New Zealand is out on its own with penal policy. We are second only to the United States in imprisonment rates and doing our best to catch the world leaders in high crime and ineffectual punishment. Just how we came to this pathetic position is the result of successful campaigns to demonise the victims of our free market, neo-liberal economic policies. The old saying that prisons are where the big criminals sent all the little criminals has never had better relevance in New Zealand before.

Over the past 25 years the standard of living of the poorest New Zealanders has dropped. The New Zealand Herald (23/6/09) reviewed information from Statistics New Zealand which shows wage earners in the poorest areas of Auckland such as Otara having had an increase in income of 3% over this period after adjusting for inflation. Meanwhile in Auckland’s wealthiest suburbs – St Mary’s Bay and St Heliers – average incomes were up 39% and 30% respectively. On the surface it doesn’t look so bad because at least the poorest have had an increase. However this has been masked by the much longer hours of work that families work to achieve that 3% increase in income. As those on the lowest wages were hammered in the 1990s the degree of income loss was masked with women entering the workforce to bolster family income and a big increase in hours worked by family members on low paid, part-time jobs.

There is a new generation of children growing up in families where no-one has ever had a full time job and where the parasites of poverty, loan sharks and pokie machines, are doing a roaring trade. The US has 35 million living below the poverty line while here in New Zealand, even after Labour’s Working for Families package was implemented we still have 175,000 children living below the poverty line (set at income levels below 60% of the average income). Social devastation on this scale needs someone to blame and the corporate sector have the scapegoats lined up – run campaigns with the policy backup to blame the victims. Keep the focus on the criminals and off the economic policies which create the social conditions leading to crime in the first place.

Blame The Victims, Lock Them Up

So blaming the victims is an important corporate objective. When economic policies were demonstrably failing to produce Lange’s or Bolger’s “decent society” in the 1980s and 1990s a determined campaign by politicians with corporate support demonised those out of work, solo parents, and sickness beneficiaries. Benefit levels were slashed in Ruth Richardson’s 1991 “mother of all budgets”.

More recently the corporate campaign to keep the blame on the victims has been led by the misnamed Sensible Sentencing Trust (SST). Anyone would think this was a group of ordinary people working to support victims while pushing for harsher sentences. It isn’t. There are some good people caught up in the Trust but its drivers are the likes of Act MP David Garrett who has acted as the Trust’s legal advisor. Without this well funded corporate campaign it may well be that attention would focus on the main cause of crime – underlying economic policy.

The SST has been aided by the media. Our television and news bulletins have morphed into reality TV with crime providing a major part of our news diet. We are told the world has goodies and baddies – the goodies are those who keep the law while the baddies are the poor, the dispossessed, the deranged and criminals. The SST campaign has worked well. Labour and National have struggled to outdo each other as the toughest on crime. National is keeping more people in prison for longer periods of time and Act is pushing hard its “three strikes” policy which will further increase the burden on the State of pointless but popular policies to incarcerate more people for longer periods of time.

Labour built four new prisons in its time as Government and National has taken it a step further – if the State is going to have all these prisons then surely they can be contracted out to the private sector. One would think that if the State takes the extreme step of depriving a person of their liberty then those the State employs to incarcerate must surely be directly accountable to the State. Privatising that accountability is wrong in principle.

NZ’s First Private Prison Was A Loss Leader

However New Zealand has experienced a privately run prison before and a lot has been made of how well the Auckland Central Remand Prison (ACRP) was run after a National-led government awarded the management contract to Sydney-based Australian Correctional Management (ACM) in the 1990s. The feedback from Maori groups in particular was good and the Maori Party leadership expressed dismay when the private contract was not renewed by the Labour government in 2005. Local iwi representatives said they had been consulted well by the company before the contract was let and enjoyed excellent relations with the prison management. They were made to feel welcome and involved in rehabilitation programmes. National also claimed the cost was lower with a private contract. At the time National’s Tony Ryall said the cost per prisoner at ACRP was $43,000 compared to $54,000 in State run prisons. However his figures were a con because they compared the cost at a remand facility (ACRP) with those associated with maximum security prisons (State-run) where the costs are much higher. Labour has since released figures to show that the actual cost per prisoner at State-run remand centres was just $36,000 compared to the higher figure at the ACRP.

It was important for National and ACM that the first private contract to run a prison in New Zealand would be successful. It was therefore funded well by the Government while the company took care not to scrimp on spending. In supermarket terminology this was a “loss leader”. Once they got their foot in the door this would open up bigger opportunities for private investment and Government-guaranteed profits. The involvement of Maori early on was also a key part of their strategy because it helped blunt opposition to privatisation. If Maori, as those most negatively affected by imprisonment, were seen to support privatisation then those opposing had an uphill battle. This same strategy was used to get the Auckland Skycity Casino up and running. Never mind that down the track Maori are disproportionately the victims of gambling, the upfront involvement of local iwi was a successful, cynical strategy to help bulldoze opposition to thousands of pokies invading Auckland.

US Parent Company’s Shocking Record

The private sector certainly know how to run a scam and it’s useful to look at the behaviour of ACM’s parent company – the US-based Wackenhut – once it was established running prisons for profit in the US. The company was started by former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent George Wackenhut who has been described politely as a “hard-line Rightwinger” who described President George Bush Senior as a “pinko”. Wackenhut left the FBI and set up a private detective agency with three other former agents. In 1958 he bought out his partners (he had a fist fight with one) and expanded into security guard work. His business rapidly expanded into an empire and extended to providing services in strikebreaking, international security work (which included providing security for chemical weapons shipments to Saddam Hussein in Iraq) and beating anti-nuclear protestors as well as running private prisons.

During the McCarthy* era he compiled a list of names of those he regarded as communists or Left leaning "subversives and sympathisers" and other “derogatory types”. By 1965 he had 2.5 million names which reportedly sold to undisclosed groups. * US Senator Joe McCarthy , with his inquisitions and deranged accusations, became synonymous with the anti-Communist witchhunts and hysteria in the 1950s. Ed.

After getting established running private prisons Wackenhut’s “loss leaders” became cash cows and the rot began to show. Wackenhut lost contracts to run prisons in Louisiana and Texas in 1999 after scandals involving mistreatment of prisoners and profit-taking at the expense of such things as drug rehabilitation, counselling and literacy programmes. A Louisiana judge called one Wackenhut jail unsafe, violent and inhumane while a Government review reported assaults, abuse and humiliation of juvenile prisoners. Two Wackenhut-run prisons in New Mexico had appalling management and experienced numerous riots and murders. Wackenhut himself died in 2004 but his company continues and it was the one that National chose to run the ACRP when last in Government and while it’s not the only private prison contractor there are plenty more just like them waiting in the wings.

Maori Party Trojan Horse For Privatisation

Private contractors make their prison profits by lowering staffing levels, 15% lower is the typical overseas figure, and employing people on lower pay and poorer conditions of work. None of this is helpful to prisoners or rehabilitation. Quite the opposite in fact. It’s virtually certain the first new prison contract will be awarded in conjunction with an iwi group. Corrections Minister Judith Collins has said as much. The chance for political cover via the Maori Party is just too good a chance to miss. Just as with the ACRP contract this will again be the entry point for the private sector into our prisons.

Unbelievably Maori Party Co-Leader Tariana Turia says private management of prisons is an investment opportunity for iwi, while the usually astute Maori Party MP Hone Harawira simply says the State has failed Maori in prisons and it’s time to try something new. He’s right about the failure so it’s plain stupid to continue at a faster pace in the same direction. Mad as it is, New Zealand prison policy is about to get a lot worse.