Download Corrections News August 2005 (pdf: 423KB)
The additional funding, allocated as part of this year’s Budget, will provide the technology and staff needed to monitor prisoner telephone calls, and to collect and analyse crime prevention information.
Chief Executive Barry Matthews says the funding will put more staff into prisons and regional offices to collect and analyse information obtained through telephone monitoring as well as other crime prevention and intelligence processes.
He says telephone monitoring will lower the risk of prisoners using landline telephones to organise illegal activities such as prison escapes and drug deals, and to intimidate witnesses and victims.
“It also offers increased safety for staff, prisoners and visitors through early detection of security breaches.”
There has also been a significant increase in the amount of contraband confiscated at vehicle checkpoints, including drugs, weapons and cellphones.
“We have increased our drug detection dog teams from six to 10 and we are continuing to improve prison security and crime prevention through improved perimeter fencing, more vehicle checkpoints and metal detectors,” says Barry.
“We need to continue to focus future efforts on improving control over the supply of drugs in prisons and reducing the demand for drugs.”
Telecommunications companies Telecom and Vodafone have agreed to work with the Government to look at ways of stamping out cellphone use in New Zealand prisons.
Corrections Minister Hon Paul Swain says prisoners getting access to and using cellphones is a growing problem world-wide.
“The issue was high on the agenda at the Australasian Corrections Ministers' conference I attended recently. Cellphones can be used by inmates to intimidate witnesses and staff, and organise crime,” he says.
“Following the conference, I wrote to Telecom and Vodafone inviting them to work with Corrections on the issue.”
The three organisations have agreed to establish a working party to identify and implement possible solutions.
It is likely that a combination of measures will be required to supplement existing security measures such as the hand-held cellphone detectors already in use in prisons.
“Most importantly, any package that is devised must be developed in cooperation with the telecommunications companies. I am pleased we have this agreement with Telecom and Vodafone to work together,” says Mr Swain.
Last month I was invited to take part in the launch of the Pacific Strategy 2005 - 2008, the Department’s second Strategy aimed specifically at Pacific peoples.
The Strategy is a working document designed to address issues for Pacific offenders, their families, communities and staff.
Reducing re-offending rates of Pacific peoples is a major focus for the Department because they are disproportionately represented in our prisons.
The number of Pacific offenders is forecast to increase disproportionately because of the high number of Pacific people in the 15-24 year-old range, who statistics show are most likely to come into contact with the criminal justice system.
There are a number of initiatives outlined in the new strategy, including the development of New Zealand’s first Pacific Focus Unit at the Spring Hill Corrections Facility. You can read more about the Strategy on page 3.
I would like to thank the many people who contributed to the development of the Pacific Strategy, in particular members of the Fautua Pasefika (specified visitors) initiative throughout the country, the Chief Executive Pacific Advisory Group and the Pacific People Liaison Committee, the Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs, and Corrections staff, particularly Pacific staff and the Pacific Network staff.
We all have a role to play in implementing the Strategy. Its success relies on the Department, the Pacific community, friends and family working together to help rehabilitate and reintegrate Pacific offenders back into the community.
The Pacific Strategy 2005 - 2008 aims to reduce Pacific offenders’ re-offending rates and provide greater opportunities for Pacific communities to work with the Department.
The Strategy is based on three key themes: strengthening relationships with Pacific peoples; being effective for Pacific peoples; and being responsive to Pacific peoples.
“These themes reflect our commitment to work with Pacific offenders, their families, the Pacific community and other government agencies to create positive outcomes for Pacific peoples,” said Mr Swain.
In launching the Strategy, Mr Swain said that Pacific peoples are disproportionately represented in New Zealand prisons.
“While Pacific people make up only 6.5% of New Zealand’s population, they make up 10.6% of the prison population,” he said.
“By 2014 the number of Pacific people in prison is forecast to grow to approximately 1000 - an increase of over 300. In addition, the number of Pacific people undertaking community-based sentences is forecast to grow by 1,270.
“This Strategy focuses on the impact of crime on the Pacific community in New Zealand, and the importance of strengthening relationships with these communities to reduce the effects of offending and reoffending by Pacific peoples.”
Policy Adviser Maori and Pacific Leatuavao Viko Aufaga says the Strategy will help the Department consolidate gains made from the previous Strategy, and focus on positive outcomes for Pacific peoples over the next three years.
“The best results are achieved when an offender receives the appropriate intervention and gets strong support from community and family groups,” says Viko.
“These groups play an important role when the offender is released and works to reintegrate back into the community.”
“The Pacific Strategy 2005-2008 is a working document that ensures Pacific offenders receive the right intervention and support at the right time.”
A new guiding statement, ‘My strength does not come from me alone, but from many’, has been developed to assist the Department to be more responsive to the needs of Pacific offenders.
“The statement acknowledges the important role the Pacific community plays in New Zealand and how it can help develop effective solutions to address the needs of Pacific offenders,” says Viko.
There are several initiatives identified in the Pacific Strategy 2005 - 2008 that will be put in place over the next three years, including the development of New Zealand’s first Pacific Focus Unit at the Spring Hill Corrections Facility, currently under construction.
Viko says the Unit will incorporate cultural processes, concepts and imagery tailored to meet the specific needs of Pacific prisoners.
“The Unit will engender pride in the Pacific identity and culture and assist in motivating Pacific prisoners to participate in rehabilitation and reintegration programmes.” The Pacific Strategy was developed in collaboration with the Ministry of Pacific Island Affairs and involved extensive consultation with Pacific communities.
Human rights and prisoner discipline were high on the agenda in a meeting between a delegation of corrections officials from the Republic of Korea and Prison Unit Manager Peter Phelan, at Auckland Prison recently.
The 10-person delegation was on a tour of Australian and New Zealand corrections facilities looking at effective and humane disciplinary measures, and ways of improving the human rights of their own prisoners.
Peter showed the group around the ‘separates’ (isolation cells), the special needs unit, and facilities for at-risk prisoners at the Prison’s maximum security facility.
“They were very interested in the at-risk unit and how we restrain prisoners who are self-harming,” says Peter.
“They have a similar system but were interested in our techniques for keeping prisoners safe.”
The delegation was impressed with how well-maintained and clean the prison was, considering its age, says Peter.
Korean prisons are in the process of being upgraded and modernised. There are 47 corrections facilities in the Republic of Korea, employing over 17,000 staff. This makes the Corrections Bureau, managed by the Ministry of Justice, the fourth largest government department in Korea.
Following the visit to Auckland Prison, a question and answer session was held that covered subjects such as discipline, regulations, use of restraints, legal aid, riots and self-harm.
The delegation noticed a difference in the style of prisons throughout New Zealand.
Peter says the difference reflects the Public Prisons Service’s change in philosophy over the years, culminating in the four new regional corrections facilities. The first of the new facilities to open, the Northland Region Corrections Facility, features buildings separated by open spaces, confined by a highly secure perimeter fence.
Peter says visits from overseas delegations are an important way of sharing our knowledge and experience, and “remind us that we’re doing a good job”.
The Republic of Korea is the host of this year’s Asian and Pacific Conference of Correctional Administrators (APCCA), to be held in Seoul in September.
The four main agenda items of the Conference will be managing high-profile prisoners, contemporary issues in corrections, international cooperation, and improving prison services.
Whanau groups are encouraged to be more involved in offenders’ sentence planning and case management under the Corrections Act 2004, which came into force earlier this year.
The Public Prisons Service already uses whanau liaison workers to help achieve this goal, and Community Probation Service Area Manager Alastair Riach saw an opportunity to utilise the concept within his team at Waitemata, Auckland.
He trialled the idea to encourage staff to work more closely with offenders and their families.
Local Probation Officer David Sarich took on the role of whanau worker for the two month trial.
“Our intention was to involve offenders who have the support of family that can improve their compliance with special conditions, sentence plan goals and relapse prevention,” says Alastair.
As part of the trial, David arranged hui for whanau to make them aware of the requirements of the offender’s sentence plan and the need to support the offender to achieve the plan’s goals.
Alastair says the trial was too short to expect measurable decreases in re-offending rates, but that the final report and results went to Area and Regional level to assess if, within existing resources, it was something that could be trialled on a longer basis.
He says the trial served to show that working more closely with whanau had potential benefits for reducing re-offending, and that his staff would be encouraged to continue to work closely with an offender’s whanau.
“We targeted Maori offenders for this project to enable them to support, assist and engage their whanau member in the corrections system. This aligns well with the priority areas of the Maori Strategic Plan to include and engage Maori whanau and hapu.”
Alastair says many probation officers already include whanau in their work with offenders. “Having a whanau worker builds on existing staff strengths.”
Corrections is committed to using water more efficiently as part of a strategy to monitor the Department’s environmental impact.
Four issues are being investigated as part of the Department’s five-year Energy Management Strategy:
Each issue is influenced by decisions made on a day-to-day basis, says Corrections Energy Manager Cees Ebskamp.
Specific measures have been identified to lessen the impact of the many buildings and operations run by Corrections.
These include installing meters to monitor water consumption, incorporating water conservation design in new buildings, using native plants that require less water and maintenance, and recycling rain water for irrigation.
“To evaluate our performance, we need to develop a process to reliably determine the amount of water we use,” says Cees.
“Then we can work out where we could make savings through recycling or re-using water and installing water efficient taps and showerheads,” he says.
Corrections is also working to intercept accidental discharges of chemicals, fuels and other hazardous substances from its operations to protect water sources and habitats.
These water-related goals are part of Corrections’ Sustainable Development Plan as set in the Statement of Intent 2005 - 2006.
“We are a huge organisation and our overall impact on the environment has the potential to be significant,” says Cees. “Let’s all do our bit and save water wherever we can.”
The specialised skills of the Auckland Prison Industrial Fire Brigade took centre stage recently when they hosted a field day for over 100 volunteer fire-fighters.
The Brigade plays a vital role within the Prison and the wider community, as it attends around 50 local callouts in the Albany to Riverhead area each year.
Auckland Prison was asked to host the field day by the New Zealand Fire Service Institute. The guests were split into groups then shown around the Prison’s East Division and service tunnels.
Brigade station officer Bert Wall says the team is Corrections’ only recognised industrial fire brigade and the field day allowed brigade members to share their expertise and learn from others.
“The focus was on how to best work alongside other emergency services,” says Bert, who is a drug testing officer at Auckland Prison.
“Companies and businesses are increasingly putting up security measures like razor wire to protect themselves,” he says.
“Our team is trained in razor wire extraction, so we had the chance to show how skills learnt for use in prisons can apply in a wider sense.”
Such exercises are good trial runs to identify resources that might be needed in an emergency, such as fire appliances (trucks) or breathing apparatus, says Bert.
“If other brigades had to come in here and help us they would need to know how to work with us, where our extinguishers are, how we access water, and how the Prison and its different facilities are laid out.”
Prisons also maintain relationships with other emergency services, including ambulance services and the Police.
But fire services are often the first emergency service on the scene and are therefore trained in more than fire-fighting. First aid, handling road accidents, and people management are other core skills.
Bert and his colleagues have been invited to attend a future field day in the South Island dealing with methamphetamine, clandestine labs, and drug detection.
The field day was organised by Auckland Volunteer Fire Police member Ross Bay. New Zealand Fire Service Institute president Brendon Wood was the day’s main speaker.
Over the last two decades our ability to predict future violence has increased considerably. There are a number of check-lists available which tap criminal history and basic social and demographic items. Using these we can provide good estimates of the risk of further violent behaviour, and certain personality measures, particularly those which measure psychopathy, are also extremely useful in this area.
While we can now be quite accurate in making assessments about the future risk of violence, one of the difficulties practitioners have faced is that most available measures rely on static and unchangeable factors that are not sensitive to efforts offenders may have made to rehabilitate themselves.
While there is now a steadily increasing body of evidence that treatment targeting violence is effective, up until quite recently risk measures were insensitive to changes which the individual may have made.
Work done over the last 10 years by Stephen Wong 1 at a specialist forensic facility in Canada, the Regional Psychiatric Centre (Prairies), has resulted in a significant advance in our ability to predict violence and to monitor how that risk may have changed as a result of treatment. What Wong and his colleague Audrey Gordon have achieved is a prediction instrument, the Violence Risk Scale, which comprises 20 items that are either empirically or theoretically linked to future violent behaviour. They contain items like criminal peers, emotional control, relationship stability and community support. What makes the Violence Risk Scale so potentially useful is that these items are not merely assessed, but are also considered in relation to a model of stages of change that has been found to apply across all types of treatment for a wide variety of behavioural disorders.
There are five stages of change ranging from “precontemplative”, when an individual is unaware of a problem; through to “contemplation”, where they are considering doing something; “preparation”; “action”, where the individual is engaged in addressing his/her difficulty; and “maintenance”, the stage where treatment gains are embedded and locked down.
By combining the assessment of violence risk factors with the stages of change model, the assessor is provided with a structured and systematic process whereby each risk factor can be rated for its potential influence on future violence.
Validation work by Wong has shown that this measure is a good predictor of further violent behaviour and, further, that successful engagement in treatment will reduce a person’s total score and that those reductions in the score on the instrument are associated with lower risks of violent behaviour in the future.
Dr Wong recently held a training workshop in the use of this instrument in Adelaide which was attended by practitioners from a number of Australian states, and also by some psychologists from New Zealand. The immediate impact of that training will be the incorporation of this measure into a Risk Training Package for Corrections’ Psychological Service. However, the general methodology for assessing change in dynamic risk factors has much wider potential applicability, and could, for example, potentially assist those charged with reintegration in focusing their efforts towards those areas of highest need.
Corrections staff emailing sensitive or restricted information to other government agencies can be assured their correspondence is being transmitted securely thanks to SEEMail, email software that automatically encrypts all emails between participating agencies.
“Users can be confident an email received is from the agency claimed and no-one outside the two agencies involved has read the message,” says Manager Information and Technology Derek Lyons.
“This is important for Corrections staff, given the sensitive nature of some of our correspondence,” he says.
Corrections introduced SEEMail to comply with the State Services Commission standards for government-to-government email.
The way users send and receive emails remains the same. SEEMail warnings may alert users to potential problems with the security of their email.
The software provides sufficient security to exchange information classified as “in confidence”, “sensitive” and “restricted”.
This is done by applying SEEMail tags that prevent classified emails being sent by accident to non-SEEMail agencies.
More information on SEEMail is available on Corrections’ internal intranet Corrnet, under Manuals.
Work and Income staff will soon be located in every prison around the country as part of a new drive to help released prisoners find work.
The joint initiative between Corrections and the Ministry of Social Development aims to help offenders make a smooth transition from prisoner to employee.
Manager Operational Policy Richard Bargh says prior to a prisoner’s release, Work and Income will complete skills assessments and match prisoners to employment opportunities in the region they are returning to live in.
“Prisoners who leave prison and find employment have a much better chance of remaining offence free than those who remain unemployed,” says Richard.
Following a successful pilot in Wellington and the Waikato, Corrections will also extend a regional reintegration caseworkers programme into some prisons.
“Reintegration caseworkers will work with prison staff and probation officers to help prisoners with high reintegrative needs move back into the community,” he says.
A supported accommodation service pilot involving eight offenders is also underway in Auckland.
“At some point, most offenders will be released. Being incarcerated means prisoners can lose their homes, their jobs and their relationships can be devastated,” says Richard.
“They can get into a cycle of institutionalisation and never establish what we would call a normal life. These initiatives will help prisoners adjust to life back in the community and reduce the risk they will reoffend.”
Staff have welcomed new training and meeting rooms at Corrections’ head office, as they now have a low-cost venue for large groups to meet.
Training courses or national meetings involving large numbers of attendees can now be held in-house. The largest room can be divided into three smaller meeting rooms with identical facilities. Adjacent training rooms can also be used as one large or two smaller rooms.
In the event of a major power outage, Corrections’ Business Continuity Plan can be coordinated from one of the meeting rooms, powered via a portable generator located outside.
The new rooms were opened and blessed by kaumatua Amster Reedy recently in a dawn ceremony attended by staff and Chief Executive Barry Matthews.
The Public Prisons Service (PPS) continues to develop its recruitment and training systems for new staff, following successful recruitment campaigns in Samoa and the United Kingdom.
The overseas recruitment of staff to work in PPS has gone from strength to strength with a constant flow of enquiries from experienced prison officers keen to work in New Zealand.
Since the ‘Are You a Positive Role Model?’ campaign was launched last October, more than 500 new corrections officers have been recruited. In addition to the new Samoan corrections officers, targeted recruitment activities in the United Kingdom netted applications from over 250 experienced prison officers, resulting in more than 150 officers being appointed. These officers will take up their positions over the next nine months.
Assistant General Manager Corporate Development Susan Provan says recruitment is only one part of the process. “The training and induction of new staff is essential to equip people with the skills, knowledge and support to carry out their role effectively.” PPS has reviewed the content of the Initial
Training Course for new corrections officers to identify what works well and what could be improved as new staff join the Department.
Some corrections officers who had been inducted in the previous six months took part in a series of workshops aimed at getting constructive feedback on the course.
“The officers’ comments were generally positive but they did raise some interesting issues which will be worked through,” says Susan.
A second workshop attended by regional and national training and human resources staff, prison managers and other key operational staff examined issues raised in the first workshop and looked at potential solutions.
“As a result, a plan will be developed to ensure the induction and training needs of all new corrections officers are met, and to identify any issues specific to the new overseas recruits.”
Prisoners may be separated from the wider community, but many will exercise their democratic right to vote in the upcoming general election.
Prisoners sentenced to fewer than three years in prison are entitled to cast a vote so long as they have enrolled to do so.
“Prisoners vote for the electorate in which they last resided for one month or more before coming to prison,” says acting Manager National Systems and Security Karen Urwin.
“Offenders on remand or serving a sentence of home detention are also eligible to vote.”
The processes behind voting in prisons have been fine-tuned in recent years to minimise disruption of the institution, and allow eligible prisoners the opportunity to vote.
Each prison site provides areas for voting papers to be issued and lodged - for example, a dining room or activities room - but the majority of the paperwork is done by the Chief Electoral Office and the Electoral Enrolment Centre in the lead-up to election day.
The Returning Officer, who is responsible for the issuing and collecting of voting papers, contacts the prison when the election date is announced, then again shortly before election day to confirm that prisoners who have applied to vote can do so.
1 Wong S. and Gordon A. “Violence Risk Scale Training Manual 2000”
Dr. 150701
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