CJH, our prisons are already run by professionals; have been for over 140 years. EVERY country which has tried privatisation is now reverting to state control and running of prisons. As usual, we are 20 years behind the rest of the world.

@ The "lets kill prisoners" brigade

We are trying to have a standard of law and a civilised society in which death and violence are seen as bad. If that means we have to spend some tax dollars then so be it.

You psychos.

Maybe we should privatise the government as well, lots of savings to be made there. I'm sure a private company wouldn't pay for partners to go on trips, or subsidise flights even after you left, relocation allowances (re renting a Wellington property) would only be paid for the first few weeks they would then expect you to move, reduce the annual leave allowance to 4 weeks, super would also be reduced to the 2% everyone else gets in KiwiSaver. They could even increase productivity to help close the gap with Australia and reduce the number of MPs down to 80-90 and still get the same amount of work done. So how about it John?

Aaron Walker #32, contract is a not a declaration of good and honest intentions - it prescribes penalties for the parties breaking the conditions. You wouldn't expect a business to risk losing their capital investment and long-term opportunities by intentionally breaking the contract to extract short-term profit.

Having said that both private businesses and Government services can be run equally badly leading to their collapse. If so, bad private business will go into bankruptcy and the Government will compensate itself with higher taxes and more borrowing. If you asked me I'd choose private business collapse over the Government hiking taxes and increasing borrowing, which will eventually lead to bankruptcy.

What happens if a private prison breaks conditions? Number of possibilities: financial penalties, early contract termination and re-opening tender to other providers are the obvious ones. When a bad business collapses it creates opportunities, unless off course the Government rushes with a wag of taxpayer money to bail it out.

Generalising "Financial Crisis" and financial companies collapse as market failure is simply incompetent.

CJH #38

You want to go down the American route?

Do you really want to create a huge industry dedicated to making money by increasing the prison population, increasing sentence lengths and driving down conditions?

Madness. Have you not heard about the case where a juvenile prison in America was paying judges to incarcerate youths who otherwise would not have been given a custodial sentence.

I'm not naive enough to think that there is no corruption in NZ but I am convinced opening up prisons to the greedy private sector can only set us up for levels of corruption that we are unprepared to deal with in this country.

A private company is worried primarily about profits. How does a prison increase their profits? Well, they'd need to increase their occupancy, or the amount of time they're there for...

Wow, I am really surprised that the sheeple of New Zealand care about WHO looks after the scumbags in our society. Surely it should be about value for our tax dollars rather than who builds and maintains these prisons?

Prisons cost a LOT of money and yet we could make savings by allowing professionals to run them for us. Since when did politicians suddenly get good at running prisons, sheesh, Kiwis have such a short memory.

Private prisons are the biggist growth industry in the United States and the reason for that is how profitable it is there is concern in America because the owners of these prisons are making such a large profit that they are now able to lobby the politicians by way of campaign funds and "donations" in exchange for longer sentencing and imprisonment for lesser offences as the more people they can get in there prisons and the longer the sentences the more profit they will make.Do we really want this in New Zealand?????

"How can it be cheaper? The Government will still use NZer's tax money to run prisons, only now a company will take their share off the top? "

EXACTLY!! If it can be done cheaper by someone else it can be done cheaper by the state. Just hire actual competent people to do it.

The fact that even the mostly right-wing readers of Stuff can see through this speaks volumes. Guaranteed the majority of NZ does not want this to happen. THANKS NATIONAL.

To all those that say bring back the death penalty. Wake-Up! The fear of death is no deterrent to criminals. In fact in American states that have capital punishment there is also the highest rates of capital crime. Convicted prisoners’ also tie up the courts with endless appeals and then DNA shows up after the execution to clear the convicted.

The facts are always hard to take, especially if you have a vested interest in making money.