Plan for more work and fewer prisoners

The Government yesterday released a strategy aimed at getting 60 per cent of prisoners working or in training and will today reassert plans to reduce the inmate population.

Included in the employment strategy are plans to re-establish nursery, horticulture and community work gang projects which have been successively axed in recent years to save money.
Other initiatives, including plans to encourage industry players to adopt prisoner training initiatives, both inside and outside prisons, are also on the table.

The latter are similar to those mooted by former Corrections Minister Matt Robson, which never really succeeded.

The plans are partly in response to a highly critical Ombudsmen's report late last year which said the drop in inmate employment and training cast a long shadow over the Corrections Department.

It found only 35 per cent of prisoners worked five to six hours a day and the total population was working only 77.5 per cent of the hours it had in 2000.

Yesterday's strategy was however accompanied by few firm targets or definitive funding commitments, subjecting it to criticism from National law and order spokesman Simon Power who described it as "a load of waffle". Mr Power has frequently questioned the department's inability to provide accurate information and it provided contradictory figures yesterday.

A strategy document said about 49 per cent of muster - about 7650-strong - was employed at any one time, while chief executive Barry Matthews put the figure at about 40 per cent.

Corrections Minister Damien O'Connor has stressed this year that the Government wants to arrest the surging prison muster and has argued up to 30 per cent of the prison population might be better serving community sentences.

He is expected to reassert that and to elaborate on his plans to reduce re-offending - with increased use of employment, vocational and drug and alcohol programmes - at a major conference on prison reform beginning in Wellington today. Firm announcements on potential policy and law changes are still some time away.

A Corrections Cabinet paper released after a direction from the Ombudsman reveals justice officials have dedicated "significant time and resources" on identifying the population growth and options to reduce it since 2004.

The paper makes it clear legislative and policy changes will be required to achieve reductions, suggesting it is likely the Government will have to - embarrassingly - reverse some sentencing, parole and bail laws it altered just a few years ago.

The paper also says that despite having spent $1 billion on four new prisons and other prison cells, the most recent Justice Ministry forecast leaves Corrections short of 928 beds - enough to require two new prisons - in the years leading up to 2010.

If the country's disaster recovery capacity, reserved for events such as a national disaster or an influx of illegal immigrants, is used to varying degrees - 100 per cent this year - and some other assumptions are "relaxed" the requirement would drop to 703 beds, the paper says.

It calls on Mr O'Connor to approve the construction of that many extra beds on existing prison sites.

Mr O'Connor told the Herald yesterday he was not prepared to approve the extra construction, at the same time signalling a Budget increase was in store for the department.

"I don't want to build any more prison cells. I'd like to think that the additional money we might get for Corrections would be for some of these [employment] programmes.

"I'm not convinced that we are that short of beds ... but clearly if we have to build more prison cells to secure some people from society then that will happen."