Herald reporter Derek Cheng spent a night in the new container cellblock before it officially opens today
A large, open-air recreational space with a basketball hoop.
A grass square for touch rugby or soccer. Board games and table tennis.
Meat every night. A TV in your cell. A steady wage, even if the minimum is only $2.70 a week for those that don't work.
Should we all become criminals? Not if my experience is to go by.
Rimutaka Prison's Unit 11, the first in the country made from old shipping containers and opened today by Corrections Minister Judith Collins, is not the standard for every prisoner.
Rimutaka houses 1000 prisoners, only 300 of whom are low-risk enough to be able to stay in residential units like Unit 11. And you have to earn it. Any act out of line and you're in the high-medium units.
Even then, Unit 11 is no walk in the park. It may be easy - comfortable, even - to stay a night in a heated cell on your own. But throw in a long sentence and 59 other hard prisoners, one of whom you have to share a cell with.
Liveable, yes. Desirable? Hardly.
Plenty of other prison accommodation is less inviting. The at-risk cells for those who might harm themselves are a bare affair - just a mattress and a toilet.
Cameras are constantly on in case these prisoners start smashing their heads on the toilet or smearing faeces on the wall.
The officer showing me around said a prisoner once smuggled a razor blade inside, by slicing a pocket into the thick-skinned part of his foot. Once inside, he sliced his arm from his hand to his bicep.
"The veins were hanging out," he said. But the response was swift and the prisoner survived.
My guide then took me to the round rooms, for the very at-risk, where there is no toilet, only a mattress and a cardboard tube or box for toilet purposes.
One of the three round rooms had restraints. As we passed the other at-risk cells, the officer nodded at a prisoner with a short mohawk who was having his dinner.
"Keeps hearing voices to harm himself," he said.
"And when he gets out, there are no residential treatment centres for him. He'll just reoffend and end up back here."
Is that a common story? "Yes." And they always reoffend? "Always."
Clearly, the container cells are preferable to this. But it is still hard time in a confined space with little freedom.
There have been cases, reportedly, where freed inmates have spent their $350 release money and returned to prison within hours.
This is a tiny fraction of the prison population. I wouldn't be one of them.
