Daddy State vengeance don’t come cheap

Bill for moving inmates tops $1m
More than $1 million was spent last year ferrying criminals around the country as the Corrections Department struggles with the burgeoning prison population.
Frontline prison staff warn this amount will continue to increase as demand for beds in the Auckland area means more inmates will be shuffled around. The Government is hoping better management of prison populations will reduce overcrowding and cut back on the need for inmates to be moved at short notice. However, transfers would "definitely" continue to increase, Corrections Association president Beven Hanlon said. "We have to move prisoners to where the beds are. Prisons around the country are full of people from Auckland.
"We have been in this situation before. What happens is they get rid of all the sentenced prisoners in Auckland, but many are still facing charges." Figures obtained under the Official Information Act show the department has spent $1.02 million transferring prisoners around the country in the past financial year, up $90,000 on the previous year. The figures cover the costs for prisoners and their escorts by road, rail and air, with air travel preferred for inter-island trips. Building work at Hawkes Bay Prison and the Northern Correctional Facility had also caused some prisoners to be moved, Corrections said. Proposed Government policies to toughen up bail laws and review home detention for violent, sex and drug offenders are expected to increase the numbers of offenders denied bail and community-based sentences.

I love how National want it both ways, they have played to the angry crowd of NZ with a medieval law and order gallows policy and ACT have been bloated to importance by the public flogging fantasist sensible sentencing group and have set in motion the legislative platforms to send as many NZers as possible into a public prison system so underfunded and overflowing that corruption has become the only thing you can guarantee, yet National also want to try and hush up how much this will actually cost. National’s solution to the massive cost of their social vengeance plan will be to implement Dick Cheney’s private prison industry here, Private Prisons don’t give a fuck about rehabilitation, they make their money with more prisoners in more prisons for longer periods of time. Of course these prisons under NationalACT in NZ are now gulags where forced prison labour at 60cents a day will be a big part of prison profits, and note how NZers were first told these harsh new conditions will only be used on the most violent offenders when in reality the number of people who will fall foul of the new tightening will be drug addicts and drug users as well. Why we are pushing addicts into a forced labour prison model and how the hell that is going to help anyone aren’t even questions that were asked in the rush of urgency to ram these brutal new laws through.

Once again NZers have allowed their anger and fear of crime to become manipulated into a brutal new system that only serves to exacerbate the damaged people housed there. When Political Leaders allow hate to warp social policy, those political leaders are responsible.