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On multiple occasions this year, inmates at the Auckland Region Women’s Correctional Center (ARWCF) in South Auckland have been denied the minimum of one hour out of their cells each day required by the Corrections Act 2004 .
In an interview with RNZ at the prison, Custodial Director Neil Beales said Corrections did not have adequate records to verify how many times this had occurred or if it was justified on health or safety grounds.
“There are times when I just don’t have the data available, or the depth and detail of the data, to be sure that the … law has not been violated.”
The records were so poor that when RNZ first raised the issue in Corrections on April 29, prison administrators had to review CCTV footage to verify when the women had left their cells.
After reviewing images from the four days between March 29 and April 1, of which no records had been kept, managers found that on 16 of 30 occasions women were locked up for more than 23 hours.
Beales acknowledged that the department could now be open to legal challenges, because he could not be sure whether the law had been violated.
“If someone wanted to do that [take legal action]So that’s his prerogative to do that and we’d have to deal with that as he comes along. “
Prison administrators admitted mistakes had been made, he said.
“They have taken ownership of that, they have recognized that there are certain things that were not happening and should have been happening. I can tell you now that that is not happening right now on this site.”
Beales said a new monitoring and registration system had been put in place and that all women now had their minimum rights to at least one hour of exercise outside their cells every day.
However, around 90 women in the high-security unit were still confined to their cells for extended periods, getting only 90 minutes from their cells each day to exercise.
Beales said that in addition to the 90 minutes, some, but not all, of the women had extra time for programs, workshops and other activities.
“Some of them refuse to work, some of them can’t work. So you have gang problems, you can’t unblock them with other people. There may be health problems or whatever. But when you unblock people, then we have to have the staff to supervise them, and you have to put them somewhere to do something and you don’t always have that. “
Under the United Nations Nelson Mandela Rules, anything more than 22 hours a day in a cell without significant human contact meets the definition of solitary confinement.
Beales said the long hours of lockdown were necessary.
“Having them wandering the courtyards in each other’s faces, becoming violent, hostile to each other, because they have nothing else to do at the time, it’s probably worse for them,” he said. “If they are in a cell, they have the television, they have their books. They are not sitting in a sterile cell with nothing.”
After reporting earlier this week on the findings of an internal review, which said the ARWCF had a punitive culture, dysfunctional management, and staff who resorted too quickly to force, RNZ took a tour of the prison.
RNZ was shown areas of the prison where the women worked, for between 20 and 60 cents an hour, packing items and sewing face masks.
ARWCF, which has 371 inmates, 67% of whom are Maori, also has a mother’s unit, with two babies currently on site.
While Beales accepted that the prison had not granted some inmates their minimum rights to time out of their cells, he rejected the review’s conclusion that the prison had a punitive culture.
“I do not agree with that. I have visited the site many times. I have visited this site many times. It is not what I see.”
He said there had been an increase in the use of force in prison in recent years, but that was true in all prisons and gangs were a determining factor.
“I don’t expect our staff to stand there and be attacked and injured as part of their job. If a staff member has to use force to stay safe, they are trained to do so,” he said. .
“I don’t see a culture of that here that makes me believe that there is an automatic use of force when there is a problem.”
– By Guyon Espiner
