This peer-to-peer literacy programme was pioneered in the Northland Region Corrections Facility and when the mentor prisoners were transferred to Auckland South Corrections Facility we managed to switch the programme there.
On a beautiful sunny day it was hard to feel anything but positive about the occasion, but what The Howard League needs to do surely shows up a flaw in our education system.
Lynette Cave, the Acting Regional Commissioner for the Department of Corrections Northern Region gave a speech in which she said that 65 per cent of men and women in New Zealand prisons score below the NCEA level One in literacy and numeracy.
NCEA level one is not that simple to interpret, but it means that these people will have trouble writing coherent sentences or reading them.
We were happy to see seven prisoners learn to read and write, and it wasn't easy to get the programme underway in that jail, but Cave's numbers mean that there are still more than six hundred prisoners at that location who can't read and write.
What we managed is valuable, but it's a drop in the bucket.
Overall we are heading for a prison muster approaching ten thousand, so that means there are six and a half thousand fundamentally illiterate prisoners in New Zealand jails.
How does this happen?
Taxpayers fund an expensive and generally well-regarded compulsory education system which includes early childhood education, primary schools and secondary schools.
It seems incomprehensible that we allow young people to drop through the literacy net and leave school without the ability to read at a level that would enable them to get a driver's licence.
Former Cabinet Minister John Tamihere quotes police statistics which show that two thirds of Maori prisoners begin their jail career with a driving offence.
Very often this is repeated unlicensed driving.
Once in jail, incarceration for far too many becomes habit.
Gang membership, for many is unavoidable and criminal behaviour rubs off.
Given that Maori are vastly overrepresented in our prison population and make up more than half of all prisoners, a focus on the literacy needs of young Maori to make certain that fewer leave school without this most necessary and basic skill is needed.
One of our very first literacy graduates at Hawke's Bay Regional Prison was a young Maori who managed to leave school at the age of ten. I asked him if his school or the Education Department had followed up, and he described perfunctory efforts to get him back into the system.
Like many of his prisoner mates, he could not read well enough to get a driver's licence.
The driving offences mounted up to the point that he got a jail sentence.
Gang membership followed.
This was an intelligent bloke who learnt to read and write fluently in twelve weeks.
Had he got the personal attention our volunteer tutor was able to offer years before when he first disappeared off the education radar, the cost to us all would have been slashed.
I'm told that such a sequence of events where a pupil is lost to the education system is much less likely to occur now than it was a decade ago.
Driver's licence programmes are essential to keeping young Maori and Pasifika kids out of jail
The Howard League has a year's funding from the Land Transport Agency to carry on our programme in Hawke's Bay.
This runs out in April next year.
We also have a year's money to fund exactly the same programme in West Auckland.
This runs out later next year.
Minister Judith Collins should require a benefit-cost analysis of these programmes.
There is a large enough sample size to be valid and Tony Gibbs (our President) and I believe the outcome could be telling and dramatically cost-effective.
Mike Williams grew up in Hawke's Bay. He is CEO of the NZ Howard League for Penal Reform and a former Labour Party president. All opinions are his and not those of Hawke's Bay Today.