Locked into days of idleness when in prison

Exercise for prisoners at Waikeria's Te Ao Marama unit builds minds and bodies. Pictures / Amos Chapple

A large framed jigsaw of the peoples of the world is one of the few mementoes of the 16 spells in jail that Bob has had since he was 16.

It's a huge jigsaw with hundreds of pieces, the sort that most of us get time to do only on long wet holidays.

Bob* and his partner Moana* have hung it in their living room because it is about the only worthwhile thing that Bob, now 37, has achieved in prison.

In large part, he admits, that is his own fault. "I've had heaps of chances to go to rehab and haven't done it - I've just chosen the drugs," he says.

At least when he started as a youth on corrective training, he worked on a prison farm. "That was constructive," he says.

Later, in adult jails, he worked in the kitchen and in gardens, on tractors, and cabinetmaking. But not on his last, 11-month lag which he has just finished.

"Over the years it's all changed," Bob says. "There's more inmates, there's not enough staff. There's been no work for the last few times I've been in jail.

"Years ago there used to be heaps of work. At Wanganui there was carpentry, shoes, clothing. All those are gone now."

Out of jail at last, he's annoyed that Work and Income won't put him straight on the unemployment benefit, even though he and Moana have a child and another on the way. Work and Income want him to do a work-skills course first.

"Why couldn't you be doing all that in jail before you go out?" he asks. "Who wants to go to shit four hours a day, five days a week, when you've been in jail locked up 24/7?"

Short and wiry, his arms heavily tattooed - using a machine made in jail from a tape deck, ballpoint pens and needles - Bob is typical of an escalating number of younger New Zealanders who are going to jail.

Since 2002, our prison rolls have swollen from 5755 to a new peak this week of 7651.

That's 185 prisoners for every 100,000 people in this country, compared with 146 in England and Wales, 124 in Australia and just 66 in Finland. Only the United States is higher, with an off-scale 724 prisoners for each 100,000 citizens.

Our high rate is attributable to an almost US-level incarceration rate of Maori - 596 for 100,000. The non-Maori rate is 113.

Prisons, of course, did not exist in pre-European Maori society, nor in many other cultures.

In medieval Europe, where they evolved, they were seen as a civilised advance on previous more barbaric punishments such as whipping, drawing and quartering and burning at the stake.

Today they are supposed to serve four purposes: to deter us from crime; to punish those who commit crimes; to protect the rest of us from criminals; and to rehabilitate the criminals so that eventually they can reform and rejoin society.

The first three of those can be achieved straightforwardly by simply locking the offenders up.

Rehabilitation is a much tougher challenge, and over the next week the Herald will focus on it.

In this country, 58 per cent of released prisoners reoffend within a year, and 86 per cent within five years. These figures are similar to comparable countries such as Australia and Britain.

Yet we cannot just give up on rehabilitation because, eventually, almost every prisoner will be released.

Historically, the most popular means of attempted rehabilitation has been hard work. After all, work is assumed to keep the rest of us on the straight and narrow.

Major Ian Spargo, head of the Salvation Army's courts and prisons service, attended the closure of the remote Ohura Prison on the back road to Stratford late last year and says its prisoners took pride in their vegetable gardens, which once supplied other prisons.

"When they came out of prison you could tell a guy that had been at Ohura," he says. "But one that comes out who has sat all day has no motivation, so when you put him into a job the boss says, 'This guy is idle'.

"If he sits all day, he starts to slow down in his thinking and doesn't make good decisions because all the decisions have been made for him."

The Rev David Connor, who started his career as a prison chaplain at another now-closed prison, at Waikune near National Park, says Waikune was an "open prison" where everyone went out to work in the surrounding forests or stayed at work parole hostels in the cities.

He remembers one prisoner who was given work parole to work for a Taumarunui plumber on replumbing the prison. "He was so good that the Ministry of Works offered him a job when he left."

Kelly Hennessy, a Kaikohe lawyer who spent 15 years as a prison guard, says that 20 years ago most prisoners at Waikeria, near Kihikihi, worked and were taught farming skills, engineering, mechanics, carpentry, plumbing and electrics.

Today much of that work has gone. Waikeria's gardens and orchards have been uprooted, its milk pasteurisation plant, sawmill and engineering workshops closed.

Its three dairy farms still operate and Andy Barr, site manager for the prisons' business unit Corrections Inmate Employment (CIE), says efficiencies have more than doubled milk production in the past 10 years.

But only 110 of Waikeria's 873 prisoners now work on the farms and in associated jobs such as tractor maintenance. Another 20 male and female prisoners make prison clothing, and some make furniture for a major retail outlet.

The prison, like most others, now buys its milk and vegetables from the commercial market. There are small vegetable gardens in some of the cell blocks, but their produce is given away to the elderly in Te Awamutu.

In December, Chief Ombudsman John Belgrave and two colleagues published the result of a year-long investigation into the country's 19 prisons which was scathing about the closure of gardens and a general rundown of work everywhere.

"We received a consistent message from all quarters that available meaningful occupation had diminished severely in recent years," they said.

"This was something that concerned us greatly. Idleness does nothing for rehabilitation. As one staff member put it, prisoners who have spent all day [possibly for years] lying in bed are not going to be released and say, 'I'm now going to go to work'."

Of course they don't all lie in bed all day. Sixty per cent of prisoners are under 35 and have all the energy of youth. The Herald saw inmates playing touch rugby and other sports informally at both Waikeria and Paremoremo prisons this month.

Physical fitness is a big part of prison culture. Many prisoners work out with weights and sport strong, heavily tattooed arms and chests. But they have few opportunities to put their strength to good use.

"You had to just about beat someone up to get a job - and that was cleaning out the dog box and doing the washing," says one young man who has just come out after nine years in jail.

"They are bored out of their brains," says a prison officer. "They spend a lot of time trading and standing over people to get what little they can. They are idle and totally non-productive because they have taken away what jobs we had."

Beven Hanlon, a Hawkes Bay prison officer and president of the Corrections Association, says prisoners sit around in their yards "literally doing nothing".

"Some are sunbathing," he says. "There are recreation facilities for them. They had pool tables, but they never last long. There's a TV in one of the units but if they wreck that, it's not replaced.

"They can bring in a 14-inch TV for their cell, but people go in and take it. The reality of prison life is that they would rather have someone take their TV than get a reputation of being a narc by telling an officer about it."

Prisoners have to fight to survive. One recent prisoner tried to get out of the dominant gang in his block and was attacked by nine men when he was in the shower.

"If you have 'form' [fighting ability], they leave you alone," he says.

"If you don't have form and stand up for yourself, they clamp on that weakness. Then it's over for you. I have seen guys washing other inmates' socks and undies. They had to do it all week, washing everyone's socks."

Former prisoners say prison officers often incite attacks, telling Mongrel Mob inmates that two new arrivals had been convicted of stabbing Mob members, or dropping a list of cell numbers on the table to identify those guilty of abusing children or other hated offences.

A visiting social worker has heard officers telling prisoners, "You are a piece of shit, you are nothing, you are never going to be anything, you are and always will be a piece of scum."

David Connor, the country's senior prison chaplain, says: "If you treat a person like a dog, he'll behave like a dog. If you treat him like a person, he may behave like a person."

Turning the culture around to support work rather than violence, he says, requires "treating people with respect and having expectations of respect back from them".

It's a great philosophy, but our prisons are in crisis. Corrections Department chief executive Barry Matthews says the escalating number of prisoners "has an impact on unlock hours, programme delivery and some of the rehabilitation and reintegration activities".

The department hired 500 extra staff last year and is recruiting more in Samoa, but prisoner numbers have risen even faster.

In most units, night lockup has been brought forward from 8.30pm to 5pm because there are not enough guards to keep watch in the evenings.

The department's business arm, CIE, aims for "quality, not quantity" of work.

Royden Motu, a Ponsonby restaurateur who ran CIE nationally until last August, says that rather than employing 20 inmates on painting a prison building, he preferred to take on two and give them proper training.

"I took a commercial approach," he says, "so I based our training on the real employment situation.

"We used the same cost drivers, key performance indicators and financial measures as any business in the private sector."

He says growing specialisation in commercial market gardens made prison gardens, which tried to grow everything, uneconomic. "What is the demand for garden labour?" he asks. "It's not that great with mechanisation being the way it is."

The result is that work shrivelled from 43 per cent of prisoners in 2002 to 35 per cent today, with only 19 per cent in CIE.

But the number of prisoners gaining nationally-recognised vocational unit standards rose slightly from 1306 to 1370 last year. And CIE made an operating surplus of $3 million.

Work is patchy. At Auckland's Paremoremo Prison, CIE site manager David Morrison says employment has increased in the last few years to about 250 of the prison's 650 prisoners (38 per cent). A big crane towers above a busy concrete yard where prisoners are fabricating precast concrete structures for prisons being built at Wiri, Meremere and near Dunedin.

Inside the main buildings, others are producing metal products, furniture and clothing for prisoners, guards and commercial buyers.

"CIE works on a 37-hour week, but engineering and precast have been working extended hours and may come back until 11 or 12 at night because when you pour the concrete it has to be used," Morrison says.

Some of the structures sent north to the new prison at Ngawha developed faults soon after that prison opened last March. But Morrison says the problems were in transporting the structures, not in the work quality.

"The guys are very proud of the work that goes out of here," he says.

"Every prisoner gets certificates of achievement outlining the work skills they achieve."

But across town, there is no work at either Mt Eden Prison nor its neighbouring, slit-windowed Auckland Central Remand Prison, apart from domestic tasks such as cooking, cleaning, clearing graffiti and making planter boxes.

Remand prisoners waiting for trial, who make up 20 per cent of prisoners nationally, are not usually given work because they may be found not guilty. But the Ombudsmen recommended that work and constructive programmes should be provided for all prisoners, including those on remand.

Matthews has asked remand prisoners if they would like to work, and they would.

"It's worth considering, given that people would rather be working than idle, then that might be an opportunity," he says.

He is negotiating this year's budget with ministers and says he would like to get a further 20 per cent of prisoners working - including more in "release to work", where prisoners work outside during the day and return to jail at night.

At present, only 0.3 per cent of prisoners are on release to work.

At Paremoremo, the sole prisoner working outside drives a prison vehicle to Wiri each day to work on building the women's prison which opens there in May.

"The Ombudsmen's report confirms my own observation that there's a great potential to do more in that regard," Matthews says.

"There is potential in timber and things like that to work with some of the big companies."

The Ombudsmen said life for many prisoners consists of "unremitting boredom and monotony".

"Enforced idleness does not, in our view, provide any contribution to a reduction of reoffending," they said.

"One may ask the question, 'Which ex-prisoner is likely to be the better neighbour? A prisoner who has spent 10 years mostly confined to a cell with little or nothing to do, or one who has spent that time learning to get up in the morning and to follow a pattern of learning and work?'

"We believe the latter, and that answer to be a matter of common sense."

* Names changed.


Hope in a bleak landscape

When they entered Te Ao Marama, the 60-bed Maori focus unit at Waikeria Prison, nine men said they could not read or write.

On January 3, a prisoner in the unit began teaching a course on "the restoration of tapu" to offenders whose personal tapu, or value, has been broken by their offences and their subsequent incarceration.

"It gives them a Maori perspective on offending. The bottom line is a recognition of the tapu of all things," he says.

The effect has been immediate. "You'd be amazed at the amount of fellows who said they couldn't read and write - nine said they couldn't. All of a sudden they could," he says. Being exposed to something which had captured their interest had unlocked their enthusiasm to learn.

"Seventy per cent of them are urban Maori with no contact with their marae ever in their lives. Now they know how to function on a marae.

"We teach them Maori as a way of life. What is Maori? What is Maori to you? It's rugby, racing and beer and all that stuff that comes out, that's what the status quo says.

"We quote Apirana Ngata and all our peers. Maori life has its own genesis, its own beginning, its own value system. It's an ongoing process of learning - what they said they couldn't do, now they can do because there's things Maori attached to it."

Te Ao Marama, one of five Maori focus units established in New Zealand prisons since 1997, is a success story in an otherwise bleak prison landscape. The Ombudsmen praised the units as "very effective in providing a basis for self-respect".

Unlike other units, the Maori units are run jointly by runanga, or committees of both prison officers and prisoners. Eight prisoners, including the prisoner/teacher, serve on the runanga at Te Ao Marama.

Prisoners from other units wanting to transfer to Te Ao Marama are interviewed by the runanga.

"You have to genuinely want to change," the prisoner/teacher says. "In our interview we establish whether they want to learn, whether they want to change, and whether they want to practise all things Maori.

"If you can't handle, right from the start, that Maori is a way of life with its own genesis, its own beginnings, its own belief systems and its own value system, we don't want to know you."

The unit combines this "mind and spirit" work with lectures about physical health, diet and lifestyle, and with organised sport. "The Maori concept is healthy body, healthy mind," the prisoner/teacher says.

Maori Party co-leader Tariana Turia, whose son was jailed years ago for a drug-related offence, says there are no excuses for offending.

"It's got to stop," she says. "For Maori, if we restore to ourselves our kaupapa and our tikanga and begin to practise them, it will change the whole way in which we view the world," she says. "That's what my own family has learned."