Sex offender wins fight against prison manager after pen pal scheme was scrapped

A convicted sex offender won a judicial review against Rolleston Prison to reinstate a pen pal service. Photo / 123rf

A sex offender has won a judicial review of a prison’s pen pal scheme after it was scrapped when another inmate tried to contact a young girl.

The man, who has name suppression to protect the identity of his victims, was imprisoned in 2015 for a raft of sexual offences against three teenage girls.

Since 2019, the man has been using the Prisoner Correspondence Network, which is a pen pal service that facilitates inmates writing to people in the outside world and receiving mail from them in return.

However, when the man was transferred to Rolleston Prison in Christchurch in 2023 he found the service had been canned by the prison’s director after another inmate who had offended against children attempted to write to the daughter of his pen pal.

After the incident, the prison’s director found the monitoring processes for the scheme were insufficient, as there was no vetting of pen pals and no reviewing of the correspondence coming in and out of the prison.

The director’s particular concern was that prisoners could establish contact with children or their parents, as had already happened once.

The recently arrived inmate made several complaints about the removal of the service after he was transferred to Rolleston, including to the Office of the Inspectorate.

He said the service was integral to him establishing a support network outside of prison, which would support his reintegration when he was ultimately released.

The man took a civil case against the Rolleston prison manager and the High Court at Christchurch heard the matter last month.

Under New Zealand law, a prison manager can withhold mail between a prisoner and another person for a range of reasons, including if the correspondence is with someone under 16, helps facilitate someone breaking the law, threatens or endangers the safety of a person, or is to another prisoner without permission.

The prison manager at Rolleston accepted disestablishing the pen pal service was unlawful and there were no reasonable grounds to scrap it.

The inmate was self-represented and persuaded High Court judge Justice Lisa Preston to order the prison to reinstate the service.

Justice Preston did so and also awarded the inmate be paid $1275 in legal costs.

Department of Corrections’ commissioner of custodial services Leigh Marsh said prisoners commonly used the internal mail system to threaten people, contact their victims, intimidate and manipulate people into providing money or contraband, and engage in inappropriate sexual activity. This internal mail is monitored, and Corrections staff can make a call about withholding it on a case-by-case basis.

Marsh noted the Prisoner Correspondence Network is run independently of Corrections, but utilises its prisoner mail system.

“The blanket restriction on Prisoner Correspondence Network mail at Rolleston Prison was lifted in mid-September this year. Prisoner Correspondence Network mail is now managed like all other mail at the site, and this is also what is in place at other prisons,” Marsh said.

“We carry out regular monitoring of mail to check for any inappropriate, illegal or objectionable material, and can make decisions to withhold it on a case-by-case basis if required, in accordance with the Corrections Act 2004.”

A Prisoner Correspondence Network Aotearoa spokesperson said the decision to ban the service was wrong and was a form of collective punishment.

“The ban destroyed many long-term pro-social connections between existing pen pals and prevented people incarcerated at Rolleston from accessing the proven therapeutic benefits of our pen pal service,” the spokesperson said.

“We spent over a year working with Corrections to try and address safety issues that were brought up (and promptly addressed by us), but it was incredibly difficult to make headway due to management changes, and eventually volunteer burnout halted the process in its tracks.”

The network said it had robust procedures to protect pen pal volunteers from harm and it was disappointing that it took a judicial review to reach a solution.

Jeremy Wilkinson is an Open Justice reporter based in Manawatū, covering courts and justice issues with an interest in tribunals. He has been a journalist for nearly a decade and has worked for NZME since 2022.