Corrections struggles to escape criticism despite claims of progress - The Front Page

Auckland Prison, Paremoremo. Photo / Doug Sherring

Corrections has admitted the department’s “not out of the woods” but maintains “change is happening” despite a scathing review from New Zealand’s Chief Ombudsman.

Peter Boshier slammed our country’s prison system in the government’s Justice Committee saying he’ll “leave the job with disappointment” that he hasn’t made “any impact in having the Department of Corrections as an organisation we can be proud of”.

“Corrections have not done a lot since Covid to improve the situation. If I’m to be cynical, they’ve blamed staff shortages, but in fact, there’s a bit of a culture now embedded that a lot of these things will be done in minimalist fashion,” Boshier said.

Deputy Commissioner of Prisons, Neil Beales, told The Front Page he “respectfully disagrees” with Boshier’s comments.

“If you look back at the things that we have done over recent years I think we’ve got a culture that is getting healthier all the time.”

Beales admits some restrictions on prisoners’ movements have continued after Covid - but, as Boshier predicted, puts it down to staff shortages.

“Directly after Covid, we saw a huge drop off in staffing numbers. We saw a huge amount of attrition. It was up at the 17 to 20 per cent mark at one point, right across the board. It’s now down to about 13 to 14 per cent.

“For argument’s sake, [if you need] six staff to unlock a unit and you’ve only got five staff, you cannot unlock all of the prisoners in that unit and you can’t do all the things that you need to do because we have obligations to our staff for their safety.”

A report from the Office of the Inspectorate released just yesterday shows that for up to nine months until July last year, prisoners in three units at Auckland Prison were denied their minimum entitlement to an hour out of their cell every day - instead getting it every second day.

For 107 men, this regime lasted more than 100 days, and for 27 of them, more than 200 days.

“I don’t think anybody would sit down here and try and argue that that’s okay, it’s not okay,” Beales said.

“I don’t think you’ll find a single member of staff who is happy with the arrangements that needed to be put in place. But, neither would they be happy if we were asking them to unlock short.”

Boshier also pointed to the lack of human contact prisoners have, describing it as a “people storage unit”. Beales acknowledges that minimum entitlements aren’t a privilege, but a human right.

“If I go back to pre-2020, many of our staff who now work for us were never in the job and don’t remember what, actually don’t even know what, a normalised prison operation was like.

“That is what we all want to get back to as quickly as possible,” Beales said.

He’s confident if the Chief Ombudsman were to visit Auckland Prison now, he’d be happy with the progress being made.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about what Corrections is doing to hire more officers and how it doesn’t think it has a culture issue.

The Front Page is a daily news podcast from the New Zealand Herald, available to listen to every weekday from 5am. The podcast is presented by Chelsea Daniels, an Auckland-based journalist with a background in world news and crime/justice reporting who joined NZME in 2016.

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