Private Prisons Are A Recipe For Disaster

Building private prisons will make New Zealand’s criminal justice system worse, said the Green Party today.

John Key’s Government today announced plans for a private prison to be built in Wiri. It will be built using a public-private partnership (PPP) model.

“Private prisons are internationally renowned for corruption and the abuse of prisoners and staff. We do not want to see this happen in New Zealand,” said Green Party Corrections Spokesperson David Clendon today.

“When you create perverse incentives for corporations to make money out of criminals it leads to corruption such as the United States case last year, where judges in Pennsylvania have been charged with taking millions of dollars in bribes to send teenagers to privately-run youth detention centres.

Evidence from the US and Australia shows that private prisons do not reduce costs for the Government. Research from New South Wales suggests that prisoner safety is compromised because of the focus on profit.

“The use of a PPP to build the prison will not save the public any money as all the evidence is that PPPs don’t work because taxpayers take all the risk while the private sector takes all the profit.

“PPPs leave the public locked into fixed contracts with private investors who make easy money from the asset, while the public bears all the risk if anything goes wrong.

“The community and public sector have lots of good innovative ideas about how the prison system can be improved, the Government should be listening to them rather than flogging of prison management to corporations.

“If John Key’s Government really wants to reduce prison costs they should get serious about addressing the causes of crime - especially inequality which they seem to be hell bent on making worse,” said Mr Clendon.

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