Corrections Chief Executive Barry Matthews, Minister of Corrections Hon Damien O’Connor,
Prime Minister Helen Clark and Collaborative Working Manager Peter Dooley at the opening
of Spring Hill Corrections Facility.
At the end of September I accompanied the Prime Minster to the official opening of Spring Hill Corrections Facility. While opening a new prison is no cause for celebration, Spring Hill will support rehabilitation by providing employment opportunities and assist prisoners to focus on their sentence plan objectives.
Spring Hill, adding 650 beds to the country’s prison capacity, is the last of four regional prisons built under the Labour-led Government. All four prisons have been built to be highly effective in terms of security and rehabilitation.
Everything about these new facilities is designed to reduce re-offending - in order to improve public safety and ultimately to reduce the prison population.
This facility, like all prisons, has a target of providing training and employment opportunities for 60 per cent of eligible sentenced prisoners.
The Department has been working hard to develop employment initiatives for Spring Hill by firstly identifying skill gaps in the South Auckland and Waikato regions. This has been done in partnership with Industry Training Organisations, local businesses, Iwi and Environment Waikato.
The Department’s aim is to match prisoner skills with the current labour market demands and to ensure the qualifications prisoners gain will be relevant to the labour market.
The employment initiatives identified for Spring Hill include engineering and stainless steel fabrication, furniture assembly activities, plus a horticultural nursery and a 65 hectare dry stock farm which will provide opportunities to gain animal husbandry and land maintenance skills.
In early October I was pleased to open Rimutaka Prison’s Drug Treatment Unit – the second of three new Drug Treatment Units established as part of the Government’s Effective Interventions Strategy.
Drug Treatment Units in prisons are the best chance some prisoners will have to turn their lives around. This is New Zealand’s first Drug Treatment Unit to provide treatment to prisoners with a high-medium security classification, allowing a greater range of prisoners to have access to this successful programme.
This new unit is the fifth such unit in the prison system and will provide an additional 100 places each year for prisoners to address their drug addiction. With a further Drug Treatment Unit due to open at Spring Hill in July 2008, facilities will soon be in place to provide treatment to approximately 500 prisoners per year.
I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Community Probation & Psychological Services staff for all their recruitment, training and work involved in implementing the new Sentencing Amendment Act 2007 this month. This legislation has enabled three new sentences to become available to the Courts as part of the Effective Interventions Strategy. Home detention is now a stand alone sentence, while community detention (an electronic curfew) and intensive supervision are the other new sentences.
I realise that implementing these sentences has been a huge task, and the extra workload will build as judges order offenders to serve the new sentences over the coming weeks and months.
Hon Damien O’Connor
Minister of Corrections
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ISSN 1178-8453