KEY POINTS:
A quarter of all prisoners in New Zealand - about 2000 - are gang members or affiliates.
Speaking to the parliamentary law and order select committee, Corrections Minister Damien O'Connor said the number in prisons was over 8000, an all-time high, and well up on projections.
A "disturbing reality" was 50 per cent of them were Maori, and a quarter were gang members, which represented a "unique challenge" to Corrections staff.
Another 64,000 offenders were managed in the community each year.
New Zealand First justice spokesman Ron Mark said it appeared some prisons had higher levels of gang affiliations than others.
In Hawkes Bay, the proportion of prisoners involved in gangs was about a third, he said. "How effective are you going to be running rehabilitation programmes in prisons where gang members are in such large numbers, who clearly aren't going to be interested in rehabilitation?" he asked.
Often prisons were dominated by one gang or another.
Mr O'Connor agreed the high proportions of gang affiliations brought its own set of problems. "Rehabilitation is far harder if there is an option for them to leave prison and go into a gang environment - they're probably not going to be enthusiastic about work options or rehabilitation."
The department strongly discouraged situations developing where a particular prison became dominated by a particular gang.
However, they did have a practice of placing prisoners near where they lived, which meant in areas where a particular gang was dominant, it was inevitable the prison numbers would reflect this.
"We do not allow gang insignia to be worn or hung up in their cells," he said.
But some gang members were tattooed, and inevitably they were intimidating to other prisoners and to staff.
The department was working to change lifetime criminals, but some people did spurn rehabilitation.
"At the end of the day you can only lead a horse to water, you cannot make them drink."
Corrections chief executive Barry Matthews said the department had experienced success in changing some hardened gang members.
- NZPA
