Police believe a prisoner who broke out of the high security Auckland Prison at Paremoremo may have now made it out of the area.

Police are still hunting for an escaped prisoner who was years earlier on the run for 41 days, in which time he robbed a security van.

Up to 20 police, some of them armed, are searching the area around Auckland Prison at Paremoremo after an inmate cut his way through a double perimeter fence and escaped today.

The Corrections Department is investigating how an inmate escaped Auckland Prison by breaking through a perimeter fence in the jail workshop.

"It was a weak and cowardly strategy and it failed," the judge said.

Former Govt minister Taito Phillip Field is appealing against his conviction and sentence for bribery and corruption.

A coroner is calling for a national legal help phone line for prisoners in police custody after a lawyer could not be found for a man who later hanged himself.

A prison inmate has described seeing a fellow inmate being dragged from a cell on the day of his death.

A believer in Scott Watson's innocence plans to reinterview key witnesses in the case of Ben Smart and Olivia Hope.

Privately run prisons are on the Government's agenda after Parliament today passed a bill allowing them to be handed over.

A senior judge has vowed to crack down on a violent crime wave, which he says is sometimes "little more than sheer sadism".

A jury finds double-killer Graeme Burton guilty of attempting to murder a fellow prison inmate.