NZ Prisons

This week's escape from Mt. Eden prison 'touched a nerve' for me.

I worked as a Corrections Officer in a New Zealand prison during 2006 and 2007. I can readily understand why the Department of Corrections has trouble gaining and retaining staff. I went into the job full of enthusiasm and no small amount of curiosity. I learned one hell of a lot during my time there. I would definitely do it again. But in the end, like most people who work there after a few years, I left.

I have seen nothing in the media that adequately and accurately presents what prison is actually like. There was a multi-part series on TVNZ in early 2006, filmed at Rimutaka Prison near Wellington, that was probably the best I've ever seen, but it was on so late at night and so poorly promoted almost no one saw it. I missed all the episodes but for one...and I was interested and motivated. But the one I saw was full of truth, if lacking in depth. TV can't give you the feel of damp concrete, the smell of disinfectant, body odour, piss, shit, maybe some vomit and ALWAYS cigarettes that will fill your nostrils during a typical day in prison.

Other than that, much of the reporting fits into one of these categories: Sensational - end of story ; focuses on the political plays by politicians ; plays on public stereotypes / preconceptions that are misleading and often completely inaccurate, picked up from US shows like "Prison Break" or whatever.....

To be fair to the Department of Corrections, they have done their homework. They actually do know (or have a pretty good idea) what will most likely reduce crime. But they can't do much or most of it because the reality of what would actually work does not tally with public attitudes to criminals and punishment versus rehabilitation.

These same attitudes exist among prison staff on the floors holding the keys. The same debates rage in the smoko rooms in a prison as may rage in local pubs about crime and criminals. The staff have genuinely held beliefs, like any member of the public. Hardened by often painful experience, too. They see the murderers and abusers and thugs and see what they do and how they often behave like animals toward each other and officers and they rightly are angered by it. They may even have been seriously injured by it.

But that doesn't mean prisons are good. Or that they are successful in accomplishing the things they are intended to do. Staff are the first to look in the cell windows and discover the suicides. Mostly, floor staff, with a few exceptions, haven't read the research. They just see the crims. (Hard to miss them ) They aren't experts steeped in reems of data from a thousand prisons in dozens of countries. There is no 'big picture' when you and your partner are down an unlocked wing with 38 crims, including murderers, gang members and assorted thugs who may whisper "pig" or "fucking screw" as you pass if they don't know you (or maybe because they do).

The bottom line for the leadership of the Department of Corrections is that it isn't politically possible, externally, to spend the money and do the things that really would work, or internally to get many staff to buy into those ideas. So Corrections does the best it can. If / when what they do attempt doesn't work due to lack of resources and / or weak commitment on the floor, the whole idea of rehabilitation is undermined and perhaps declared a failure and the "hang'em high" crowd say "We told you so." Never mind the truth may well be the opposite had the policies implemented been supported adequately and seen strong commitment over time.

Much of what public debate does occur about prisons in New Zealand is ignorant or cynical or both. The public servants who actually work there aren't allowed to say what they know, on either side of the debate, other than through their union, leaving the field of debate open to people who often have strongly held beliefs, but little in the way of experience to back them up. Or people more intent on giving a favourite political football one more kicking around the party political paddock.

The wider public is thus poorly served and their ignorance preserved.

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As for the escape the other day, when I worked in the prison, if you didn't have enough staff in a wing, the wing stayed locked. That's OK for a few hours occasionally, but if it happens a lot, the convicted crims and / or accused, mostly young guys, get pissed off with being locked in their tiny cells all day. You'd have to spend a month in one of these cells to have any idea what that feels like. One day wouldn't do it. Your head is still "outside". When prisoners get pissed off due to being locked all day because of short staff, the job gets more dangerous.

There definitely are mad, bad (and sad) people behind many of those doors. You may be struck by how the murdering monster on the TV News last night, last week or last month is the quiet, polite person in front of you saying "please" and "thank you" in asking for a bar of soap. Or maybe he's still full of his raging lethal ego, trying to assert control here, conditioning you with his violence and threats, yelling and screaming and bashing his cell door and threatening to "do you" when you unlock it to give him his evening meal. That's what his life taught him worked for him. His incarceration was inevitable.

Where I worked, you did shifts to an 18-week roster, usually working 10 days on and 4 days off. You work most weekends. Days, evenings and nights. Mostly days. But a big chunk of evenings and night shifts came every 2-3 months for 7 days in a row. I worked two kinds of shifts. One was an 8 hour shift for 8 hours pay, including a half-hour meal break and two shorter "smoko" breaks. The other was a 9 to 5 shift, with an un-paid lunch hour. Prisons are usually in the middle of nowhere, so you spend that hour at the prison. If an alarm goes up during your lunch on a "9 hour" shift, and you're on site, you're expected to respond despite the fact you're not actually being paid. I thought it odd that you would be expected to incur MOST physical risk at a time when you're not actually 'there'. You may even be putting your life on the line....for nothing other than to show loyalty to work mates. But who CREATED that situation?

Ten days in a row in a prison wing is a LONG run. You're "doing time", too. By day 9, even during a quiet period, you're getting punchy. If the gangs or some group of prisoners are trying to put pressure on staff for some reason - and they do - then 10 days is simply punishing. When you're new to the job, you're OK until the first time you find yourself wrestling on the floor with a belligerent crim. If you're lucky, you aren't injured. Maybe a few scratches and/or bruises. You hope they guy doesn't have hepatitis or HIV. If you followed the rules, you also weren't alone and more help came quickly. You're trained to handle these situations. But with short staffing, the rules often get bent or broken by staff trying to keep the routines running and you may find yourself down a wing with 38 unlocked crims, fingers-crossed nothing happens. If anything does happen, as far as management is concerned, it's YOUR fault. You should not have been there alone. You broke the rules.

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How do staff respond to this stress? They call in sick. Crazy not to, in a way. If you go to work stressed, you might do something rash, like get annoyed with the prisoner who won't get off the pay phone (for the 100th time) when his allocated time is up. You might push the lever and cut off his call. That makes him angry and he loses it and smashes your face into the floor and you're off work for 6 weeks while your bones knit. At least you'll make a full recovery. Some don't.

OK, so staff have called in sick. What do you do? You call in other staff who will do the overtime. This overtime is in addition to their rostered 10 days on. They are covering for you on one of their 4 days off. Or maybe they will work a double shift today...and then come in tomorrow and for the next 4,5 or 9 days. Maybe they will do several doubles during their 10 days, then maybe another shift or two on their days off. Overtime is capped, but you can run yourself into a rut before you hit the limit. Next month is a new month.

Sickies happen so much, that management suspects that some staff organise "sickies" to effectively replace a normal shift with one paid at the overtime rate of time and a quarter. That additional wage bill represents a huge extra cost due to the high level of absenteeism, in turn related to the stress, in turn part of working in a prison and further exacerbated by working to a punishing roster hostile to social life and family life. After an initial burst, of overtime, toward the end of which I did some DUMB things, I rarely did "call backs". The time and a quarter paid for overtime simply wasn't worth giving up a precious day off after 10 days straight. I needed those days off more than I needed the money.

Younger or single staff tend to prefer the 10 days on, 4 days off. Many, if not most, are from military backgrounds and think people who don't like the 10-day regime are weak. They should harden up. Suck it up. "When I was working close protection in Iraq".....etc. So we were left to enjoy the four days off....in the middle of the week when no one's home all day and your friends are at work.

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The job itself teaches you to say"No". If you're the sort who can't say "No", you either learn or this quickly becomes the wrong job. The crims always want something. They depend on you for access to everything. They will run you ragged and wreck the daily routine, endanger your security and more, if you let them. They only want what they want. "No" is often your best defense.

There are definitely times you can and should say "Yes" and most officers will, most of the time. Some joke about saying "No" to everything ("Talk to the hand!"), but the reality is that they are placing their and their co-workers' safety at risk if they seriously try to follow that.

On the flip side, if you say "Yes" when other officers have said "No", then you can run into increasingly serious problems with your co-workers. There are grey areas and it generally boils down to whether the senior officer running the shift is a "yes" or a "no" sort of person....remembering that everyone is mostly "no" out of necessity. You find you work your shift according to the "flavour" of the person you're reporting to. But the consequence of even these minor inconsistencies can be significant if a certain prisoner, on a given day, with a specific need gets a "no" to a request he REALLY wanted, in his mind NEEDED, a "Yes" to.....and has had "Yes" before. That can drive people in prison crazy with frustration.

Therefore, the lowest common denominator is to say "no" to everything legally manageable.....with the consequence that over time, this increases stress as prisoners respond in their own way to insensitive, arbitrary authority - the sort that may have helped shape their anti-social attitudes from their earliest days.

Picture this: You're working with staff who, like you, hold all the cards (the keys and access to ANYTHING) over the prisoners. You're harder. You know how to say "No". "No" is most often the best answer. How then do you relate to other staff? How much of this attitude do you take home to your family, given you spend most of your waking moments being conditioned to behave - and respond - in this way? As you can imagine, senior staff, long accustomed to saying "no" for years, maybe decades, are inclined to say "No" to staff, too. "No" is a big part of prison culture on the side that holds the keys. I quickly found that in discussing any issue that arose, it was essential that you not allow it to boil down to a "Yes" or a "No", because if it did, the outcome would predictable.

Maybe you're getting the idea prisons are deeply dysfunctional places. You would not be wrong. If you think about it, what might the most likely outcome be of taking all the most socially (and often mentally) damaged, crippled, abused -even outright EVIL - people and putting them all in the same confined place? A place where they have open and easy access to large groups of people like themselves for much of the day. It might seem like a really dumb thing to do if you want to PREVENT crime. In my opinion and in my experience, you'd be right.

But people who don't know prisons often BELIEVE prisons will deter all crime. Get tougher. Be harder. FORCE people to be better people. Send them to Boot Camp before they end up in the prisons! Never mind it doesn't work and usually only makes things worse for people already too often damaged from their very earliest days by previous force, past coercion. Maybe more discipline does work for people who not known any. Maybe more discipline would be petrol on the fire for those who have already suffered more than enough "discipline".

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Prisons definitely do deter the vas majority of people from offending and many of those who do offend from re-offending. Prison sucks. It sucks hard. Doing things that would see you go back would be no longer on the menu for many people. But what about the rest? Sadly, however this is not true for many others who go to prison and keep going back. Once inside, prison can BECOME their life. They are "institutionalised". Everyone they know well is there. Their friends are all there. Their (often gang) family is there. Their personal values become set there. They aren't values normal people people share.

I'll end with one true story. The names have been changed. No one is innocent.

There was a charming, intelligent and enaging Maori guy in my wing who was also, unfortunately, a complete rogue. His history of trouble with the law was long, comprehensive and gradually escalating in seriousness as he revolved around, in and out of the justice system and prison. He, like many in prison, had been recruited by a gang and much of his offending after that was gang-related. Some was drug-related. He could be violent if he chose to and often was toward other prisoners. Rarely toward staff, though he was known to have the odd 'bad day'.

I was talking to him one day while I was supervising the outside yards. He was in his own concrete yard, segregated from other prisoners for his own safety for reasons I no longer recall. He probably owed someone for smokes. That's the most usual reason for prisoner to prisoner violence in prison: debts. Usually tobacco. Debts are often run up by prisoners about to be released. They then go "on segs" and escape the bash.....and go home not having paid up. They're crims. This guy was soon to be released.

But all "normal" crims, who might bash or murder their wives, friends or random strangers or steal anything not bolted down (and much that is) or bash you up for looking at them the wrong way.....well...they all hate the the "kiddy fuckers", the lowest of the low.

As he was due to be released in a few weeks. I asked him how he saw his life going once free. The "quotes" below are representative, not from any transcript other than the one burnt into my head.

He said: "My life is fucked. I'm just over 30. My family doesn't want to know me. No one will give me a job. I've spent over half my life in jail. All my friends are in jail."

I said, "You're an intelligent guy. Your life doesn't need to be this way. It would take a long time to build the trust again, but if you started today, in time, probably years, I know, and that sucks, but you would begin to see an improvement. No way will it be easy. You've built up a long and bad history. But there is no way back if you don't even try. You clearly have what it takes to make a go of it. You're not one of the guys in here who doesn't have two clues to rub together...."

He said,"My life is worth nothing outside. I've wrecked it. But I will make something of myself. I will do something good."

"What's that?", I asked.

"I love kids. I hate anyone who hurst kids. I can make something of my life if I have been able to make a difference to even one child."

"How are you going to do that?"

"I'm going to kill a kiddy-fucker".

I told him that wasn't a good idea. Prisoners sometimes talk this way and you just do NOT buy into it, for obvious reasons.

But a year later, long after he had been released, he killed his kiddy-fucker. The murder victim was another prisoner I also knew from prison who had a history of sexually abusing children. The guy I had been talking to that day in the yard had "made something of his life" according to the value system common among prisoners. It's the world and values they come to know.

How did prison work for this guy? How good is a system that, at least in part, produces an environment where the values that PREVAIL are so at odds with normal, decent human values?

This guy's values became so mangled, bent and broken that he saw his ONLY way out of the life he had created (and HE had created it) was to redeem himself and his wasted life by killing someone else who he saw as even more worthless than himself.

The values he acted on were common prison values. He would have picked them up from other prisoners inside and out of prison. Yes, there are some people who really should be locked up forever and key thrown away. Some people really are "born bad". But at least some who end up being the worst might have been put on a different road if their lives were changed for the better early enough. Before the hidings, drugs and booze. Prisons so a reasonable job of containing the consequences of social or genetic failure when everything else (social or medical) has failed.

But for the rest, the ones who are not irredeemably evil, how do you break that cycle? Is prison the best answer?

I think not. The answer will be more complex and subtle and relate to the personal situation of each person who heads down the road paved with criminal acts that disregard the life, property and well-being of others. The real answer will take more thought and insight than most people are prepared (or have the time) to devote to it.

Maybe you keep first-timers you incarcerate away from all other criminals. Maybe you keep them away from each other. Maybe they should see only staff and social workers and perhaps family, if their family aren't all criminals (too often the case).

But for sure, what makes a small criminal into a big one is sending him to 'Crime University' (prison) and letting the gangs make him one of their own. He can then spend his days in the yard being trained how to break people's bones or take their eyes out in seconds.

Go work in that. The public (mostly) have NO idea. When it gets to be too much, you call in sick. Breathe some fresh air. Let the pressure ease. It's either that or quit. If you quit, you can't pay your bills. You're letting your work mates down, if you quit. Besides, what else are you going to do if this has been your source of income for several / many years? Everyone "knows" prison officers are corrupt and petty sadists. No end of TV shows making that clear.

There is a lot more I could say, about gangs in prisons and what a critically important role prisons play in gang recruitment, discipline and culture, but this is already far too long.

Prisons seem to create as many, if not more, problems than they solve.