Behind Bars by Anna Leask

Author:Anna Leask [Leask, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143770275
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2013-04-08T00:00:00+00:00

It’s no secret that sometimes guards stray from the straight and narrow — becoming prison drug and contraband carriers, getting too heavy-handed with the inmates and, surprisingly often, having inappropriate relationships with them.

Back in 2000 a guard at Auckland Prison was caught with $200 cash on him as he left his shift in the highest-security wing. He’d been selling cannabis oil capsules to the inmates, who were paying big bucks for the drugs. A couple of years later a guard was sacked at Mount Eden after he admitted meeting the associate of an inmate outside the prison grounds and discussing how to smuggle in marijuana. When questioned about the meeting the guard said he wanted to take the drugs in so he could stay in favour with the inmates.

A prime example of a guard gone bad hit the headlines in 2009. Jeffrey Mark Reid was a senior manager at Rimutaka Prison, a man with two decades of experience as a guard, who had been assigned to run one of the high-security units that housed volatile and dangerous gang members. His downfall came after a month-long covert police operation investigating a drug ring. The culprits were growing cannabis outside Rimutaka and bringing it in to sell to inmates. Reid was arrested and charged with cultivating cannabis and conspiracy to supply, and when he was sentenced to one year’s home detention he claimed to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, the result of being assaulted more than a decade ago by a prisoner while he was at work. The trauma from that assault, he said, was compounded by the fact that during his tenure as a guard he discovered the bodies of three inmates who had killed themselves in separate incidents. Alongside Reid, three prisoners and two women were charged, but Corrections was quick to point out that the incident did not indicate corruption within the department or prison system, and that Reid’s actions were not reflective of the work of most prison guards.

While it’s usually drugs that get guards into trouble, there are also plenty of tales of inmate–staff relationships. Over an eight-year period from 2007, 10 prison staff were fired as a result of relationships with inmates deemed to be inappropriate — including some who were caught having sex with prisoners. At the time Hanlon said he was surprised the number wasn’t higher, given there were more than 4000 guards employed across the country’s 18 prisons. He suspected the ‘inappropriate relationships’ uncovered by Corrections were more to do with financial or business deals between staff and inmates, rather than anything sexual — but that did happen. Over the years there have been many allegations levelled regarding relationships between female prison guards and inmates, but few of those have been proven.

At the Otago Corrections Facility, one staffer reportedly entered a ‘private, non-camera monitored room’ with a prisoner and spent 40 minutes inside with him. She was suspended, but eventually reinstated, with Corrections saying that after a thorough investigation into

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