on solid research or sound reasoning, but on "a letter from a very courageous woman" whose 15-year-old daughter was murdered in "a brutal attack". The awful experiences of Collins’ correspondent, and the outrage and horror they evoke, effectively forestall any serious criticism of the Minister’s argument. Who would be insensitive enough to chop logic with someone acting on behalf of a mother whose daughter had been stabbed, strangled and sexually violated?

But, when did it become acceptable for a Minister of the Crown to use the victims of crime as human-shields against the critical scrutiny of government policy? And how did it become "okay" for politicians to render any dispassionate assessment of that policy impossible by admitting to the discussion all the overwhelming emotions associated with violent death and inconsolable human loss? What sort of politics is this?

The very worst kind. Because conservative politicians compound their cynical exploitation of human grief by directing the intense emotion it inevitably evokes against their ideological opponents.

"In this country we have many people who have made a thriving industry out of making excuses for criminals", writes Collins. "In the past decade these people have overwhelmed the debate on law and order with their views on the rights of offenders."

A thriving industry? To what and to whom is the Minister referring? The legal profession? The probation service? University departments conducting research into the causes and consequences of criminal offending? NGOs and religious organisations helping offenders make the transition from "inside" to "outside"? Who are these thriving industrialists?

And what is Collins suggesting? That citizens accused of a crime should not be entitled to legal representation? That no one should ever be encouraged (let alone funded) to ask why young men murder young women? Is she seriously suggesting that all attempts to ease offenders safely back into society are misguided?

Unfortunately, the Minister doesn’t say – so let us examine the one specific claim that she does make: that for the past ten years the advocates of "the rights of offenders" have "overwhelmed" the law and order debate.

Is this a true statement? No, it isn’t. In fact, the situation in New Zealand is the exact opposite of what the Minister is claiming. Over the course of the past ten years – no, let’s be honest, over the past thirty years – the trend in all the English-speaking countries has been towards harsher penalties, longer sentences and diminished legal protections for those accused of serious crimes.

This is particularly true of New Zealand, where, for most of the past decade, both of the major political parties have engaged in a bidding war to determine who could come up with the most draconian responses to violent crime. It began with Norm Withers’ "Law & Order" Citizens Initiated Referendum" – carried overwhelmingly at the General Election of 2002. Mr Withers’ success put paid to what little remained of the liberal Minister of Corrections, Matt Robson’s, doomed attempt to align New Zealand’s penal policies with international best practice.

And, on every dismal, descending step of this new law-and-order staircase our politicians were shadowed by the "if it bleeds it leads" news media. So potent (and profitable) has the depiction of serious criminal offending become, that our journalists see little merit in alerting their readers, listeners or viewers to the statistical facts of New Zealand’s declining crime-rate. Instead, reporters and politicians became inextricably entwined in a dangerously symbiotic double-act: the former whipping the voters into a vengeful frenzy; the latter doing their best to appease the resulting bloodlust.

The true flowering of liberal penology actually came in the 1960s and 70s when, at the height of the "historic compromise" between capital and labour, and the social revolution it precipitated, English-speaking politicians, inspired by the compassionate social-democracies of Northern Europe, attempted to shift the policy focus away from primitive retribution (the Old Testament’s "eye-for-an-eye") towards a more humane emphasis on offender rehabilitation and a getting-to-grips with the socio-economic and cultural generators of criminal behaviour.

Not surprisingly, Collins is unwilling to acknowledge any of this. To do so would be to place the artificially induced clamour for a more punitive corrections regime in the broader historical context of the New Right’s counter-offensive against the redistributive welfare state and all its works.

In this context, not even Tony Blair’s rhetorically brilliant "tough on crime – tough on the causes of crime" is acceptable. But, if the second part of Blair’s slogan must be jettisoned, conservative politicians must have something else to mask the unrelenting bleakness of their ultimate "solution": constantly rising levels of incarceration in a privatised prison system.

The answer, of course, is to shift the political focus from the perpetrators to the victims of crime. No matter that this policy effectively reverses the centuries-old tradition of treating crime as an act against the State. No matter that it makes the calm and impartial administration of justice increasingly problematic. The relentless focus on victims, by making rationality redundant, and turning evidence-driven humanitarians into criminal enablers, provides a perfect cover.

"Time and again," writes Collins, "victims of crime have told me they feel let down by a system that seems to put greater emphasis on the rights of offenders than victims."

Not any more.

This essay was originally published in The Independent of Thursday, 4 February 2010.

The Takeover

To secure a florishing private prison system, it is first necessary to secure an ever-increasing supply of prisoners. Fortunately, this isn't difficult.

LET me share with you some ideas I’ve been working on for a political thriller, its working title: "The Takeover".

The plot kicks-off in the United States, back in the early 1980s, with a private security firm, staffed by a volatile collection of former FBI and CIA agents, deciding to cash-in on the Reagan Administration’s privatisation programme.

With contacts in Washington, and friends in the Republican Party, they have little difficulty gaining ground-floor entry to the brand new business of designing, building and running private prisons.

Fast-forward fifteen years, and we discover that what started out as a little firm providing security for sensitive military installations and nuclear power plants, has morphed into a global corporation managing private custodial facilities all over the world – including New Zealand.

Now it’s the end of the 1990s, and this big American corporation – let’s call it CON-International – is on the point of signing a multi-million dollar contract with New Zealand’s conservative government, when a general election tumbles a raucous combination of social-democrats, democratic socialists and greens into office.

Overnight, CON-International’s plans are thrown into complete disarray. The new Corrections Minister, a former Trotskyite socialist, turns out to be an implacable foe of private prisons. Within months of taking office, the new left-wing government has passed legislation making the private operation of custodial facilities illegal.

Now, this is where the plot really gets going. Because CON-International isn’t all that bothered by the political turn of events. Its sojourn in New Zealand, though relatively brief, has convinced its bosses that making a profit out of the country’s tiny prison system will be, to say the least, challenging.

What CON-International needs to succeed is more prisoners. Increase the muster of inmates and you generate an irrefutable case for increasing the number of jails. CON-International’s interim mission, while waiting for its conservative friends to be returned to power, is to generate new inmates for the new jails it will, sooner or later, be contracted to design, build and run.

Now, when it comes to generating new inmates for new prisons, nobody does it better than CON-International’s man in Washington – "Alec". This veteran K-Street fixer specialises in setting up grass-roots organisations dedicated to scaring the public into "getting tough" on crime.

Once established, Alec supplies these "grass-roots" bodies with ready-made and field-tested campaign initiatives like "Truth in Sentencing" and "Three Strikes & You’re Inside For Life".

The aim, of course, is to induce moral panic – always easy when "If it bleeds – It leads" is the news editor’s rule-of-thumb. Once generated, this mass public anxiety places irresistible pressures on the main political parties to lengthen sentences, eliminate parole, limit bail, and increase the number of offences punishable by imprisonment.

With the need for new prisons thus established, Alec’s work is done. All that remains is for CON-International to submit its bid for the new federal contracts.

Alec flies to New Zealand to get a feel for what sort of grass-roots organisation is best suited to the task of inducing the requisite moral panic over here. After travelling the country, and talking to all the leading conservative opinion-formers, he presents CON-International with a memorandum:

The momentum for a tougher line on law and order will come from the "heartland" of rural and provincial New Zealand. The ideal person to lead such a group would, therefore, be a person who epitomises "heartland" values. My suggestion would be to pick an elderly farmer. He should come across very obviously as a graduate of the "University of Life", and look like everybody’s favourite uncle. There is already an abundance of political, media and financial resources available for such an organisation and its leader. For obvious reasons, however, these should be kept hidden from public view.

Alec’s plans are put into effect, and the ensuing moral panic plays a significant role in driving the left-wing government from office. Everything seems set for a CON-International takeover of New Zealand’s prison system – whose inmate population is about to explode.

Trouble is, I can’t decide how to end the story.

Should I go for an heroic, Frank Capra-type ending, where the people see through CON-International’s manufactured moral panic?

Or, should I go for a bleak, Coen Brothers ending, where the conservative government awards CON-International the contract and everyone cheers them on?

Which ending would you choose?

This essay was originally published in The Timaru Herald, The Taranaki Daily News, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Evening Star on Friday, 13th March 2009.