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Thursday, June 26, 2008

The Tsunami of psychopaths breaks


Minister acts on parole killing
Details of an explosive report on police and parole blunders that led to a hardened criminal killing a woman in a car crash could soon be revealed. The Crown Law Office has filed an urgent application to revise suppression orders that have stopped publication of the report for six months. The highly critical but heavily suppressed report says police and probation staff contributed to enabling a paroled criminal to be on the loose when his car hit a vehicle carrying the 20-year-old woman.

When I read the lost report from Corrections that showed the parole conditions of the 150 most serious offenders in the country last week, I wrote about the inevitability I felt reading through all the notes of some of the ticking timebombs our parole board were releasing into some of our weakest communities. Our righteous anger at crime has been whipped up by talkback reactionary Sensible Sentencing lynch mobs feed by a ‘if-it-bleeds-it-leads’ ratings addicted media creating a level of public debate on punishment that foams and brays with such hatred that it has warped public policy to levels that make NZ one of the most imprisoned societies on the planet. There are repercussions to anger and hatred as public policy, and those ramifications are a prison system so under stress that violence and corruption have become the everyday and rehabilitation has been completely ignored so much so that the human beings who have served their time are now so damaged that they decompress with disastrous results on an unsuspecting and frightened public. National will malform this abomination even further by privatizing prisons, beside the ideological argument that the democratic state should be the only power that can hold you against your will as opposed to a corporation, this change of power structure makes profit the motivating factor as opposed to rehabilitation, more prisoners in more prisons for longer becomes the strategy for private prisons and it sees them get involved in public debate pushing for harder sentences by using victims pain and anguish to sell what becomes a very vested self interest. As a community we need to dump the pitchforks and burning torches and rethink the entire strategu here, when National are PROMISING that their hard tough line will require the building of a new prison, that is a sign that the debate has lost all rational compass and we are now in the unchartered waters of the feral mob.

6 Comments:

At 26/6/08 7:57 am, Blogger Steve Withers said...

Spot on, Bomber.

 
At 26/6/08 7:58 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

What are you trying to say?

Should this man have been paroled or not?

 
At 26/6/08 10:42 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Didn't we have this post yesterday?

Surely it must be time for another Zimbabwe post? Actually we haven't had anything about Iraq for a while.

Argox.

 
At 26/6/08 5:29 pm, Blogger steven wilkes said...

You comment that private prisons will chase $ ahead of rehabilitation, maybe i dont know. I do know public prisons sure as fuck dont. Their system is all about the guards. They abuse and humiliate to stroke their ego, they kowtow to gang leaders to keep themselves safe, they smuggle drugs to make $.

Your public vs private is a false dichtomy dude, the true problem is more multi-dimensional. Dont be so fucking intellectually smug and think harder eh.

 
At 26/6/08 7:11 pm, Anonymous Anonymous said...

During the whole saga of the 'lost' corrections files I have been left wondering where did the file really come from? It appears to beggar belief that the file was 'found by a former corrections employee' and then handed to a site run by a former corrections consumer, if I may use that term to decribe Mr selwyn.

It would be of great interest to know the full details of how this file came to be in possession of the Tumeke website. Perhaps you may care to tell the full story about the true origon of your information, and then maybewe can have the broader social debate.

 
At 27/6/08 5:06 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I really appreciated reading that blog, thanks! Perhaps after reading the `lost file' / spreadsheet, you will appreciate the difficult job that Corrections staff have to do and the risks they have to manage. No system will get it right all of the time; be it a lost file, missed recall, too slow an action - that is the reality of the situation - anywhere. Add the political pressure and public desire for blood and it's not helpful to what is trying to be achieved.

 

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