Budget 2025 funding to manage the growing number of prisoners is almost maxed out a year ahead of schedule, leaving Corrections grappling with “sub-optimal” levels of frontline staff.
But Corrections Minister Mark Mitchell says there is no looming crisis, no reduction in frontline services, nor any question over how long Corrections can sustain the situation, because it is such a “world-class agency”.
The Opposition says Mitchell’s “head-in-the-sand” approach is “reckless, putting safety at risk and setting us up for a bigger, more expensive crisis tomorrow”.
How to handle a growing prison population with a shrinking per-prisoner budget is, and has been, an ongoing challenge for Corrections, which has no control over the numbers it must manage safely.
This also presents a growing fiscal headache for the Government, which declined a Budget 2025 request from Corrections for contingency funding. This would have been accessible if the actual number of prisoners exceeded the forecast at the time, which is now happening.
Budget 2025 provided $98.4 million a year in operational funding - mostly to hire more frontline staff - to cover a forecast 10,860 prisoners by June next year.
By the end of June this year, there were already 10,783 prisoners, approaching the all-time high and almost at the peak of the funded capacity - a year earlier than anticipated.
This has left Corrections describing the frontline staffing level as “sub-optimal”.
Treasury officials, in a briefing in March, warned about stretching the funding any further: “It is likely that any further significant scaling would require changes to service delivery, including rehabilitation, reintegration and health services.“
Mitchell was adamant not only that this wasn’t happening, but that services were improving.
“I haven’t been briefed, nor am I aware, of any reduction in the delivery of services. In fact, they’re doing more in the mental health space. And we’re rolling out rehabilitation programmes to prisoners on remand, accused or convicted, which has never happened before.
“They have done an absolutely outstanding job of absorbing the increase in prisoner numbers.”
Nor did he think there was a looming crisis.
“Not at all. In fact, the opposite. Corrections are doing a really good job of having a long, medium and short-term plan, and we’re supporting that as a Government.
“It’s only through their skilful leadership and ability to manage those numbers, almost down to a daily basis, that they’re keeping our Corrections system running at that high level. They’re just a world-class agency.”
Corrections has already been managing a prison population above and beyond what’s been budgeted for.
In an update after Budget 2025, Corrections said the prison population at the end of June was above the level funded for in Budget 2024 (10,783 versus 10,000 prisoners).
“To manage prison population above funded levels, Corrections has made internal reprioritisation decisions and is operating with a sub-optimal level of custodial staffing resilience, absorbing additional operating costs within existing baselines,” the update said.
Corrections told the Herald there are currently 4666 fulltime equivalent (FTE) Corrections officers, with 276.74 FTE vacancies. Mitchell said the staffing situation had significantly improved, following a successful recruitment campaign and a halving of the staff turnover rate.
A rising prison population is not unexpected, given the Government’s law and order programme that will send more people to jail for longer. Coalition policies - including sentencing reforms, new laws targeting gangs, and Three Strikes 2.0 - are estimated to add 3000 prisoners to the total population in the next 10 years.
There is inherent uncertainty in predicting how many people will end up in prison, so Corrections asked for a tagged contingency fund “to manage prisoner volume increases in-year over and above forecast levels”.
But Finance Minister Nicola Willis agreed with the Treasury’s recommendation that an application for out-of-cycle funding would be a better mechanism.
So far, Corrections has not requested this.
“We continuously monitor prison population and related costs, and would look to manage any pressures within baseline funding in the first instance,” a spokesperson told the Herald.
The completion of a 596-bed addition to Waikeria Prison in Waikato has ensured enough capacity for the short-term, leaving a buffer of about 1300 beds out of a total 12,145-bed capacity.
This has its own complexities, however, with an increasing proportion of prisoners being double-bunked: 45% in June this year, up from 40% in June 2024, 34% in June 2023, and 27% in June 2022.
While prisoners are screened for suitability, double-bunking can still present health and safety issues. Last month, a prisoner was charged with the murder of a man with whom he shared a cell in Mt Eden Prison.
A longer-term concern is that the forecast prison population is now much higher than in March, when the Budget 2025 request was presented and eventually approved.
The latest forecast, from June this year, is for the population to reach 11,825 by June next year, almost 1000 more than the number funded for in this year’s Budget.
By mid-2027, the population is forecast to breach the current capacity, and by late 2034/early 2035 is expected to creep over 14,000.
The silver lining for the Government is that the numbers are tracking below those forecasts, which put the population at 11,253 prisoners by this month. This is about 400 more than the current number, which reached new heights last week in reaching almost 10,900.
Mitchell hopes the Government’s law and order programme will eventually lead to the prison population trending down, though Justice Ministry officials do not foresee this, and have questioned the evidence behind government policies.
Is he preparing for the worst-case scenario?
“Absolutely, that’s what we’re doing.”
There are plans for an additional 810 beds at Waikeria by late 2029, and a redevelopment of Christchurch Men’s Prison that should add 240 beds by late 2029, and a further 240 by 2032.
There is also a fast-track application to expand Auckland Prison at Pāremoremo, which, if approved, would give Corrections some extra capacity potential.
“There’s another one, too, that’s going through Cabinet, so I can’t talk about it,” Mitchell said. “But yes, there’s lots of planning and investment going into the network itself, and upgrading and modernising the network.”
Labour’s Corrections spokeswoman, Tracey McLellan, said Mitchell’s “nothing to see here” perspective was risky, and the Government’s plan to cope with more and more prisoners was not realistic.
“The money isn’t there, and neither are the staff. Treasury is warning that pushing further means cutting rehabilitation and reintegration. That doesn’t reduce crime. It increases the risks,” she said.
“For a fraction of the billions spent on prisons, we could invest in mental health, addiction services, housing, and jobs that break the cycle of offending.
“But the Government isn’t willing to backtrack on its rhetoric to do what works.”
Corrections is spending $1.709 billion a year to house sentenced and remand prisoners, which amounts to about $160,000 per prisoner per year.
Treasury officials noted the risk of a rising prison population for the Government’s finances; its December briefing said it was the “primary pressure” for the entire law and order sector.
The Treasury pinpointed remand as the main opportunity to reduce the population.
But remand numbers are forecast to keep rising over the next 10 years (by 19%), as is the average time spent on remand (by 20%). This is a steeper rise than the forecast increase for sentenced prisoners.
The main reasons, according to the Justice Ministry’s projections report, were an increasing number of serious offenders and “a reduced risk tolerance for granting bail”.
The Government is trying to reduce pressure on the remand population by improving court timeliness, so that cases are completed more quickly.
About 20% of the remand population was due to delays in court processes, while the rest was policy-driven, Justice Ministry chief executive Andrew Kibblewhite told the justice select committee in June.
Courts Minister Nicole McKee told the committee that a drop in the number of sentencing adjournments in criminal cases had led to “nearly 2900 fewer delayed sentencing hearings”.
Some of those gains, according to Corrections chief executive Jeremy Lightfoot, were offset by increasing levels of serious offending, which was seeing more people put behind bars.
“Those things are longer-run, I think, in terms of how you deal with that category 3 inflow [offending punishable by at least two years in prison],” he told the committee.
The number of times those cases appeared in court before being completed had grown between 2015 and 2023, from about eight appearances - or events - to more than 11.
Efficiency gains had seen the average number of appearances fall by 1.1 events in Auckland - where most such cases are heard - over the past year.
Derek Cheng is a senior journalist who started at the Herald in 2004. He has worked several stints in the press gallery team and is a former deputy political editor.