A small group of Northland criminals will be the first occupants of the Ngawha Prison from the end of this month.
The Northland Regional Corrections facility, commonly known as Ngawha Prison, was officially opened at the beginning of March, but the first prisoners will not take up residence until April 29.
Ngawha
Prison site manager Mike Hughes said seven inmates, all from Northland, will be transferred to the $133 million Ngawha facility from other prisons around the country on April 29. The jail can hold up to 350 inmates.
Mr Hughes said the first 28 inmates to arrive in the first month will all be low-to-medium and medium security categories and all will be sentenced inmates, transferring from other jails. They will also all be Northlanders.
"We are not planning to get remand (inmates) for the first 90 days, and we won't have newly sentenced inmates in the first month," he said.
Mr Hughes said the first inmates will be ones that had caused no problems during their incarceration.
"When you are starting up a new facility you need new operating philosophies. We decided that the first 28 (inmates) would be people that don't have a record of misbehaviour or rocking the boat," he said.
"Common sense says it's best to have the people that haven't caused any issues as that gives it a stable base to build up the inmate population from."
Ngawha Prison, is being hailed as a new weapon in the fight to reduce re-offending.
About 25 percent of people freed from prison re-offend within a year and the Department of Corrections says the prison's integration of tikanga Maori (Maori customs and protocol) would help reduce reoffending.
