Inmate's surgery not for sex-change

An operation performed on career criminal Joanne Martin while an inmate of Rimutaka Prison was not a gender reassignment procedure, the Corrections Department said yesterday.

The publicly funded surgery on Martin, a 35-year-old with 157 convictions spanning 20 years, was performed in August at Wellington Hospital and cost more than $2200.

She was escorted from Upper Hutt's Rimutaka Prison by prison staff and underwent a bilateral orchidectomy - the removal of the testicles.

However, the Corrections Department had been advised that Martin's operation was not part of a gender reassignment procedure, public prisons general manager Phil McCarthy said. "The operation that Joanne underwent can be done ... for a number of different reasons and not necessarily as part of a series of operations that represent gender reassignment," he told Parliament's law and order committee.

Corrections Department policy was to provide services that any member of the public would be entitled to. "If a doctor, a surgeon, a hospital says an inmate is required for an appointment at this time and this place, then it's our responsibility to get them there."

The only exception to the policy was that a sentenced inmate was not to be released for gender reassignment operations, Mr McCarthy said. "In my understanding, in this case, our policies were complied with."

Department health officers had liaised with the hospital and were aware of Martin's background and the reason for the operation. "They had formed on the basis of that information, and I think correctly, the view that the operation was permissible."

There was a number of other reasons the operation could be conducted, including to mitigate natural hormones and drug side-effects, and cancer, Mr McCarthy said.

The decision was made by a specialist and the department didn't "second guess medical judgments".

"It's all a fundamental human rights issue."

Martin has 87 burglary convictions.

In 1988 she stabbed a security guard who confronted her with a screwdriver, leaving him for dead.

Since 2000 she has been freed twice, and both times has reoffended within days.

She appeared for sentencing in the Wellington District Court last month on three burglary charges for which she was given a four-month reprieve, sentencing being put off until March next year.

- NZPA