Jail to wage war on pokie habit

New Zealand's biggest women's jail is open for business, with a pledge to tackle addiction to "pokies" which is sending more women to prison.

The new $159 million Auckland women's prison at Wiri will increase the country's prison beds for women by a third. Its roll of 286 will account for half of all female beds when the existing women's blocks at Mt Eden and Waikeria prisons close at the end of the year.

Planned to house 150 prisoners, its capacity has been almost doubled because of a surge in female prisoners, who have increased from 151 to 411 in the past decade.

Corrections Minister Damien O'Connor said at the prison's opening ceremony yesterday that he wanted prison-based treatment for gambling addictions because of growing evidence that gambling was contributing to offending, especially for women.

A survey of prisoners in 1999, reported in the Journal of Gambling Studies last year, found that 33 per cent of female prisoners were probable lifetime pathological gamblers, compared with 21 per cent of male prisoners.

Women were more likely than men to gamble on Lotto or poker machines, almost twice as likely to have committed a crime to pay for gambling or a gambling debt, and more than twice as likely to have a conviction for a gambling-related offence.

Problem Gambling Foundation operations manager Graham Aitken said the number of women getting addicted to the pokies had worsened since that survey was taken.

"What has happened in the last two years is a dramatic uplift in women gambling on poker machines," he said.

In 2004, 87 per cent of Pakeha women and 92 per cent of Maori women seeking help from gambling help services said their primary mode of gambling was the pokies (excluding casinos), compared with 77 per cent of both Pakeha and Maori men.

The number of new Maori women clients citing non-casino pokies as their major problem has increased by more than 100 per cent every year since 2002.

Mr Aitken said: "If you speak to people on marae, they have stopped playing housie and headed off to the local pokie bar, which is creating an enormous cashflow problem for the marae because the housie was to pay for the new roof for the whare kai and now they don't have that."

Maori were an even bigger proportion of the prison population in the 1999 survey in the women's jails (67 per cent) than in men's jails (50 per cent).

Overall, women have increased from 3.7 per cent to 5.4 per cent of all prisoners in the past decade.

Problem Gambling Foundation chief executive John Stansfield said the foundation was nearing the end of a trial of gambling treatment programmes. He hoped the Corrections Department would make a commitment to continue the programme.