Paul Holmes: Jail overload will make things worse

Millie and Paul Homes are familiar with the damage pure methamphetamine causes. Photo / Herald on Sunday

The Chief Justice, Dame Sian Elias, should be listened to. She is right. Let some of the prisoners out. She is not saying let them off, she is saying let them out. Relieve the stress of overcrowding.

Throwing more and more people in jail for longer sentences does not make us safer. Jail damages everyone and the people sent to jail are already deeply damaged. Many prisoners are illiterate, many have mental health problems and many have substance abuse problems.

The soon-to-be record numbers of prisoners make jails frightening and dangerous places for those who work there.

All the Chief Justice is saying is we have created "monster factories" so let us try putting more resources towards community-based sentences and let us give more resources to what she believes is an under-resourced, inundated probation service, whose staff do so much good work that is largely unappreciated by the public.

Let us really try to, people. In doing so we will relieve the insane prison overcrowding which costs us a fortune and requires us to build more and more prisons.

Sir Douglas Graham was on the TV One Sunday political programme Q+A a couple of weeks ago. The prisons were a matter of discussion. There are now 8400 prisoners in New Zealand. He said that when he was Justice Minister there were 4000. He asked, "Are we any safer now?" The answer, of course, is obvious.

Recently I met a prison manager, who runs a prison built for 330 inmates. He has been told to prepare to house about 480. His prison is in the south. His extra prisoners will come from the north. They will have no connection to the district and ongoing contact with their families will be difficult to sustain.

Maintaining contact with family is rated as important to a person's chances of turning his or her life around. How well a prisoner maintains or has rebuilt contacts with family is a very weighty consideration to the Parole Board when it decides whether a prisoner can be safely released.

But it is the safety of Corrections staff we have to think about as the numbers of prisoners explodes. Prisons are gruesome at the best of times.

Fair enough, you might say. For some prisoners, they probably should be. I am not that far from the general public sentiment. I know what people want. I hear the talkback and it cannot be ignored. People expect those who seriously, grievously and violently offend to pay a like price.

But overcrowding must make life a nightmare sometimes for the people we hire to run the daily life of prisons. Corrections staff are in there day after day putting their lives on the line.

Overcrowding makes a very unhappy cell. Unhappy cells make unhappy prisons. Many prisoners are not people who can relieve their issues by talking through the problems. They are explosive people. I would never want to be a Corrections officer.

They are also institutions where deception is constant. The revelation recently of the pure methamphetamine ring at Paremoremo was breathtaking. Prisoners were not only importing the ingredients from overseas but they were manufacturing the drug in the prison, then selling it outside. Paremoremo is no Club Med. No one moves there without being monitored. Yet manufacturing was apparently going on. That is the kind of place prison is. That is the kind of evil determination Corrections staff deal with every hour of every day.

I may be naive, but it seems obvious that people get better quickly when not shoved under concrete but when they are surrounded by the normality of life, by decency and kindness. Eventually decency and kindness will win. Love always wins.

Decency and kindness and diligent supervision where it is possible can work for many we imprison. The prison numbers are becoming insane. They will soon become impossible to administer.

The Justice Minister, Simon Power, is a very bright man. He did not need to jump so vehemently on the Chief Justice for her considered speech to Wellington lawyers. After all, she did not hire a public hall in Porirua to deliver it. She is not a rabble-rouser. Her image of prisons as "monster factories" is frightening. Evil breeds evil. Inhumanity breeds inhumanity.

With Rob Harley, a longtime colleague and a journalist of compassion and integrity, I have made a documentary, Chasing the Ghost, about pure methamphetamine and its ravages, which will go to air on TV One on Tuesday at 9.30pm.

As you will imagine, it was painful to make. I have tried to achieve a balance between the obvious reason I am involved and the stories of those who have been victims of the drug. It is not a tell-all documentary.

There are things that happened in our family which remain my family's business and, especially, my daughter's private business.

I think it is also probably true that my daughter Millie will have no memory of a lot of what happened that was so painful to us all. In the programme Rob and I meet at least a couple of people whose lives became absolutely insane because of pure methamphetamine. The programme is very raw, I think. We made it with the best intentions.

It is a journey of discovery to try to find out why the drug wreaks such havoc. I hope it brings some comfort to families who have gone through its pernicious hell and I hope it encourages those in political office to keep the pressure on those who manufacture and supply it.

One of the worst things about the drug is the terrible company it keeps. Head Hunters and other branches of organised crime who make millions out of it should be wiped off the face of the Earth.

I thought of addressing the Head Hunters' headquarters in Ellerslie from the footpath with the megaphone my wife bought me for that very purpose. I thought it might be a leavener for a quite intense television programme.

I decided against it, not out of any worries for my personal safety but because it might have been seen as too facetious for the intensity of the methamphetamine issue.

As for Dame Sian, she will be having a tough weekend. She should not worry. It will soon blow over. In the meantime she has given people who think about things with some openness some very high-protein food for thought.

The prison numbers and the costs of maintaining them are simply not sustainable.

There have got to be better ways.

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What a breath of fresh air psychologist Nigel Latta is in this week's Listener, in which he declares himself to be a bad parent and proud of it. He means bad in the sense of not being beholden to hand-wringing fears and political correctness in his parenting.

Heaven knows, parenting is the hardest thing in the world and it is tempting, sometimes either to give up or turn away to avoid conflict. You want to set rules and boundaries but you do not want to be a tyrant. The balance is the hardest thing to find.

Latta is funny and no-nonsense. His parenting advice cheered me up. He says girls are weird because they believe in fairies and like high heels. He warns dads not to pull back when things get a little tough during the adolescent years.

Teenage boys, he says, will look for what can get out of a situation.

And for dads correcting teenage sons, keep the sermons brief, says Nigel. The full stop is better than the comma.

He says the reason boys don't talk much is that they don't see the point. Just wait it out and they'll eventually talk again. Dead right, Nigel.