Sneering and sniggering about prisoners’ rights
National Radio, Thursday 7 June 2012
Maybe you heard this nasty little item on National Radio just before 9 o’clock this morning. In a tone of barely contained levity, Simon Mercep said that prisoners have been “grumbling” about the quality of the food they get. Prisoners have laid 374 complaints about food in the past year.
Obviously, in the minds of the producers at National Radio, this is a matter for amusement and sniffy disdain, and it was treated as such. Corrections Association head Bevan Hanlon clearly thinks it’s a big joke: “One of their main complaints was that, ha ha ha, the bread was only buttered on one side.” He called their complaints “whingeing” and said that the only reason they complain is “because they can.”
Of course, the prisoners’ concerns are much more profound than that, and it’s a concern to hear someone in Hanlon’s position dismissing so callously the views of the people he and his colleagues are entrusted to look after.
The final insult was to give the last word to that moral pygmy and outspoken advocate of knife-killing, Garth “the Knife” McVicar. He asserted that he has been into every prison in New Zealand and that “they are all very humane places”. He repeated Bevan Hanlon’s contention that the prisoners are simply “whingeing”.
In view of his defiant support for child-killer Bruce Emery, for the monstrous ACT member of parliament David Garrett, and for the brutal and extreme Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, surely McVicar is a discredited and thoroughly disreputable commentator. It beggars belief that Radio New Zealand should go to him for comment about anything at all.
National Radio, Thursday 7 June 2012
Maybe you heard this nasty little item on National Radio just before 9 o’clock this morning. In a tone of barely contained levity, Simon Mercep said that prisoners have been “grumbling” about the quality of the food they get. Prisoners have laid 374 complaints about food in the past year.
Obviously, in the minds of the producers at National Radio, this is a matter for amusement and sniffy disdain, and it was treated as such. Corrections Association head Bevan Hanlon clearly thinks it’s a big joke: “One of their main complaints was that, ha ha ha, the bread was only buttered on one side.” He called their complaints “whingeing” and said that the only reason they complain is “because they can.”
Of course, the prisoners’ concerns are much more profound than that, and it’s a concern to hear someone in Hanlon’s position dismissing so callously the views of the people he and his colleagues are entrusted to look after.
The final insult was to give the last word to that moral pygmy and outspoken advocate of knife-killing, Garth “the Knife” McVicar. He asserted that he has been into every prison in New Zealand and that “they are all very humane places”. He repeated Bevan Hanlon’s contention that the prisoners are simply “whingeing”.
In view of his defiant support for child-killer Bruce Emery, for the monstrous ACT member of parliament David Garrett, and for the brutal and extreme Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, surely McVicar is a discredited and thoroughly disreputable commentator. It beggars belief that Radio New Zealand should go to him for comment about anything at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment