Tapu Misa

Tapu Misa

He arrived in Auckland with little more than the clothes he was wearing. We'd last seen him as a gangly, smiley teenager, before his parents' marriage ended badly, and his mother, bitter and hurt, sent him to her relatives in the United States.

He was supposed to have carried on his education there, but a few years later we heard about the fight that left a man dead, and his imprisonment for manslaughter.

And, without meaning to, we wrote him off. It seemed easier not to think about him. We didn't visit, we didn't write. We left him to fend for himself in a brutal and unforgiving environment we doubted he could survive, physically or emotionally.

But then, last year, he came home, after nearly a decade in American prisons. One day he was in a Californian prison, the next day he was put on a flight to Auckland, a free man with nothing except an extended family he hadn't seen in well over a decade.

He had turned into a tall, physically imposing man who was seemingly extraordinarily well adjusted for someone who'd spent a third of his life in a prison - wiser and more worldly in some ways, naive and vulnerable in others.

He was determined never to return to jail.

We assuaged our guilt by making sure he had clothes, a roof over his head, and money to tide him over till he could find work. Eventually, that meant a move out of Auckland to live with his dad, who got him a good job in the same company, which made him more fortunate than many of the 9000 prisoners released in New Zealand every year.

But it was clear that while he'd become adept at surviving prison life, he had no idea how to cope with freedom. In prison, the choices were simple, predictable. Only the toughest, the strongest, the smartest survive.

But survival on the outside is hard, too. The real world is more unpredictable than prison, the rules less clearly defined, and the hazards of too much freedom and temptation not as easily detected. He has needed time to learn to be free again and how to make the right choices, to be watched and guided closely, and yet not so he feels shackled.

Which, I fear, is not what Bailey Kurariki will get when he is released on parole next month, a few months shy of his September release date.

Already under intense media scrutiny, he will be watched too closely, controlled too tightly. His unusually stringent parole conditions include an electronic anklet and a 24-hour curfew preventing him from leaving his house without permission.