Gardens dug up to cut jail costs

This nursery at Paremoremo is one of the facilities closed by the prison's department to cut costs. Picture / Paul Estcourt

Prisons have pulled out their vegetable gardens and are buying their food in from outside in a move to cut the costs of prison employment.

Corrections Minister Damien O'Connor has told National MP Simon Power in written answers to parliamentary questions that horticulture has been abandoned at eight of the 12 prisons where it existed five years ago.

Nurseries have been closed at five of the 12 prisons that had them. Joinery has stopped at three prisons, light engineering at two, and contract gangs going out to forestry and other work have stopped at two others.

Corrections Department chief executive Barry Matthews said the closures had cut losses on the prisons' $50 million a year work programmes from $8.6 million in 2002 to $3.8 million last year.

Prisoners working for the business unit Corrections Inmate Employment dropped from 41 per cent in 2001 to 31 per cent last year. But Mr Matthews has set a target of lifting that back up to half of the country's 7500 prisoners.

"The reality is that some of them are on drugs, and for some there are security issues, but if we could get that up to half - which would be a big ask - everybody would agree that that's desirable," he said.

"But in doing that, we want to make sure we are not just getting them weeding bits of land. The main focus is providing sustainable post-release employment, so we want them to get work skills and a work ethic and be able to go and get a job."

Corrections Association president Beven Hanlon said that at Hawkes Bay Prison, where he works, 40 prisoners lost their jobs when the prison abandoned an organic vegetable growing enterprise and leased out the land to a local cattle farmer.

"They now sit in their units doing nothing," he said.

Almost all the prisons still employ prisoners in internal kitchen and laundry work, and many still have other industries such as a workshop at Paremoremo which makes precast concrete beams for the new prisons being built near Meremere and Dunedin.

Employed prisoners earn an average of about $18 a week.

But Mr Hanlon said: "They buy all the produce in. They used to grow it all."

Prison Fellowship director Kim Workman, who managed the Prison Service from 1989-93, said the policy of running prison work on a commercial basis was wrong.

"This isn't about running a commercial venture. This is about teaching them a work ethic and providing them with constructive activity so they don't delve into drugs and anti-social conduct," he said.

"And there is a huge therapy in gardening. My experience is that for the men who work in the gardens there is a special element of contact with nature. There is a spiritual element to it. There is the thing of seeing something grow before your eyes rather than doing meaningless work."

Mr Matthews, a former top police officer who took over Corrections last February, said some prison managers were keen to bring back vegetable gardens for internal prison use, and they would be allowed to do so.

"It's an issue, as I have travelled round the country, as to whether we shouldn't get back into at least growing vegetables for our own consumption," he said.

"It will be up to individual site managers. If they have corrections officers that are guarding prisons, the next question is, can those people be used to guard prisoners outside the wire where there are additional costs involved? Some of the site managers are very keen to do that. It's a matter of assessing each of the sites."

CLOSED DOWN

* Paremoremo: horticulture, timber processing.
* Mt Eden: manufacturing (moved to Paremoremo).
* Waikeria: light engineering, nurseries, other land-based work.
* Ohura: horticulture (prison closed).
* Turangi: horticulture, nurseries.
* New Plymouth: contract gangs.
* Wanganui: contract gangs, horticulture, textiles.
* Hawkes Bay: nurseries.
* Manawatu: joinery.
* Rimutaka: light engineering.
* Arohata: horticulture.
* Christchurch: joinery.
* Christchurch Women's: horticulture, nurseries.
* Dunedin: joinery.
* Invercargill: horticulture, nurseries.