The week after I first visited Rimutaka, I visited Arohata – the women’s prison. I’d gone to the prison half a dozen times already, to drop off books, letters, newspapers and visitors forms; I knew the prisons were different. At Arohata they weren’t set up for supporters. At Rimutaka there were signs, forms and boxes for anything we might want to do. At Arohata they weren’t as rigid, but after a week they wouldn’t let us drop any more newspapers off, because they’d never seen this number of newspapers.
I got to Arohata half an hour early – just like I did at Rimutaka. When I rang the bell they told me that visiting didn’t begin for half an hour and I’d have to wait outside. About ten minutes later another woman came, she was Maori and there to visit her mother. She’d come down from Palmerston North and we talked a little bit as we waited. I leaned against the fence, and she sat on the grass. She was pregnant, and needed to pee. I wanted to fight for her to get in and get a proper seat, but I’d already spent long enough in the prison system to know that it would just make me tired and get us nowhere.
Theoretically women prisoners on remand have much more visiting time than male prisoners on remand. Visiting time was in two hour blocks, rather than one hour blocks. All visiting time is cut into by the slowness of the prison system, but at the men’s prisons they at least seemed to be expecting visitors. At the women’s prisons they didn’t even realise we were coming, until visiting time began.
As I said, from 12pm Monday 15 October to 4.01pm Thursday 8 November my happiest hours were spent prison visiting. While I was visiting I knew that they were really there, and that they were still them and fears that I couldn’t even acknowledge dissipated.
But visiting at Arohata made me so sad, sad and angry, because the other female prisoners didn’t seem to get visitors. The woman I’d waited on the grass with was the only other visitor the day I was there, and when other friends had visited the day before, none of the other remand prisoners at Arohata had got visits.
There are fewer remand prisoners at Arohata than there are at Rimutaka (18 vs 81 in the 2003 prison census). There are only three women’s prisons in the country, so women as far away as Gisborne would be held in Wellington. But even taking the numbers into account there were five times as many visitors over two days at Rimutaka, than two days at Arohata.
I don’t think that I can extrapolate out total support from two days of visiting, but there’s other evidence that implies this is a pattern. Three times as many women as men had custody of children immediately before they were locked up (35.5% vs. 12.1%). For men, almost 80% of the children were looked after by their partner or ex-partner. Whereas for women less than 25% of children were looked after by their partner or ex-partner (full figures here. Instead it’s immediately family, larger whanau or CYFS.
Women do the work when men go to prison, and when women go to prison there isn’t necessarily anyone to fill the gap.
Great post, again. Couple of quick questions, though, which would help my understanding if you have a moment to answer them:
-what’s a “remand prisoner” and are they different from other prisoners?
-Does NZ have prison levels like the U.S. (different security levels and harshness)? Does it have two systems (we have state and federal prisons)? Where in the NZ scheme is this type of prison?
-are the prisoners you’re visiting the same three friends you talk about in “where I’ve been”?
thx
I know you have remand prisoners in America, but I don’t know what they’re called. They’re prisoners who have been arrested but not released on bail who are waiting for trial. Like I said in my previous post bail is much esaier to get in NZ than it is in America. Remand prisoners are kept seperate from the rest of the population and theoretically have more visiting time, because they haven’t been convicted of anything.
New Zealand only has one prison system and one jurisdiction. The prisons I’m referring to are the prisons for women and men in the Wellington region (133 and 637 prisoners respectively at the last census. The nearest male prison is two hours drive away, the nearest women’s prison is 10 hours drive away. So the prisons hold almost all remand and sentanced prisons in the Wellington Region.
There is one other prison in the region, but that caters only for segregated male prisoners. Segregated prisoners are prisoners who ask to be separated from the general population for their own safety. People who have abused children, police officers, narks and so on.
I also visited Auckland Central Remand Prison and Auckland Women’s Region Corrections Facility. They’re what their names describe. The women’s prison holds female prisoners for the entire Upper North Island, and the remand prison is specifically for prisoners who are on remand.
There are different levels of security classification within the prisons, low, low medium, high medium and high. And different units within the prisons have slightly different regimes. But each of the prisons I visited held a wide variety of prisoners in the region.
As far as I could tell, most of the differences between the units prison were to help manage prisons. For example, in Auckland Central Remand Prison there were two units that were paired together – one had ten different gangs in it and was really violent, with prisoners beating each other up all the time. After one night in that unit, my friend was moved to the paired unit, which held mostly deportation cases, and people who wouldn’t get into fights (or would lose them – my friend was most). The threat in the less violent unit was that if people misbehaved they’d go back to the other unit, where they would get the shit beaten out of them (because if people who left and came back obviously weren’t hard enough).
There didn’t seem to be anything like that within the women’s prisons, but that was because there were so many fewer prisoners. I think it may be slightly different with sentenced prisoners, but not that different.
Yes – my friends were arrested on Arms Act charges awaiting to see if they were going to be charged under the Terrorism Suppression Act.
This is a digression, so please remove as you like, but I’d love to learn the reasons behind the disparity that you’ve observed.
Thanks, Maia, for the explanation. Yes, you’re correct that we have many prisoners awaiting bail hearings, and others who have been denied bail but are not yet tried. The bail system is actually a source of great prosecutor abuse, though I won’t side track here (ask me some time if you’re curious.)