Posts by Eddie Clark
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And on schedule, the select committee report on the prison privatisation Bill has been released. Some minimal improvements in reporting and accountability, and quite strongly worded (and good) dissenting reports from Labour and the Greens.
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Measuring whether an inmate reoffends is very very easy. If they're convicted for a crime post-release, they've re-offended.
As is often the case, Graeme, you're technically entirely correct, but fail to actually address the substance of the argument.
You're right that reoffending is easy to monitor per se, but how do you measure the relevance of that reoffending. If you're a private prison and you're unlucky enough to have a sociopath allocated to you, nothing you do is going to reduce their reoffending rate. Its the same reason I'm not in favour of direct test results = pay level 'performance' based teacher pay. Not everyone is dealt the same hand, and pretending they are doesn't produce meaningful results, whether its measuring the quality of teaching or the quality of rehabilitative programmes offered by prisons.
So in short, simply monitoring whether or not someone reoffends then punishing the last prison at which they were incarcerated is not an action that is likely to reduce reoffending. The issue is complex, and doesn't neatly fit into a metric that is easily measurable in a contractual sense.
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Sacha - but those aren't the important indicators. It'd be like Zespri monitoring its fruit quality based on the angle that the stem is attached to the fruit - easily and objectively measurable, but not a helpful metric when want you want is nice kiwifruit.
What we want is prisoners who are humanely treated, given opportunities and incentive to rehabilitate, and who don't reoffend. Measuring all of those things is inherently hard. Escapes are headline-grabbing things, but in the scheme of things they don't actually happen that often or matter that much.
I actually agree that remand might be separate issue from long-term incarceration. Although given how long things take to get to trial, you could be in there for up to a year (longer, if there are appeals and you don't get bail).
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another +1 for floriditas. Or, slightly less flash but also awesome, and my regular brunch haunt, Roxy (which is opposite logan brown).
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Graeme - see my point re monitoring. If Corrections isn't trusted to run prisons efficiently, how can it be trusted to monitor efficiently?
Also see the principled objections rasied by other posters - I didn't raise them because they're ideological more than practical. I happen to agree the state has an obligation to conduct its own punishments, but that's not a conclusive reason. The practical consequences of prison privatisation are.
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Agree re billing McVicar. And the complicit media, particularly television, that lazily ask him (and usually only him) to comment on criminal justice matters, giving him both credibility and a totally false aura of neutrality.
[rant] As for private prisons, they may help with the short-term capital outlay to get new prisons built, but they will absolutely make the long-term situation worse. The incentives they set up are obscene.
The Geo group, which ran National's favourite hobby horse, the Auckland central remand prison, has a record in the US of actively lobbying for harsher sentencing policies in the jurisdictions in which they run prisons. They're generally paid per prisoner, so they're incentivised to have more prisoners in jail for longer. This also means that they have no incentive to actively work on rehabilitation. Some of the research I've read in fact seems to indicate that people imprisoned at private prisons have a statistically significant higher rate of recidivism.
Prisoner health and welfare is generally worse, too, as are working conditions for staff - there's only so much you can save in prison construction and basic operating costs, so you save in things like quality of food, quality of medical care for prisoners, and staff wages. Also, there's usually a performance penalty for each prisoner that has to be sent to an external hospital, so they're incentivised to hide injuries as long as possible.
A common answer to this is that all these things can be solved with a proper monitoring programme from the contracting agency - in this case, it'd be Corrections. Theoretically, this could be true. However:
1) A genuinely proper monitoring system is very expensive to run. You could see many of the financial benefits you got in tendering out eaten up by compliance costs and monitoring.
2) Private prison advocates argue that Corrections can't run a prison efficiently, yet they magically trust them to monitor properly? How does that work? [/rant]
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Its good to be able to rely on Auckland councillors to make the Wellington ones look good - I'd have succumbed to despair at having Kerry et al foisted on us for years if I wasn't able to think "at least she's not John banks."
To translate this logic to Wellington, lets close Bodega at 11. Its out of the CBD, there's some apartments near it (sorta), and the students in the nearby, totally feral residences might object to late night noise, or something.
Most headliners at bodega don't even get on stage before 11. It'd be ridiculous in Wellington, and it IS ridiculous in Auckland.
(At least you can see at bodega, unless you're behind the stupid pillar. And Tuatara on tap. Mmm. Tuatara).
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First I hear of that. But is not something that could happen within PAS? I know there must be excellent reasons, just wondering what they might be.
No reason, I don't think. Just needs someone to start a nominate a book, wait a few weeks, and start a thread, yeah?
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I think NZers are a pretty conservative bunch, it just doesn't translate into worse governance because the political class is reluctant to tap into certain sentiments.
I think a better way to look at NZ's prevailing political culture (Matthew Palmer's written a book on this) is lazy egalitarianism. Not actively seeking out opportunities to promote equality for everyone, but wanting all people to be treated the same if it doesn't affect you. So you get people like Mani Mitchell growing up intersex in rural New Zealand with, by her account, fantastic support from the community. Georgina Beyer as mayor of carteron. I know there's been a lesbian mayor, whose name escapes me, in rural Taranaki.
I think most New Zealanders don't get agitated about things if they can see it doesn't really affect them. Even the virulent anti civil union sentiment, as far as I could tell, was restricted to mad fundies. Sure a lot of others felt a bit uncomfortable about it, but not enough to get really worked up.
The flipside is the famous New Zealand tall poppy syndrome - everyone should be treated the same so those that stand out are viewed with suspicion. Similarly, affirmative action stuff (maori quota at law schools comes to mind) doesn't wash, because it's people getting treated differently.
On another point entirely - lets get serious about a book group - Emma set up a shelfari PA group about 6 months ago, but only like 7 people joined.
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Two words: Commerce Act.
I hope Telecom's got some fairly good competition advice on this, cos it looks to me like there's at least a question here as to whether they're entering into a competition-squishing, market power abusing agreement.