Island Life: Driving around Mt Eden, looking for a bed.
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you can't just add heating or lights or anything like you can in a normal house
You say that like it's a bad thing?
Heh. Seriously, good points.
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Thanks for the links, Kerry. There are no doubt plenty of things wrong with the proposal, including the fundamental problem that it's based on the idea that more prison space is a good thing. But a lot of the reaction is based on something like "OMG containers, WTF?", when internationally the concept of repurposing redundant containers for housing is no longer seen as crazy, demeaning or avant garde, but as a practical and flexible solution worthy of further investigation.
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Kyle, the containers are 20' or 40' long and they can be joined together or re-cut to make whatever size bed/bath space required. I'm not seeing poky little rabbit cages here and the idea of having smaller compounds seems more humane to me.
Smaller compounds would mean being able to house similar prisoners together, keep rivals separate. Smaller might mean prisoners having more time out of their actual cells and in the communal space. it might mean having more small, even relocatable, compounds around the country that are more accessible for visitors, hooking into training etc. They might be easier to manage in terms of security if the low-risk prisoners are housed there.
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Wonder if there would be consultation on WHERE a big number of container /cells would be put?
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Here's a wee anecdote from a friend of mine who's a prison officer. A prisoner stabbed one of his colleagues recently -- luckily, the wound was not severe. The prisoner said later "I only stabbed you a little bit, because I like you." Same friend of mine observed that Mt Eden was a bastard to work in because its antique plan made it easy for you to be surprised.
So yeah, there are some very challenging design problems in prison layout.
Maybe they can be met using shipping container modules, maybe they can't. I wonder how thoroughly this has been investigated.
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I'm not seeing poky little rabbit cages here and the idea of having smaller compounds seems more humane to me.
It might be humane. It'll double the cost of housing the prisoners however.
If you have a 'shed' with cells on either side of a communal area, you can house 30 - 40 prisoners easily. You might have two or three staff on round the clock to supervise that area. There might be a team of a dozen staff who cover those prisoners for a week, all day, all night.
If you go to a smaller unit, you might have 5 prisoners in it. You still need two staff minimum to supervise it. To cover 24 hours all week you need to employ 10 guards to guard 5 prisoners. So you've just multiplied your staffing costs for supervision by a factor of about 5. You need twice as many guards as prisoners.
Prisons, among other things, need to be run efficiently. They're tremendously expensive to start with without making them more so.
There are people in Corrections who are employed to design and build prisons following international best practice. They've spent quite a bit of time learning to be good at it, and our recently built prisons rate quite well.
How anyone with access to The Herald's 'your views' pages can be reasonably considered to be able to do a better job I have no idea.
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Wonder if there would be consultation on WHERE a big number of container /cells would be put?
Well there is always the contaminated land down by the tank farm. Pitbull Collins has made it obvious that she thinks inmates scum so a bit of contamination wont matter surely.
I dont mind recycling Containers into other things but somehow think the nimbys will come out of the wood work and do think 380 k each for temporary cells is diabolical. -
At the Australian National University in Canberra, they're planning to put students into containers. In the Netherlands they already do.
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I vaguely recall Tolley having a go at Labour last year when a news item highlighted containers being used here for extra classrooms. So not good for students, but acceptable for inmates?
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Given the suggestions that some costing has been done, I assume that Corrections has some more detailed descriptions of what has been proposed, but I can't seem to find any links to them. I'm going to hold off on any further comments until we know what we're arguing about.
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But shipping containers are terrifically strong...
For their intended purpose, yeah. But their intended purpose is sitting on a boat, packed full of items that aren't actively trying to cut their way out, break bits off for use as shivs, etc. So while they can take quite a lot of load without buckling (you can stack full containers quite high), they may be somewhat more vulnerable to ingenious inmates.
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But their intended purpose is sitting on a boat, packed full of items that aren't actively trying to cut their way out, break bits off for use as shivs, etc. So while they can take quite a lot of load without buckling (you can stack full containers quite high), they may be somewhat more vulnerable to ingenious inmates.
Pretty much what was going through my mind earlier.
Who knew that more or less back-to-back repeats of 'america's hardest prisons' on the discovery channel would eventually be useful for something?
It is a foolish prison officer who treats his charges as stupid. When you sit a person with well-demonstrated sociopathic tendancies in a confined space for hours at a time, they tend to spend a lot of that time thinking up ways to turn their immediate surroundings into weapons. Them having extended amounts of time compensates for them not being MacGuyver-level intellects - they get there in the end.
A lot of the cost in prison design is trying to make the cells and communal areas inmate-proof - bolting down chairs and tables, making toilets out of something that won't shatter and leave you with a sharp edge, etc etc.
Not something you generally have to consider for your average home rennovation.
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The $380,000 cost of the container option is in comparison to the $643,000 cost of the Spring Hill complex units, a per bed cost.
The cost of monitoring these units does not seem to be included. That leaves $263,000 as the saving between options. Ok, I can understand that the cost of the building containing that "Bed" being higher than the cost of a concrete slab and a container but what I can not see is how anyone could arrive at these figures without lapsing into some kind of fantasy. It is a fuck of a lot of money and as its "our" money, I think we should be told how the hell they arrive at these figures. -
I still predict this government will be remembered not for what it did, but for what it failed to do.
and for what it un-did.
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There are people in Corrections who are employed to design and build prisons following international best practice. They've spent quite a bit of time learning to be good at it, and our recently built prisons rate quite well.
How anyone with access to The Herald's 'your views' pages can be reasonably considered to be able to do a better job I have no idea.
Oh dear. So we're not allowed to discuss it unless we're architects or cost analysts with experience of building prisons? Cheap shot.
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Oh dear. So we're not allowed to discuss it unless we're architects or cost analysts with experience of building prisons? Cheap shot.
That doesn't look like what Kyle was saying to me.
I think everyone is perfectly entitled to discuss the issue and propose better solutions, but I also think it's sensible to give experts' views more weight when trying to decide which solutions are workable.
I think this holds particulary true with the issue of corrections, since most people don't have day to day experience of the prison environment, and many people really, really want to believe that there is a dirt-cheap and effective way to imprison people for years on end and actually have them come out better at the end of it.
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@I/S
... prisoners onto trains.
But they closed the Gisborne line years ago, and there's no prisoners on the West Coast, so they couldn't be sent east.This line clearly going nowhere, but for the record the Gisborne railway line is no more closed than the north-bound lanes of the Auckland Harbour Bridge are, though granted the traffic counts are lower.
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the night life in Paris, New York, Amsterdam and London was powered by whale oil lighting.
Wow, you mean that Whale Oil was once actually useful for something?
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Can I just say when I first saw the title of this thread, my initial reaction was - there's one here. When my stepson has gone, of course.
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they tend to spend a lot of that time thinking up ways to turn their immediate surroundings into weapons.
Hence, underfloor heating.
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Not all whale oil was clean burning. Some of it stank.
Now I'm confused. Shouldn't this be in the Garrett/Oil rig thread?
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Can I just say when I first saw the title of this thread, my initial reaction was - there's one here. When my stepson has gone, of course.
You're boundlessly generous and thoughtful, Jackie. The title is in fact a quotation of Minister Collins on Morning Report.
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Was it as clever sounding as it looks in print?
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Can I just say when I first saw the title of this thread, my initial reaction was - there's one here.
Funny that ,I thought he was doing the inorganics :)
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Was it as clever sounding as it looks in print?
Next time, I think the title will be #1 Crusher
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