Guantanamo firm's fresh bid for Kiwi prisons

A US company that runs an immigration detention centre at the notorious Guantanamo Bay detainment facility in Cuba wants to work again in New Zealand by managing the combined Auckland Central Remand Prison and the new Mt Eden prison.

In January, the Department of Corrections started the process of selecting a private contractor to manage the prisons. The "request for information" process ended on March 1 and the Sunday Star-Times understands that the GEO Group has submitted a proposal.

GEO is not new to prison management in New Zealand. The company, which oversees 60,000 offenders in 60 prisons across the globe, managed the Auckland Central Remand Prison (ACRP), under the umbrella of Australasian Correctional Management, between 2000 and 2005.

This came to an end when the Labour Government changed the law to forbid private management of prisons, but that was reversed again by the National government last year.

The GEO Group has in the past been accused of abusing prisoners and inadequate care resulting in preventable deaths, especially since 2005 at its US facilities in Pennsylvania, Texas and Indiana.

Cabinet will consider the contract management issue in May, and the government will then invite a shortlist of companies to tender. The successful contractor will be announced late this year or early next year.

Supporters of privately run prisons argue that they are more efficient and cheaper and point to the example of GEO when it managed the ACRP.

In 2004, the prison recorded one suicide and three serious assaults, which is said to be a low level of serious incidents for an institution of this type.

Only 5.5% of inmates returned positive drug tests, compared with over 20% in publicly managed prisons.

But the president of the Corrections Association of New Zealand, Beven Hanlon, said New Zealand did not need GEO, which had a notorious reputation.

He said that in the five years GEO ran the prison the muster was only 280 and yet two prisoners escaped. In the five years since, under government management, there had been zero escapes despite the muster increasing to 417 prisoners.

"Why would we be moving to these [GEO] people? I don't think any of them [private companies] are any good but this [GEO] is particularly the worst."

But the Act Party's spokesman for corrections matters, David Garrett, said the criticism aimed at privately run prisons appeared to be ideological because the evidence suggested they outperformed publicly run facilities.

"Where is it written in stone that running prisons is a state function?

"The limited experience we have with privately run prisons, ie the Auckland Central Remand Prison, was uniformly good."

It costs an average of $90,000 a year to keep a prisoner behind bars. The government says the experience in the UK and Australia is that these costs can be reduced as much as 30% if the prisons are run privately.

But Hanlon said the cost per inmate under GEO was $7072 more a year than what it was costing now under government control.

- © Fairfax NZ News