Besides prisons being the least inspirational, least aspirational, least innovative, least ambitious, most destructive institution Maori could ever hope to be involved with, here’s further food for thought as to why it’s just a plain dumb idea that iwi own prisons.
Iwi should instead be focused on preventing Maori getting to prison in the first place by identifying at risk Maori students in schools now and mentoring them through to university.
Trouble is, there’s less money and too much work involved in anything so proactive, progressive and preventative.
A 2003 report prepared for the Ministery of Education by John Church of the University of Canterbury named, “The Definition, Diagnosis and Treatment of Children and Youth with Severe Behaviour Difficulties: A Review of Research”, made a rough assessment of the costs of intervening with antisocial children at ages five, ten and fifteen years. It says:
The cost of normalising the development of one antisocial child at age five is $4000, with a success rate of 80%. The cost for a child of ten years is $8000 with a success rate of 50% and the cost for a child of fifteen years is $12,000 with a success rate of 20%.
Extrapolating those figures, this must mean ‘normalising’ or rehabilitating a person aged twenty will cost about $16,000 with an expected success rate of just 10%. The cost of rehabilitation of a twenty-five year old will be $20,000 with an expected success rate of just 5%.
The cost of housing a prisoner for just one year is on average about $70k.
So let’s do the sums – Iwi take their 10% profit – Willie Jackson asked on Marae yesterday morning – What’s wrong with Maori making a profit? So they need their cut. This leaves $63k in the kitty. Then a twenty-five year old turns up in prison for a year. It costs at least $20k to rehabilitate him (more if we expect better than a 5% success rate) – $43k left in the kitty.
That doesn’t leave a heck of a lot for running the show does it? Looking at this research, if iwi run prisons expect to have rehabilitation success rates of say 70- 80% they are going to have to spend anywhere from $30-50k per prisoner, possible more.
Where will savings be made? Employing under qualified guards who will work for less. Employing foreign guards who will work for less, but can’t relate to Maori. Cutting guard numbers. Double bunking. Reduction in rehabilitation programmes.
This is going to make life very dangerous for both guards and prisoners.
These iwi leaders haven’t thought this through.
Kelvin that is absolutely correct.
These are the type of figures plus initiative and innovation which Matt Robson , Minister of Corrections of The Progressive Party had set on a path to implement in 1999 when the progressive years of The Clark- Anderton (Labour-Alliance/Progressive) started.
Imagine if that project through “The About TIme Document” had been fully implemented. We would be 10 years a head of where we are now!
costs of intervening with antisocial children at ages five, ten and fifteen years. It says:
The cost of normalising the development of one antisocial child at age five is $4000, with a success rate of 80%. The cost for a child of ten years is $8000 with a success rate of 50% and the cost for a child of fifteen years is $12,000 with a success rate of 20%.
So the money required to get one success at age five is: $5000 (i.e. $4000/0.8), the money required to get one success at age ten is $16,000, and the money required to get one success at age fifteen is $60,000.
Well, it seems clear where society can do the most good, the earliest, for the best results and the least costs.
When there is a chance for a breather can we please look at doing something in the 10-15 years *before* someone is at risk of going to prison?
Agreed.
The way the iwi will do the deal would like they do the fishing.
ie get the contract and then sub contract to one of the overseas owned private prison operators.
They only want to be rent takers.
if there is a build and leaseback , they would do it as a partnership with say private equity and or Fletchers or Hawkins .
The iwi connection would only be on the letterheads
Conflict of interest too.
The way the iwi will do the deal would like they do the fishing.
And the problem is…?
The Ngai Tahu approach to fisheries is something that is well worth emulation.
Their view was;
We now have this valuable asset in our posession. Lets get the best people regardless of race to run it initially. They’ll be expected to nurture the talents of the second generation of owners, the actual iwi.
Excellent analysis – the nats privatisation agenda via iwi and ‘urban authorities’while willie and jt carve off their slice (and they wont be thinking of just 10%)
Your right Kelvin it is a dumb idea mainly because it needlessly increases expenses. Say it costs $1000 to run a prison per year (example). If the prison is privatised the prison still needs $1000 per year to run. The way Private prisons work is they go into a contract with the Government, so the Government should be paying the privateers $1000 a year to run the prison and provide their service because that’s how much it needs to work. But no, privateers need to make a profit. So it will have to cost $1000 per year plus maybe an extra $200 in profit from the Government to the privateers. So it’s same prison being run but costing $1200 instead.
And where is that money gonna come from? It’s going to come from US! I’d be fine with National privatising prisons really. While some have gone terribly wrong some do function well. It’s just that THEIR NOT THE ONES 4UCKING PAYING FOR IT!
Dylan – I think that it’s based around the assumption that there are areas where the private sector can run things more efficiently that the public sector, and that even with their profit this means that the overall cost to the taxpayer is smaller.
Whether this is or isn’t the case has been the subject of much intense debate (as you can imagine) down the years, so don’t expect any conclusive resolution to the issue to be reached here. Some will vehamently deny that any such savings are possible; others will take the opposite stance just as passionately.
@George
Yeah I know about the bizzare assumption alot people have that privitisation = efficiency but weather that is true or not, how can prisons be run any better than they are now. What’s wrong with them?
How exactly can private prisons be run cheaper? I’ve sat thinking over what you’ve said for a while now and can’t think of anything enlighten me.
Lets all remember how much wealth the private sector has destroyed in the financial markets over the last 24 months. Not even internationally, think about the myriads of privately held and privately run finance companies.
And isn’t the XT network running so damn well.
Now of course, I’m cherry picking examples here but the point is made.
Oh just one more, Singapore Airlines = majority owned by the Singaporean Govt, seems to run just fine thank you.
Hmm yeah just cherry picking examples of state efficiency eh Loota yeah hmm. I’ll see if I can chuck another one in there.
Oh I dunno how about… The Poor, Downtrodden and Poverty ridden slavic nations which were turned into a world superpower in just 2/3 decades by the Soviet controlled economy… hrmmm yeah I guess you just have to cherry pick when considering state efficiency next to the free market which FAILS ALL THE TIME
The Poor, Downtrodden and Poverty ridden slavic nations which were turned into a world superpower in just 2/3 decades by the Soviet controlled economy…
Don’t go there, Dylan.
I visited the Eastern Bloc many times in the 70s and 80s. I was very left wing at the time, but even I could see it wasn’t the socialist paradise it was made out to be.
Huge parts of Eastern Europe are still suffering from the environmental damage done during the period of soviet rule.
And let’s not forget Chernobyl
Damn George. It wasn’t the socialist paradise it was made out to be. And? Everybody already knows that? I never said that it was?
But if you want to have a soviet argument in some other place on the net then please let’s have one it’s one of my favourites. I got my economic history of the USSR book next to me to quote all my sources.
But anyway you argueing a point that I didn’t even make is typical of the ethnocentric black and white thinking that people Always take on when talking about the soviet union, ethnocentric because their way of life before the soviet union was absolute hell and people always compare their conditions to the U.S.A and other western countries when considering their situation.
George can I suggest thar the reason why it wasn’t the “socialist paradise it was made out to be” is because it didn’t even resemble socialism in the slightest – stalinism and true Marxist theory were poles apart! I always find it particularly irksome that the former USSR was referred to as a socialist or worse still, a communist state. I feel the same when people refer to China under Mao as the same….
Dylan it is fantastic that for a young person you are taking such a keen interest in these matters however one thing you could perhaps factor into things when forming your opinions or counter-arguing against others is that many of us are a lot older (some older than others!) so have not only read about these things, but also lived through them.
I can’t help but feel that your opinions lack the empathy that often comes with experience.
Dylan – I wasn’t trying to make any point at all other than to caution you against using Poverty ridden slavic nations which were turned into a world superpower (your words) as any sort of counter argument against the failings of capitalism.
Yes, the Soviet Union did go from a largely undeveloped place to a world superpower in a relative small amount of time, but the cost of that was enormous. The fact that its history through that period has been disowned by most who profess to be socialist, at least in the liberal democracies of the west, shows how far beyond the pale was much of what went on there.
The comment you make about the starting point for Soviet society is very valid, and one I put forward myself in many contexts. You’re right in pointing out that many in the well off world compare things in less developed places to their fortunate selves rather than to the history of the place they’re evaluating.
(As an aside, though, my own deepest experience of life in the Eastern Bloc was in Czechoslovakia in the 70s. That country had been very rich before the war, hadn’t suffered mass destruction during WW2 like much of the rest of Europe had, and had gone significantly backwards since the Communist coup in 1948.)
Perhaps the failing of my post was in being too paternal. Like Rebecca, I also think it is great that you take such an active, intelligent and informed interest in politics. I didn’t want you to start digging a hole for yourself from which it would be difficult to climb out. If I misconstrued where the comment of yours which I quoted was going I apologise.
Rebecca says: George can I suggest thar the reason why it wasn’t the “socialist paradise it was made out to be” is because it didn’t even resemble socialism in the slightest – stalinism and true Marxist theory were poles apart!
That’s a very valid suggestion, but one that is (and will always be) the subject of masses of debate. I admit that I don’t know enough about the intricacies of various strands of Marxism, Leninism, Marxism-Leninism and all the other variants to take a credible part in the philsophical debate. M-L did introduce the notion of ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, though – is that part of the theory that works, or the practice that doesn’t?
But like it or not, to a Labour-supporting sixth-former about to go off to live with a family in Prague for a while in the 1970s the CSSR was characterised by a lot of my ‘comrades’ in the party (many of whom were miners) as as ’socialist paradise’. I bet that there were many in the NZ Labour Party of that era who also saw it in the same way at the time.
I always find it particularly irksome that the former USSR was referred to as a socialist or worse still, a communist state. I feel the same when people refer to China under Mao as the same….
But the second ‘S’ in both USSR and CSSR (the official names for the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia during the mid 20th Century) stood for ‘Socialist’. And they themselves constantly referred to themselves as both socialist and communist.
I think that the problem is that wherever socialism and communism (as opposed to Social Democracy) have been attempted in practice they’ve failed, which becomes an embarrasment for those who believe that the ideologies work admirably in theory.
George I agree as yes there is much debate on what actually constitutes socialism and communism. I define both in their purest form therefore, irrespective of how the former USSR saw themselves or how others saw them, they far from met the socialist test.
Like you say, any attempt to put the theories into practice has failed because we humans will would never accept a level playing field where all man is equal.
True socialism and leading to the ultimate state of perfection (communism) has no more chance of really coming to life than Plato’s Republic!
In the same way I found many of Labour’s policies in their 9 year tenure hard to marry with the realities of my life. Great in theory but in practice, did not seem to work…
I liked Labour’s policies, well most of them, four weeks annual leave,
Yes Spud most people liked that – I was on 6 weeks anyway due to being long service employee benefits!
What frustrates me over conversations to do with the USSR and ideologies/theories related to it is how quickly the argument turns to custard because of differences in understanding of terminology.
Dylan says: “What frustrates me over conversations to do with the USSR and ideologies/theories related to it is how quickly the argument turns to custard because of differences in understanding of terminology.”
I think that you’ll have to recognise that different audiences need to be dealt with in different ways when it comes to political debate.
If you’re doing a politics paper at uni, for example, you can / should expect everyone to be very precise in how they use language, and respond accordingly.
The further away you get from that environment the looser will be the way in which words are used. You just have to attempt to understand the true meaning of what you hear (and ask for clarification if necessary), and try to anticipate any possible ambiguities in what you say (even if they’re down to the listener/reader’s lack of knowledge) and phrase yourself in words that can’t be misunderstood.
In the heat of debate it can get very frustrating, and it can be easy to go off on a tangent over definitions, but it’s worth the effort if you can avoid this.