The prison that once loomed in splendid isolation over Auckland City was engulfed by housing and light industry from the 1920s. In the late 1960s its setting suffered a further indignity, and one which created a new and ongoing security risk. New on- and off-ramps at Khyber Pass Road on Auckland’s southern motorway swept within metres of the prison at the height of its perimeter wall. The main exercise yard, tramped daily by at least 200 inmates, was suddenly within a stone’s throw of any Aucklander prepared to breach the highway code. On a warm Sunday afternoon in late 1970, a noisy hundred-strong crowd, including several children, took this opportunity. They were led by the Progressive Youth Movement (PYM), the shock troops of New Zealand radical activism, and set out for the prison on foot from Albert Park in the city centre.
The country’s most recognisable radical activist, the shaggy-haired, charismatic face of youth rebellion, Tim Shadbolt, had been admitted to Mount Eden a few days earlier — not for using the word ‘bullshit’ in public, as many of the protesters believed, but for refusing to pay an accumulation of fines for this and various other minor offences. The protest march was intended to show support for him and other political activists held in the prison around the same time, especially Bob van Ruyssevelt and John Bower, serving four and five years respectively for bombing a Parnell air force depot storing equipment for use in the Vietnam War. A solitary traffic officer made a token effort to stop the marchers from swarming onto the motorway, and was brushed aside.
They climbed onto a metre-high crash barrier to gain a better vantage point, and began tossing packets of cigarettes, bags of sweets and other prohibited delights to the inmates in the yard. The prison’s newly appointed superintendent, Jack Hobson, reported the inmates ‘fought amongst themselves to get possession’ of them. When prison officers managed to force the inmates out of reach of this rain of treasure, the protesters threw lighted firecrackers instead. Portable megaphones amplified fiery speeches about the injustices of the prison system and songs promising to ‘blow up the walls’.
Superintendent Hobson had replaced Buckley the year before, with instructions to restore the partially rebuilt prison to an orderly and well-managed state. This protest was one of the first acts of mass insubordination he had faced. ‘It was impossible to clear the yard,’ he told Justice Secretary Robson, ‘and had we attempted to do so we would have had a first-class disturbance on our hands.’1 Nor were the police much help at controlling the protesters. ‘We were caught on the hop by this one,’ admitted Senior Sergeant Rains. ‘I could only muster two constables and didn’t get to the prison until 3.40 p.m.’ The marchers had clearly committed an offence by walking on the motorway but they were unlikely to be charged or deterred from repeating it, since traffic officers had no powers of arrest and could only take the offenders’ names, ‘which are usually fictitious’.
In fact, an identical action took place the following month, when five dozen cans of beer were flung into the exercise yard as an early Christmas present for the inmates. ‘About half burst on impact,’ reported Hobson, ‘but the rest were consumed in record time by those lucky enough to get a can in the general melee.’ Such lightning demonstrations might appear fairly harmless, he told Robson, but they provided an opportunity for more dangerous contraband, such as drugs and firearms, to be delivered to inmates. ‘To be quite truthful, there is no knowing just what has been introduced during the last three such demonstrations.’2 A barbed-wire fence was erected to prevent public access to the on-ramp, and Hobson hoped to forestall further protests by removing some of the instigators from his prison. He regarded the Parnell bombers Bower and van Ruyssevelt as ‘very prominent anarchist prisoners’, and ‘it would be in the interests of discipline to transfer them’.3
Bob van Ruyssevelt, then aged 22, had no prior experience of imprisonment and found it ‘initially quite scary … I was put in a cell with a man who they say had sex with a sheep and then cut its throat. He did nothing to me but showed me a knife he had under his mattress.’ After several months van Ruyssevelt was transferred to Paparua Prison near Christchurch, which appeared little better. Looking back on this time after a half-century with no further convictions, van Ruyssevelt believes that ‘Mount Eden should be bulldozed. Doubling up in cells should not be allowed. There need to be more alternatives to prison such as restorative justice, more mental health support, more education and decriminalisation of drug use.’4
Tim Shadbolt had the highest public profile of the three young activists held in Mount Eden at this time but was not transferred elsewhere, partly because he was serving a much shorter sentence but also because a fellow inmate intervened with Jack Hobson to lessen the impact of his presence on the prison’s functioning. The PYM protesters who first surged up the motorway on-ramp in November had alerted Shadbolt to their plans beforehand, and expected him to be waiting in the exercise yard when they arrived and then to launch into one of his trademark orations denouncing the prison system and calling for solidarity between inmates and other social dissidents. Instead, on that afternoon he was down in the ‘pound’, the punishment cells, where he found himself in the company of long-serving criminals George Wilder and Trevor Nash, an experience the young radical found unexpectedly enjoyable and informative.
Wilder had been released on probation the year before, swearing never to set foot in a prison again. He had spent his first weeks of freedom in the Titirangi, West Auckland, home of Maurice Shadbolt, his loyal supporter and writing mentor (and, coincidentally, Tim’s cousin).5 Like all long-serving ex-inmates, Wilder struggled to adapt to an unfamiliar world with rules of conduct that he had to learn by breaking them. He was well known to Auckland police, and claimed they would not even allow him to linger on a street corner without harassing him. After several months he met up with Trevor Nash, a fellow professional criminal who was then also between sentences. Nash convinced him to improve their finances with a quick illegal enterprise, and both men soon faced a variety of charges including receiving stolen goods.6 The judge felt enough sympathy for Wilder that, for once, no extra term was added to his previous sentence, but he was returned to Mount Eden to serve out the nine years that remained of it.
The legendary escaper was initially wary of the articulate young celebrity installed in an adjacent punishment cell, but for want of other company the two soon forged a friendship and spent every minute of their precious exercise periods in the former execution yard, playing a ferociously competitive version of squash using only their hands and a tennis ball. Shadbolt was younger, fit and naturally athletic, but ‘I never won a single game. He could climb up a wall virtually, and whack that ball back at me.’7 Wilder also enthralled Shadbolt with stories of his days on the run from police. He described evading a manhunt that had surrounded him in a small area of swamp. He sank under the peaty brown water and, in classic prison-break fashion, breathed through a hollow reed, managing to remain undetected even when a police dog trampled over his stomach. Shadbolt offered to help with writing and publishing this picaresque life story, and arranged a sizeable advance on the royalties. Wilder was initially tempted but changed his mind and returned the publisher’s cheque, saying that he planned to avoid all public attention once he was finally released.
Heading for the highway. Progressive Youth Movement members and supporters take the motorway off-ramp to protest the imprisonment of Auckland radical Tim Shadbolt. From the ramp they were able to toss cans of beer to the prisoners in the exercise yard. BARRY LEE COLLECTION
Nash, the career bank robber who had staged a celebrated walk-away escape in 1961, was a very different figure. To Shadbolt, Nash seemed ‘like a caged tiger. He just paced up and down completely naked in his cell.’ He tried to strike up conversation with this intimidating villain, and offered to publicise his experiences, too, in the interests of prison reform. Nash’s response was bluntly unfavourable. ‘He said something like, “You bloody little twat. I’m a criminal. I rob banks. This is how the system works. I make a lot of money for my wife and five kids. I get caught now and again and I do my time. Prison reform? What sort of wanker’s idea is that?”’8
Tim Shadbolt spent almost his entire month-long sentence in the pound with these two, and despite suffering Nash’s contempt, considered himself fortunate to have done so. In fact, he owed this experience to one of Mount Eden’s most unforgettable inmates, the former Māori Battalion commander, Auckland City councillor and expert on traditional weaponry, Colonel Pita Awatere DSO, MC. The year before Shadbolt arrived, Awatere began serving life for the murder of his wife’s lover, and immediately created a lasting impression on fellow inmates and staff, including Superintendent Hobson.
One of those inmates was 17-year-old Te Rangikaheke Kiripātea, who in 1969 was serving his first prison sentence in a large 10-bunk cell in the prison’s south wing. He heard of Awatere’s impending arrival some days before the celebrated, silver-haired figure appeared:
When he first stepped into the wing — aroha, eh? An emotional wave reached out to him. I remember he was quite dark-skinned, very handsome, had a giant presence. He had a lot of dignity even in those circumstances. He was a lot older than the rest of us Māoris … That was when I had an awakening of things Māori — I was hungry for it. We knew that he had this wealth of knowledge, and we’d walk the yards together constantly.9
As well as mentoring young Māori, Awatere, who spoke several ancient and modern languages and could quote Shakespeare by the hour, worked as the prison librarian. In that role he admired Shadbolt’s efforts to encourage other inmates to express themselves in writing. When he learned of the imminent PYM march and Shadbolt’s intention to declaim on criminal justice from the exercise yard, he intervened with prison staff to forestall such naive and foolhardy action. Shadbolt recalls: ‘He knew there’d be a riotous situation and said “Get rid of that student radical”, and they put me in the pound.’10
Superintendent Jack Hobson, in particular, had a very high regard for the polymathic and courteous Awatere, and recognised that his presence in the prison provided an opportunity to address a disturbing trend in the inmate population. By 1970 the proportion of Māori in prison had soared to five times that in the general population, an unprecedented situation due mainly, the government admitted, to ‘the social, economic and cultural pressures associated with migration to an urban metropolis’.11
The exploding number of young Māori inmates placed especially heavy stress on Mount Eden Prison, sited in the heart of the nation’s biggest city and near major Māori centres of population. Hobson therefore gave his uniquely authoritative new resident every encouragement to pass on elements of his traditional knowledge to eager young inmates such as Kiripātea. Awatere eventually held regular classes for at least 30 students in the arts of whaikōrero, taiaha and te reo, and also spoke on behalf of the hosts at welcome ceremonies for visiting Māori. ‘He was obviously the kaumātua of the prison,’ says Kiripātea. ‘In the eyes of the Justice Department, he was the only one who could do that in that situation.’12
Superintendent Hobson was a humane and insightful man who won the admiration of both inmates and Justice Department officials. He hoped that once memories of the 1965 riot began to fade, he could relax the harsh security measures imposed under Buckley, and extend recreation and education programmes for both Māori and non-Māori. Once again, those expectations were thwarted by remorselessly rising inmate numbers. The prison had been renovated to hold just over two hundred inmates, and by early 1971 the muster reached 375. E. A. Missen, the new Secretary for Justice, drew up a 10-year plan that included replacing Mount Eden with a new remand and short-sentence facility, but not, he made clear, ‘as an immediate priority’.13
So, in yet another stopgap measure, the department planned to repair the prison’s two most badly damaged wings, still standing vacant six years after the riot, to cope with the latest crisis in inmate numbers. This vague intention suddenly became much firmer in March 1971, when another riot broke out. It was short-lived and caused little damage, but focused official attention very sharply on the security risks inherent in a grossly overcrowded, understaffed and imperfectly repaired prison.
On 21 March, a Saturday, the two hundred-odd inmates in the main yard were called in from the afternoon exercise period as usual, but about half of them refused to return to their wings. They presented Hobson with a list of demands and grievances that included perennial complaints of poor food and inadequate recreational and medical facilities, but also more imaginative suggestions such as improving the system of payment for prison work, and receiving two clean bedsheets rather than one each week. Hobson promised to forward the list to Wellington, but the rebels were not appeased and threatened to stay out in the yard all night if necessary. After some hours they began to smash its seats and other wooden structures, and some men armed themselves with broken lengths of wood as batons. Hobson later told his superiors that he could do nothing but contain the situation. ‘I just did not have the staff. We would have needed 100 officers’, and his complement was only about half that number.14
As darkness fell the rioters broke into a locked tunnel and acquired a drum of diesel fuel that rekindled their bonfire but also spread burning oil towards cells occupied by other inmates, who then had to be dragged away through the flames by staff. When an attempt was made to break into the kitchen, which might have supplied provisions for an indefinite siege, Hobson abruptly abandoned his hands-off approach. As a newly appointed superintendent, he decided that his response to this revolt would determine his relations with the inmates for the rest of his term. Accordingly, he ordered handguns issued to his officers and instructed them to aim either high or low.
In the volley of gunfire that followed, two inmates were hit by bullets, neither fatally, and the rest surrendered soon afterwards. Five prison staff required treatment for injuries, and for at least one of them, the tenacious officer Ed Marchant, the mounds of charred wreckage left in the exercise yard evoked uncomfortable memories of the 1965 riot. He had been badly beaten on that occasion by Sadaraka and MacMillan, the two young remand prisoners whose escape attempt had precipitated the earlier uprising.
Those considered to be the ringleaders of the latest revolt were transferred to Paremoremo. They included Kiripātea, then aged 19, who remembers ‘having to walk a gauntlet of officers as we went back in. Then they kicked us down the stairs.’15 All the grievances presented to Hobson were dismissed, with Justice Minister Dan Riddiford describing the request for two bedsheets a week as ridiculous.16 With an alacrity typically shown only after such incidents of serious disorder, Cabinet approved plans to repair the prison’s derelict north and east wings, and they were re-opened later that year, providing an extra 143 beds.17 To refute fears that this was a retrograde step, Riddiford added that ‘the need to quit the prison altogether was accepted as an urgent priority’, and he predicted that it would be entirely vacated by 1977.18 Its site would then be used for the promised ‘modern short-term and remand prison’, a premature glimpse of what would take almost 40 more years to come to pass.19
Hobson’s firm and strategic handling of the 1971 riot was admired by both his department and politicians.20 They showed their appreciation by placing him in charge of Paremoremo the following year, where he immediately earned the respect of the hard men of D Block by releasing them from their cells, and walking among them alone and unarmed.21 His replacement at Mount Eden was Jack Rogers, an Englishman who had worked at similarly antiquated high-security prisons in his homeland, such as Pentonville, before moving to New Zealand in the 1950s with a desire to reform rather than replicate such institutions.
Rogers took charge of a prison that was both overcrowded and critically run-down. Even basic toilet facilities were inadequate and a single washbasin might be shared by 48 inmates. All the earlier reform initiatives appeared to have stagnated into a narrow concern for security and rigid regulation. Each weekly tobacco ration, for example, was issued with a single match, though Rogers found that craving inmates managed to use this up to 16 times by splitting it carefully into tiny slivers. ‘It can be done … You dampen the match head first.’22
The only organised recreational activity was a weightlifting class, formed in 1970 by prison officer Mike O’Donnell, who had previously represented Ireland at the sport. After some years at Mount Eden he realised that although the inmates prized physical strength, they had no legitimate way to exert themselves since the closure of the quarry. O’Donnell converted an unused workshop into a crude gym, and equipped it with basic weights and benches made on the premises. He then served as instructor, helped by visiting experts such as the diminutive Commonwealth gold medallist Precious McKenzie.23 The gym remained hugely popular 25 years later, when O’Donnell had become the prison’s longest-serving officer.24
Following the 1965 riot most of the trade-training workshops, such as the cabinetmaking, tailoring, canvas goods and bootmaking shops, were transferred to Paremoremo, and the few that remained produced tubular-steel furniture for government departments, and plastic and paper bags. They could employ only a small number of inmates; the others spent their weekdays in idleness, unable to earn the two-dollar weekly wage that was partly paid out as credit at the canteen and otherwise accumulated for the date of release.25 To increase employment opportunities, Rogers sent about a hundred of the lowest-security inmates — those with short sentences and considered at low risk of escaping or violence — outside the prison walls every weekday on work parties. Some travelled by bus, accompanied by several officers, to work in the large gardens at Paremoremo, where the produce, and the bread from its bakery, fed both prisons.26
Other inmates maintained and painted prison housing and other government buildings, or worked in carpentry, engineering and spray-painting shops alongside the prison. A much smaller number who were soon to complete their sentences were granted the exceptional privilege of pre-release parole, spending weekends away from the prison and returning to it voluntarily on Monday morning. While on parole they were forbidden to drink or drive a car, and remained in the care of an approved sponsor such as a spouse, parent or prison visitor.27 Eventually this scheme expanded to become work-parole, and a select group of inmates was able to hold down jobs outside the prison as part of their reintegration into the community before release. They were housed in a stand-alone unit of modern design and materials, with its own toilet and washing facilities and a tiny kitchen. Its 20 cells were somewhat larger and considerably warmer than those in the main block, especially as they enjoyed an abundance of natural light. The pre-release unit had its own access to the outside world, sparing its occupants the need to pass through the great front gates.28
Soon after Rogers took over, Tim Shadbolt was back inside, once again for refusing, on principle, to pay the various fines he had accumulated. The period between his first and second sentences had been spent in the relative seclusion of a commune on the shores of the Manukau Harbour, and he discovered that over that time his public profile had much diminished, and other inmates were no longer inclined to pay the same regard to his political provocations: ‘I was just a smartarse young hippie trying to interfere with their life.’ On his second day inside he heard a group of inmates singing in Māori and greeted them through the cell door. ‘I said, “Great singing, fellas. I know I’m just a bed and breakfast boy [short-sentenced inmate] but I’d love to join in.”’
Their sour reaction told him instantly that he had made a serious mistake. Later he encountered two of the singers serving up dinner, and found that he would get nothing to eat that night. ‘The queue was building up behind me and I thought, “Man, I’m going to get a hiding. I’m not safe here at all.”’ Shadbolt promptly sought out the prison social worker and asked if any member of the public had offered to pay his outstanding fines. He was told that several people were prepared to repay the $200 owing. ‘I said, “Just pick one and say yes please,” so an hour later I was out of there. I was only in for maybe a couple of nights. It was a sudden dose of reality.’29
This helpful intervention by the prison’s newly appointed social worker was an outcome of Rogers’ determination to revive progress towards rehabilitative measures. Social workers and psychologists now supported the prison chaplain, and the general staff were given training in shifting from ‘a purely custodial role to that of people with the understanding and ability to determine causative factors which made inmates act the way they did’.30
Dr Miriam Jackson (later Saphira) began working as a prison psychologist in late 1975, and remained at Mount Eden for more than a decade. She recalls, ‘I was very conscious of the spiritual nature of the prison. It was full of pain, so you had to adjust with compassion. I can also remember fearing the surly prison officers. On a bad day they would wind some prisoner up and then send him to see us. But I never had any problems with those men — they were always in tears within a few minutes. Many men there had been raped as little boys — I hadn’t expected that.’31
Each day Dr Jackson had to be escorted through eight locked gates to reach her office, where the only toilet facility was a men’s cubicle with no door. ‘Whenever I used it they had to put a trusted inmate on guard with his back to me. He was always very polite. The whole place was damp and my joints ached from arthritis, but some of the men came from much worse conditions outside.’ One inmate made a point of offering cups of tea to Jackson and the other psychologists, and of staying to converse with them. ‘He was very educated and interesting to talk to.’32 This was Colonel Awatere, who died unexpectedly in the prison in early 1976, just months before he was due for parole, apparently of complications from diabetes.
Dr Jackson found mental health issues were almost universal among the prison’s women inmates. ‘I could see the benefits of having a much more therapeutic prison regime where they could learn to deal with their emotions at the moment and heal their childhood backgrounds.’33 For more than 20 years the assistant matron, and then matron, of the women’s prison was Dot Costar. She recalled: ‘We used to ring a bell at 7 each morning to unlock the cells, then breakfast was brought over on trays from the men’s prison … At 8am we had a muster, and the sentenced women were given their jobs for the day. They were all domestic duties like laundry, cleaning the rooms, sewing. Every prisoner could get a free issue of tobacco in those days, and some of the women used to make up these little packs of tobacco for the whole prison.’
The only personal possession women inmates were allowed to keep after sentencing was a wedding ring. ‘They were issued with two complete sets of clothing, right down to underwear.’ These uniforms were a type of long smock for day wear and a lighter one, known as the ‘party frock’, to wear in the evenings and other free time. ‘Even their sanitary towels were all numbered, and the women had to wash them out, then dry them by carrying them around on their belts during the day.’ Evenings were spent watching TV in the recreation room until the 9 p.m. lockup, then listening to the radio in their cells until lights-out at eleven.34
A young remand inmate of the women’s prison in this period recalls that almost all of her fellow prisoners were Māori and ‘lots of them couldn’t read. They had to get other people to read their mail.’ The most terrifying of her fellow inmates was ‘a big woman they called Cochise. She was over six foot and very strong — full of rage and anger. If you saw her coming down the corridor you’d turn and run. She spent most of her time down in “the hole”, where you had to live with the smell of your chamberpot.’ For this terrified first-time inmate, the week’s highlight was the arrival of the ‘special mothers’, voluntary female prison visitors. ‘They were each allocated to four or five of us, and they came and talked to us in our cells. Mine was a lovely Indian lady. It was good to see a face that wasn’t glowering at me.’35
In the following decade a high-profile activist entered the women’s prison. Sandra Coney was an editor of the feminist magazine Broadsheet, which had notably published a treatise on Māori sovereignty by Colonel Awatere’s daughter Donna, a psychologist who had worked at Mount Eden. Coney was arrested along with many others on Waitangi Day 1982, during protests at the Treaty grounds. ‘I had some eggs in my pocket. I hit the Governor-General, Sir David Beattie, twice. He had his plumed hat on.’ She was refused bail — ‘they thought I was dangerous’ — and remanded to the century-old former superintendent’s house alongside the prison, which had housed its female inmates since the chaos of 1965. ‘It seemed to me like a nineteenth-century workhouse. There was absolutely nothing useful to do and nowhere to exercise — just a small yard with a high wall around it. The women had a much worse deal than the men who had far more facilities, such as a gym.’ Sandra Coney remembers the 10 days she spent in this neglected appendage to the main prison as ‘extremely boring. We were only allowed to carry out completely meaningless activity, like putting a tablespoon of sugar into a plastic bag and sealing it with heat. And the food was really terrible. It was cooked in the men’s prison and delivered to us — we weren’t even allowed to do our own cooking.’36
She made use of the enforced idleness by keeping a prison diary, later published in Broadsheet:
The women’s prison is a two-storied late-Victorian wooden house at the end of Lauder Road. Nestled at the foot of the mammoth stone walls of the men’s prison, its honey-bricked exterior looks deceptively homely and innocuous … Upstairs are three cells of 6–8 beds in bunks. One solitary cell is for women on murder charges. Each cell has a lavatory and handbasin behind a partition. Windows are curtainless and kept permanently open. Consequently it is bitterly cold as winter sets in. Remands are locked together in their cells from 5pm till 6.30 in the morning … Boredom hangs around the place, an unwelcome but inevitable visitor. Mornings spent dry-scrubbing floors and afternoons spent embroidering prison numbers on old sheets and packing rations of sugar leave the mind aching for stimulation. Backs ache from long sitting in stiff vinyl chairs; bodies dull and sluggish from lack of exercise … Although Mount Eden is a remand and short-stay institution, women can spend up to eight months there. One woman in my cell had been on remand since January waiting for trial. There were three very pregnant women, one a week away from confinement … All my preconceptions about my fellow inmates proved groundless. They accepted me, shared their knowledge with me and were interested in me and my politics.37
The drawing by Claudia Pond Eyley that accompanied Sandra Coney’s 1982 prison diary published in Broadsheet. COURTESY OF CLAUDIA POND EYLEY
The racial imbalance in this small community was even more marked than in the larger one alongside. ‘Just about every other woman there was a Māori or Pacific Islander,’ Coney remembers. ‘I was a complete abnormal, but they were perfectly friendly.’38
The run-down women’s prison briefly housed another high-profile prisoner a few years later. For her part in the 1985 bombing of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour, Dominique Prieur, a French military intelligence officer, was fortunate to be placed in one of the single cells normally reserved for murderers. Her co-conspirator, Alain Mafart, was in the main prison alongside, and apparently found its conditions so primitive that he requested a transfer to the higher-security Paremoremo.39 Prieur succeeded in improving her own surroundings by persuading staff to provide her with a television, and dumbbells for weightlifting, in her cell. These privileges later became available to other inmates.40
Both the Justice Department and the Ombudsman’s Office had received many complaints about facilities in the women’s section, and work on a new and larger women’s unit, with extra cells and the kitchen and dining facilities that Coney hoped for, began soon after Prieur’s transfer into French custody. It was opened in 1988 and enlarged several years later to accommodate 54 women.41 Even so, by 1997 the library in the women’s prison was just ‘a trolley with a few books on it’, according to one inmate. ‘If you were fast enough, you could grab a Mills & Boon.’ Two years later the reading matter was greatly improved through the efforts of a volunteer, Lynn Dawson, who taught remedial reading to the women inmates. ‘It’s had such a positive effect on so many women,’ she said. ‘You see them come in and they can hardly read and they’ve got no confidence. It’s amazing the difference it makes when they can read better.’42
Another eagerly awaited group of women volunteers gave monthly talks in the men’s prison on sex education. As volunteer Mary Woodward explained: ‘Our family planning talks were part of a pre-release programme run by Prisoners Aid. We gave an hour lecture once a month in the prison chapel for those in the pre-release group who chose to attend, usually between 10 or 20 inmates.’ One of her colleagues had to overcome her nervousness at
the noisy unlocking and locking of heavy doors as we progressed through the prison to the chapel, and certainly we could expect catcalls and remarks from prisoners in their cells on the few occasions they got a peep at us … Our brief was to concentrate on relationship matters often arising from the difficulty or inability many men had in discussing this sort of issue with their partners … While there were often laughs as men opened up about their sexual preferences, the conversations were at times protracted beyond the hour as inmates welcomed the opportunity for straight talk with open-minded females who listened as well as spoke.43
At this time, and for many years afterwards, the Department of Corrections refused to issue condoms to inmates to avoid condoning any form of sexual activity among them. Irrepressible but prudent sexual partners were forced to improvise with alternatives such as ‘a bread bag and butter’, until condoms were eventually supplied by medical staff.44
By 1976 the creaking institution held 430 inmates, the greatest number in its history to that date and more than any other prison in the country. Staff were obliged to work ‘six days a week, sometimes seven’ and their union, the PSA, was ‘gravely disturbed at the failure of successive governments to solve the problem of overcrowding in the prison and the workload on officers’.45 Yet the incumbent government appeared no closer to finding a replacement for the prison than any of its predecessors. In early 1977, the year in which Justice Minister Riddiford had promised that the prison would be permanently shut, its inmates were hard at work repairing battlements that his predecessor had ordered demolished after the 1965 riot. The old prison, Superintendent Rogers surmised with accuracy, ‘will be with us for a fair while yet’.46
In line with international penological practice, Rogers introduced pets to encourage tender feelings among the inmates: a fish tank in the lending library and budgerigars in the pre-release hostel.47 Inmates were also known to feed the pigeons that perched on the ledges of cell windows, but eventually grilles were placed over the ledges to end the practice.48 The daily menu now ran to scrambled eggs at breakfast, with curried sausages and steamed chocolate pudding at night. The improvement that inmates probably valued most was an increased number of showers. They still, of course, had to use chamberpots in their cells at night, since even a vigorous reformer like Rogers could not negotiate the cost of installing modern toilets in cells made from solid stone. Most cells also lacked glass in their heavily barred windows and were therefore bitterly cold in winter.49
Through the 1970s and 1980s, drug use proved an ever-increasing problem. Whether or not their original offence was drug-related, large numbers of inmates were now admitted showing symptoms of recent drug use and withdrawal, and once inside they displayed great determination and ingenuity at smuggling in drugs and paraphernalia such as hypodermic syringes, and at hoarding, swapping and selling prescribed medication.50 Extra vigilance was demanded from staff to manage behaviour and symptoms associated with drug use, including attempted suicide, self-mutilation and sudden decline in physical health, which occasionally proved fatal.
British-born musician Tommy Adderley was admitted for supplying morphine to a persistent acquaintance who proved to be an undercover cop. Adderley had enthusiastically indulged in the cheap Thai heroin that began entering the country from the mid-1970s, and he was a regular user by the time of his arrest.51 He arrived at the prison in August 1981, and a few months later sent friends one of the more insouciant accounts of Mount Eden Prison life on record:
I’m attached to the kitchen and I’m in charge of the prison bread shop. I’m more or less my own boss and work unsupervised most of the time and at my own speed. I start at 5 am until I’m finished. My cell is right next door to the kitchen and in fact the whole kitchen is quite isolated from the rest of the jail. We have our own messroom and TV, plus our own pool and table-tennis tables. We get clean clothes every day, a great hot shower, plus our meals are always fresh and hot. We eat what we like and the tea billy is boiling all day long.52
Adderley maintained that the experience of imprisonment had ended his addiction, but other inmates found no difficulty in sustaining their habits inside. At times the smell of marijuana in the corridors was so strong ‘you could get stoned just walking around’, says former officer Zane Paine. Methamphetamine, or P, later became the drug of choice, as it was easy to conceal inside body cavities and its users could be detected only by problematic behaviour changes. ‘They become violent — erratic would be the word. Even more so when they’re coming down off it.’53
The perennial issue of mental illness among inmates was greatly worsened by the rise in drug use. Rogers gave the example of an inmate returned to the prison from Oakley Mental Hospital who, the following day, ‘stands in the main yard in the midst of the bulk of inmates and threatens to fight all and sundry. It takes six officers to restrain this inmate and place him in a special observation cell. By Sunday, although under medication, he is smashing up his cell and assaulting staff whenever his cell door is opened.’54 For such eventualities a special medical unit was created in the remand wing, with resuscitation equipment and drug antidotes. The hospital had an isolation unit added for infectious patients, and in 1976 Rogers reported: ‘We’ve had three lepers, and a case of hepatitis.’55 As well as three doctors on call and a visiting dentist, the staff grew to include five psychologists, a forensic psychiatrist and a female social worker.
Drug-addled and mentally disordered criminals drew little sympathy from the general public, but from the mid-1970s the country was shaken to learn that Mount Eden’s inmates included children as young as 13, placed there on remand from the Children’s Court. Exposing this practice and campaigning to end it was largely the work of ACORD, the Auckland Committee on Racism and Discrimination, whose members included a public-spirited scientist named Oliver Sutherland:
We had a reasonable relationship with the superintendent of the prison and he let me go in and meet the kids held on remand. I found it a very forbidding place and it horrified me to meet young kids in there, 15-year-olds, who had no idea what was going on. The prison staff didn’t like it. They said it was a hassle for them because they couldn’t keep them separate from the adults. There were stories of these kids sharing cells with deranged drug addicts.56
In 1974 ACORD publicised the case of Kahu W., a 14-year-old Rarotongan schoolboy who was arrested on Auckland’s Queen Street. He had never been in trouble with police before, but because he had no money he was charged with being ‘idle and disorderly’. Lacking legal representation, he pleaded guilty ‘because a police officer told him to’, and was remanded to Mount Eden for a week before being acquitted.57 A stream of ACORD press releases and reports on cases like this, backed by multiracial demonstrations outside the prison gates by concerned Aucklanders including future prime minister David Lange, produced damning newspaper headlines and drove the Justice Department to launch an inquiry headed by Judge Augusta Wallace, who concluded that, ‘Young people should not be remanded to Auckland’s Mount Eden Prison.’58 The inquiry brought no change to sentencing policy, however, and all teenaged offenders from the upper North Island who were remanded in custody were routinely sent there.
ACORD was one of many organisations drawing attention to racial inequity, an issue glaringly apparent in a prison whose muster was now overwhelmingly Polynesian. In 1981 the government’s determination to host a tour by South Africa’s racially selected national rugby team proved a uniting force for these organisations, and their vigorous opposition to the tour gave a number of their members first-hand experience of Mount Eden’s racial imbalance. ‘Initially the prisoners were on the side of rugby,’ remembers Tim Shadbolt, ‘because listening to sport was their escape from the misery of being locked up. But once the numbers of protesters built up and they started to talk about why they were in there, they won the other guys over to their side.’59 Tigilau Ness, of the anti-racist group Polynesian Panthers, served nine months with four other anti-tour protesters. ‘I was lucky to have a protector,’ he said, ‘a Polynesian Panther who looked after the five of us. I’d wake up and he’d be at the foot of my bed, guarding us.’60
Auckland criminal lawyer and future PM David Lange (at back, obscured) is among the placard-holders at this 1976 protest organised by ACORD (Auckland Committee on Racism and Discrimination) against the practice of remanding children to Mount Eden Prison. AUCKLAND LIBRARIES HERITAGE COLLECTIONS, NZMS 521-347-7
In 1983 the prison was split into three self-contained divisions: a general, a remand and a women’s prison, each with its own youth section. This meant subdividing the exercise yards into eight smaller areas bounded by wire fencing (and later by concrete walls), which at last enabled the complete segregation of remand, sentenced and young inmates. A nine-bed medical wing opened in place of the old infirmary.61 The basement of the north wing was converted into observation cells for psychiatrically disturbed inmates, whose number increased sharply after the city’s psychiatric hospitals introduced new admissions criteria. This, said one prison officer, ‘practically negates the provision for disturbed inmates to be transferred’ from the prison.62
Although it had lost its maximum-security status, the reconfigured Mount Eden sometimes held as many as 20 inmates on murder charges, and the 22 cells in the high-security block, known as the ‘separates division’, were often insufficient for the prison’s needs. Among their occupants were escapers from both Mount Eden and other institutions, the very disruptive, those who had asked to be kept apart from others, and ‘certain transvestites and active effeminate homosexuals who have to be segregated from the mainstream of the inmate community’.63 An ever-increasing number of inmates asked to be held in the separates division, generally because they had been charged with the sexual assault of children. The incidence of those crimes increased from 1989, when children were permitted to give evidence in court in the form of video interviews.64
Members of rival gangs such as the Mongrel Mob and Black Power also had to be kept apart from each other as much as possible, as ‘inevitably there is ill feeling between the various groups’.65 The Mongrel Mob, regarded by staff as ‘the toughest of the tough’, were first isolated in E Block but were still able to intimidate other inmates, such as remand prisoners wearing prized footwear or warm clothing.66 They also upheld the prison’s sorry reputation for insecurity that had earned it the nickname of the Outward Bound School.
In September 1983, four gang members on remand sawed though the bars of their cell before dawn with a smuggled hacksaw blade. They climbed onto the roof of the former security block, then over the perimeter wall using plaited blankets.67 Two years later, a bloody brawl erupted in one of the exercise yards as more than 30 members of the rival Mongrel Mob and Black Power gangs fought with iron bars, chisels from hobby carving activities and other improvised weapons. Three were hospitalised and others treated within the prison.68
Finally, in 1987, general manager Brendan Moynihan cracked down on gang culture, and placed members of the same gang in different wings. This may have reduced their ability to exercise dominance over specific areas of the prison, but they remained a formidable threat. Just three years after the crackdown, six Mongrel Mob members pulled off an evidently well-planned escape. During the evening recreation period, when sentenced inmates from two blocks were allowed to mingle, they stabbed one officer with a knife and bashed two more with metal table legs to acquire a set of keys. With these they opened a series of doors, and reached an exterior yard where a long ladder was waiting for them. They climbed the perimeter wall and dropped the considerable distance onto a grass verge. A heavy wire fence still separated them from freedom, but a hole had been cut in it and a gold Ford Falcon was parked across the road. At high speed the six headed north, pursued through the back roads by a convoy of police vehicles. Prison staff blamed the escape, with good reason, on relentless staff cuts. Only four prison officers were on duty in the block where the attack took place, down from eight three months earlier.69
The actions of ungovernable prison inmates like these tended to overshadow incidents of generosity and compassion. When Peter Mauriri, a popular officer with 14 years’ service, died suddenly on duty in 1987, almost every one of the 354 inmates contributed towards a koha from their minimal weekly allowance. They collected this sum at their own initiative as a sign of their respect for Mauriri and sympathy for his wife and children. ‘Peter Mauriri got on very well with everyone,’ said Gerry Guy, the chair of the Mount Eden group of the Prison Officers Association, which had largely replaced the PSA as the staff’s representative body. ‘The inmates’ collection was a measure of the respect they had for the man.’70
The prison had become a short-term holding pen where, typically, inmates were classified and then moved to a more suitable institution elsewhere, usually staying for no more than a fortnight. Most were on remand or awaiting transfer to longer-stay institutions. The smaller number of sentenced prisoners served no more than six months and half their term was routinely remitted for good behaviour.71 After their evening meal they had a few hours to watch TV, lift weights, and play pool, darts and chess. Christmas Day was the highlight of the year. Cultural groups arrived from around the city to perform and lead the inmates in singing, and they had a choice of two feature films.72
Only sentenced inmates wore the dark-blue prison uniform and were allocated jobs in the furniture-making workshops or servicing the prison facilities. Since nothing in the way of trade training or pre-release experience could be expected in the relatively short period they spent there, the limited range of jobs was keenly contested. The kitchen was preferred to the laundry, which handled all the sheets, towels and uniforms. The laundry’s moist atmosphere, however, suited the flax used for traditional weaving, and large bunches of it hung from the ceiling. At times inmates were able to contribute to community projects beyond the prison walls. In an echo of the track-cutting project on Rangitoto Island 70 years earlier, hundreds of native seedlings were raised with the help of the Forest and Bird Society, and planted out by low-security prisoners on the Meola Reef public reserve, a former rubbish tip near Westmere.73
The staff, once populated by implacable ex-servicemen or failed candidates for the police force, were giving way to younger people and, to the alarm of the older officers, to women. In 1986, at least a decade after North America, Britain and Australia had broken this barrier, the first woman officer was employed to work in the men’s division. Linda Brougham did not have to carry out full-body searches, but her duties were otherwise no different from those of her colleagues. The inmates ‘have been very respectful’, she reported, ‘and have probably toned down their behaviour’.74
In time, it became apparent that female officers could bring distinctive qualities to their work. ‘Male inmates will talk to a female officer about things that they would never discuss with a male,’ one of them found, ‘like they’ll talk about their families and their relationships. They’ll discuss their personal problems.’75 Cathalena Sinclair, a Samoan-born mother of six, joined the staff in 1989. ‘I’m a Pacific Islander and we can have an impact on our people … We sort of put a calm on them here and so they feel a bit more relaxed while they’re doing their time.’76 Zane Paine, longtime Mount Eden corrections officer and union delegate, said that ‘having women in the [men’s] prison was one of the most positive changes I saw’.77
By the time Beth McLeod joined the staff around the end of the century, she was one of 20 women officers in the men’s prison. As an out lesbian she had chosen not to work in the women’s prison where she might be ‘at much greater risk of false accusations’ of sexual harassment. When she first arrived at her new workplace, she recalls, ‘I was struck by the testosterone smell. There’s very little natural light and you’re enclosed in the walls like an inmate … In the prison culture you encounter a lot of sexualisation, and you need to have a very good sense of humour.’ As it happened, some of her own colleagues proved at least as challenging as the inmates, and in 1998 she won $12,000 compensation from the Auckland Employment Tribunal after her unit manager was found to have harassed her about her sexual orientation.78
McLeod learned that the job also required a highly tuned instinct for imminent violence. ‘You might be watching a yard from the bridge, with ninety inmates all walking around. There’s a stereo going, someone’s kicking a ball, it’s a nice sunny day. Suddenly the music stops and the men stop walking. You know something’s going to happen but you don’t know what. Could it be a riot? A mass escape or a fight? Or will some of them jump up on the bridge and take you hostage? When an inmate eyeballs you and says, “I’m going to kill you,” to feel love, empathy and compassion in that moment is quite difficult.’79
That very situation confronted her colleague Raewyn Abbott, the remand unit manager, in 1996. She was approached in her office by two inmates who suddenly produced improvised knives made from razor blades melted into the plastic handles of cutlery, and held them at her throat. To hamper her movement they took her shoes off, cut down the front of her shirt and tied her hands behind her back. They then took her car keys and, with an arm linked through each of hers and their blades against her neck, ordered her to walk with them to the front gate. That journey took them through the visitors’ room and down a flight of stairs, passing numerous staff on the way.
Some thought she was the victim of a practical joke, as she was due to be married two days later. Other staff recognised an escape attempt but did not intervene for fear that the highly agitated men would carry out their threat to fatally slash their colleague. Once through the main gates, the two men unlocked her car; staff surrounded it, but watched helplessly as she was pushed onto the back seat with one man straddled on top of her. Then came a moment of fortuitous confusion as the other hostage-taker was unable to start the car. In that time Abbott succeeded in freeing her hands and unlocking a rear door. Another officer gave the signal to lunge at the kidnappers, and Abbott was rescued unharmed. Remarkably, she returned to work three months later. ‘I didn’t want those guys to affect the rest of my life,’ she said, and at the time of writing she continues to work with the Department of Corrections.80
Abbot’s experience resulted in several new protocols for dealing with crises in the prison. Emergency flipcharts were developed to guide staff through critical decisions, and specialist debriefing was made available to those traumatised by life-threatening events. Staff were no longer expected simply to ‘harden up’ after terrifying ordeals like hers.
At least as transformative as the influence of women officers on the culture of the prison was the gradual recognition that Māori culture was inherent to the institution. Just as in wider society, this was an uneven and troubled process that brought dissension and obstruction as well as goodwill. An important step came in 1985 when Reverend Nehe Dewes, from a prominent East Coast family, was appointed prison chaplain, the first Māori to hold this post in the prison’s hundred-year history. He introduced services in both Māori and English, and hoped one day to see a Māori cultural centre.81 More immediately, however, Reverend Dewes became concerned at the rising rate of suicide attempts, bizarre behaviour and violent disorder among the inmates, and particularly among the Māori majority.
In the year he arrived there were eight suicides at the prison. In 1986, on three successive weeks, inmates climbed to the roof of the main building to protest the conditions of their confinement. Since they were in full view of passing vehicles, and provided striking press and TV images, their actions were widely publicised. The last of these episodes of ‘roof-walking’ was made by two young remand inmates, Gary Hobson and Jackie Waru, who spent an 18-hour vigil on adjacent turrets. Their demands for toilets and washbasins in cells, extra time out of cells in summer, and better facilities and food for remand inmates were not granted. Instead, the prison announced that protruding metal collars would be attached to the drainpipes in the exercise yards to prevent further rooftop sit-ins, and until those were installed the pipes would be kept well greased.82
The Justice Department was inclined to attribute the sharp increase in these incidents of disorder and suicide to the growing number of people with psychiatric problems admitted to the prison, and to an increase in suicide in the general population. Others, however, saw them as symptoms of spiritual unrest, especially in the case of Māori inmates psychically damaged by confinement in a site of concentrated suffering. Attention was drawn to the row of gravestones marking where execution victims were buried. Dr Ranginui Walker, chair of the Auckland District Maori Council, pointed out that Māori inmates were, ‘in effect, living in an urupa (sacred burial ground) which is a grievous transgression of Maori custom’.83
Ethnologist David Simmons claimed that Māori inmates generally, and especially those from Whakatōhea, the tribe to which some of the executed men had belonged, were in spiritual danger. ‘I think it would be a wise move on behalf of the Justice Department to move Maori people … from the prison until a tohunga-matakite [priestly seer] says it is safe.’84 These views were at first strongly opposed by the newly appointed prison superintendent, Humphrey Stroud, who considered that, ‘this thing has been blown out of proportion … We are very alert to the Maori side of things and we are very aware of the needs of different people.’ He doubted that anyone could reliably identify those who lay beneath his prison’s asphalt. ‘They have been there for more than 100 years and people have been walking on them ever since.’85
Stroud had first entered Mount Eden as a junior officer in 1956, and after the 1965 riot was decorated for heroism in rescuing trapped inmates from the flames. He was appointed superintendent in 1984 and resisted efforts to exhume the buried bodies for the next five years. Stroud was finally overruled in 1989, when the all-night exhumation described in the introduction to this book was permitted to take place. That pivotal event marked a distinct break with the policies and practices of the past. Mount Eden no longer fulfilled a secondary function as a historic cemetery, and the bodies lying there were granted the long-overdue dignity of reburial in sites where they were welcomed. By finally acknowledging differing cultural practices, and attempting to reckon with historic injustice, the macabre yet moving exhumation ceremony may have relieved some of Mount Eden’s accumulated burden of spiritual anguish.
Although Superintendent Stroud was reluctant to accept such arguments, he welcomed multi-million-dollar renovations that the Justice Department hoped would ‘shake off the place’s forbidding reputation’.86 The urgency of this work was undeniable. The electrical wiring had become so old and faulty that an electrician was permanently employed just to keep circuits operating. Sewage leaked from damaged pipes into the exercise yards, and on occasion flowed down a ramp towards the basement kitchen in E Block, where inmates struggled to repel it with brooms and fire hoses. Rats heard rustling in the walls proved to be the size of cats, too fat to fit through clay drainpipes.87
For inmates, the most eagerly welcomed refurbishment carried out on Stroud’s watch was the once-unimaginable luxury of flushing toilets in every cell. High-powered drills bored through solid basalt walls, producing a deafening din that caused entire rows of cells to be temporarily vacated, but as soon as their toilets were functioning, inmates clamoured to be transferred to them, ending the morning ritual of emptying pisspots into a reeking stainless-steel drain.
Even these costly renovations proved incapable of elevating a listed historic building to modern standards, especially as it was consistently overcrowded and understaffed. During 1987 prison staff repeatedly resorted to short-term industrial action and refused to accept further inmates until the ‘muster’ fell below 366, the largest number they believed could be held securely and humanely. These actions were coordinated with the staff of Carrington psychiatric hospital, a symbiotic institution whose patients were regularly transferred to and from Mount Eden. In September 1987, Carrington staff refused to take further patients referred by the courts, while prison officers banned new admissions until 21 psychiatrically disturbed inmates could be held separately from the main body. This calculated stalemate was resolved by building a new psychiatric wing on the site of the former work-parole unit for day-release inmates, which was moved elsewhere.88 In addition to these stopgap measures, Missen’s 1971 plan for a purpose-built Auckland Regional Prison was given new priority, and the department promised that a five-storey medium-security prison for 120 male and female inmates would be ready for use by 1989.89 This and later deadlines came and went with no sign of construction activity.
Even as the superannuated prison entered its drawn-out final phase of life, it continued to reassert its reputation as ‘the hardest jail in New Zealand — worse than Parry’.90 Career bank robber Simon Kerr made national news in 1994 when he and fellow inmate Shane Thorne climbed up a new ventilation shaft and set up camp in the turret, using mailbags and plastic sheeting for shelter.91 Kerr says they made their protest after seeing a friend, Tamati Gray, dragged down to the punishment cells with a broken arm. Thorne came down from the roof after a week, but Kerr held out for 13 days until, in an operation that gained maximum media coverage, a mobile crane swung a cageload of prison officers in riot gear above his barricade. In full view of TV cameras, they leaped down on Kerr. ‘I fought them to the end,’ he says, but he was hauled into the cage and, battered but defiant, sent to solitary for three months.92
Kerr had spent several earlier terms in the prison, starting at age 16, and had already escaped from it twice.93 Mount Eden was evidently unsuitable for such high-risk remand inmates, but all other prisons were too distant from inmates’ families, lawyers, probation officers and courthouses. Paradoxically, the long-sentenced inmates of Paremoremo may have posed fewer risks than those facing serious charges on remand since, according to one officer, ‘remands are more tense because they’re not sure what sentence they’re looking at, so they’re quick to react to anything’.94
In yet another security upgrade, banks of remote-controlled cameras were installed, monitored from offices beneath the Dome, and unsightly rolls of razor wire topped the outer walls to discourage escapes.95 For many years inmates and their visitors spoke through a clear screen running down the middle of a long table. The screen was removed in the early nineties, but inmates thereafter greeted their visitors attired in close-fitting orange jumpsuits, elasticised at wrists and ankles and with a zip at the back to discourage concealment of contraband such as drugs and cellphones.
Sentenced prisoners were confined in the south wing. They could use a small gym in the east wing exercise yard once used for executions, and the condemned cells were replaced by a kitchen that offered cereal and toast for breakfast, sandwiches and filled rolls for lunch, and a varying menu for dinner. In a development unimaginable a few decades earlier, the kitchen catered for vegan, vegetarian and pork-free diets.96
For remand inmates, who were denied work duties, the days passed monotonously and were spent mainly in cramped cells with twin steel bunks. The only natural light came from a small barred window in the back wall, and the lack of heating meant bone-chilling cold in winter, when the infirmary was thronged with cases of colds and flu. These patients were issued with extra blankets and their families could bring them warm clothes, although these might immediately be requisitioned by heavies in the exercise yards.97 Three hours each morning and afternoon were spent in these barren enclosures, playing bruising games of basketball and ‘crash’ — a cross between rugby and bullrush. During scorching midsummer weather, the water cannons in the watchtowers were occasionally turned on to provide relief for inmates, although the city council complained that this caused the water pressure in the surrounding area to drop markedly.98
For young and first-time inmates the yard could be a terrifying place, dominated by gang members.99 Requiring juvenile inmates to mix with adults breached a 1993 United Nations convention, but was enforced at Mount Eden on the doubtful grounds that older inmates exercised ‘a stabilising effect on younger ones’.100 Under this regime, and despite a growing awareness of the particular mental health needs of its most vulnerable inmates, Mount Eden gained the dire status of the prison with the highest rate of suicide in the country.101 Ten inmates killed themselves in 1997 alone. Most were on remand, young, Māori or Polynesian, or all three.
David Tufala, just 15 years old, killed himself while inmates in adjoining cells were frantically ringing their cell alarms and calling for guards. The alarms failed to register at the prison’s control centre due to a problem with the power supply. A few months later, 18-year-old Eruera Maaka, who had begged the sentencing judge not to remand him to Mount Eden, was also dead. In a letter to his family two days earlier, he wrote that ‘the kingpin wants to smash me … I really have nowhere to run. I might as well stay here and get gangbashed.’102
Most suicides chose the same method — threading plaited bedsheets around the bars of their cell window, then slumping down until their bodyweight caused them to stop breathing. Losing consciousness was believed to take about 45 seconds.103 Corrections officers grew accustomed to opening the heavy cell doors and finding a body to be cut down. Eventually, whether the victim was Māori or Pākehā, prison authorities established the practice of asking a local kaumātua to deliver incantations in the cell before a new inmate was placed there.
The primary suicide-prevention tool available to the prison authorities was a risk-assessment form. All inmates filled this in when assessed on admission, and if they gave two or more positive answers to questions about drug and alcohol use or family problems, they were sent to a 16-bed ‘special unit’ whose cells had no sharp corners, non-rip sheets and no bars to tie them to, and 24-hour video surveillance. Three of the cells, for ‘highly active suicidals’, were entirely bare apart from a small metal drain in the corner; their occupants wore special ‘suicide gowns’ made from non-rip material and without zips or buttons. The flaw in this vetting process was the pride that teenage offenders took in appearing ‘staunch’ and refusing to admit to vulnerabilities.104 The prison’s suicide rate remained appalling, and in 1998 the Howard League for Penal Reform held a protest meeting to condemn it. Over 300 people called for legislation making it illegal for young people to be held in Mount Eden, and for its urgent demolition or closure.105
Neither of these demands was met for more than a decade, but as the twenty-first century began a few prison staff introduced a more compassionate approach to engaging with inmates that eventually brought a noticeable lifting of the oppressive atmosphere. The longstanding practice among senior staff, in particular, had been to treat both inmates and each other with a distant and heartless severity, and some officers competed to write up the greatest number of misconduct reports. The routine response to inmates struggling to cope with prison life was ‘Harden up — do your lag’. That harsh ethos proved damaging to the domestic lives of the officers themselves, and their profession had a dismal record for marital stability. ‘If guys are calling out to you at work all day,’ said one divorced officer, ‘when you get home the last thing you want to do is talk.’106
Younger staff began instead to treat inmates as individuals rather than adversaries. A new system of sentence planning was introduced, with each prison officer assigned a group of up to eight inmates to monitor and support. The officers then developed individual sentence plans for those on remand, and these became rehabilitation plans if the inmates were sentenced. Beth McLeod, an advocate of this approach, said she and her like-minded colleagues had become ‘like social workers, because we’re there to help them, to rehabilitate them’.107 The old guard responded by referring to these officers as ‘tree-huggers’, and insisted that inmates would exploit any sign of weakness or loss of authority among the staff. That risk, however, had always been present, and was eventually addressed by a separate training programme to alert staff to exploitation by inmates.
Peter Williams QC, president of the Howard League for Penal Reform, called for improved conditions for remand inmates during the 1994 rooftop protest by Simon Kerr and Shane Thorne, who are shown in the background of this photograph. NEW ZEALAND HERALD
Sentence planning proved less effective at Mount Eden than in other prisons around the country because inmates were not held there long enough to develop a constructive rapport with their assigned officers. Even so, the early results were so encouraging that staff who initially disparaged the new system began to adopt it. By that time, however, construction had begun in earnest on the long-promised remand prison, and disused outbuildings were demolished to make way for the floor slab of the brand-new structure. No one in the durable old relic alongside could doubt that the death sentence imposed on the prison decades earlier would soon be carried out. All thoughts of sentence planning and other policy initiatives were swept aside, and a drawn-out but inexorable shutdown began.
The inmate muster had reached more than 500, and every one of them had to be securely relocated to a prison elsewhere in the country or to the brand-new Auckland Central Remand Prison (ACRP) standing alongside their own. This $40 million facility, housing 250 remand inmates, opened in July 2000 and became the main reception prison for newly remanded male prisoners in the Auckland region. As each of its gleaming new wings was completed, it was rapidly occupied by Mount Eden inmates, escorted in groups along a temporary elevated tunnel that linked the old and new buildings. Not all inmates welcomed the chance to leave an iconic institution which, for all its discomfort and inconvenience, held a reputation and prestige that its replacement could never match. ‘Hey boss, the Rock’s the Rock,’ these unwilling evacuees told Neville Mark who, as Mount Eden’s last prison manager, was charged with managing the shutdown.108
Mount Eden’s remaining women inmates were moved in 2006 to a new purpose-built women’s prison in Manukau City, and their former accommodation became a reintegration unit for low-risk sentenced prisoners who were approaching the date of their release.109
The ‘honey-brick’ prison superintendent’s house was built c.1894, near the main prison buildings. The house became the women’s prison in 1923 and was vacated by 1988, when a new women’s prison was built. The building was demolished in the first years of the twenty-first century to make room for a new Auckland Central Remand Prison. DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS
For all its state-of-the-art equipment and polished appearance, ACRP soon acquired a notoriety to rival its incorrigible neighbour. Mount Eden was the first prison in New Zealand to be administered by a private company, initially the Australian-based GEO Group. A new Labour government was elected in 1999 with a commitment to return it to state operation, but the fee for breaking the management contract obliged them to wait until the contract came up for renewal in 2005. Five years later the National Party was in coalition government, and the prison was re-privatised, with the contract awarded to the British conglomerate Serco. This proved a fraught relationship, and after inmates were found to be running ‘fight clubs’, allegedly with staff taking bets on the outcome, Serco’s contract was revoked in 2015.
The last 50 or so sentenced inmates in Mount Eden spent their final days in the prison repainting its interior walls, and cleaning everything as thoroughly as the antiquated decor allowed. The gloomy, subterranean kitchen had been closed down, so meals were brought over to them from the immaculate facility next door. A supply of 50 mattresses and other bedding was kept in storage for unspecified future requirements. ‘We had to mothball the place,’ said Mark, ‘but at the same time keep it ready to re-open at six months’ notice depending on the national prisoner muster, or in case of an emergency like a riot at another prison.’110 Some of the remand prison’s innovative security measures could be enforced across both institutions, helping to keep Mount Eden’s final years almost trouble-free. All people and vehicles entering either prison now had to pass through a single entranceway where they could be checked by sniffer dogs for drugs, weapons and other forbidden items such as unauthorised mail.111
As the inmate numbers steadily dropped, Mount Eden’s resident rat population did likewise. With less food and other comforts available to them, the rats proved more willing to sample the poison baits that for decades had been routinely laid around the corridors. ‘Rats know not to eat a bait except when a place is closing,’ Mark discovered. He also noticed that the pigeons fluttering around the turrets and upper windows grew much bolder and came up the front steps and into the Dome offices every morning. ‘It was as though they were taking back their own property.’
A series of valedictory barbecues and other muted celebrations were held for both inmates and staff in the final weeks. They had been told that soon after the shutdown, part of the old building was likely to re-open as highly distinctive office space for Department of Corrections administrative staff, and there were also rumours of a small museum of the country’s penal system. As a result, the formal closing ceremony on 8 July 2011 was a quiet and low-key occasion. After so many strident demands over the previous century for the prison to close, the reality was greeted not with rejoicing but with a mild and nostalgic regret by the skeleton staff present. The national flag flying above the main gates was solemnly lowered, then ceremonially folded and passed to a succession of senior staff, along with the keys to the prison.
‘There wasn’t a great sense of finality,’ Mark recalled, ‘because quite a few of us had already started working in the new prison next door and some of the others expected to be back at Mount Eden once it reopened as regional office space. But even so, there was a real sense of sadness that day. The staff would have loved to stay on. For them it felt like leaving home.’
More than 150 years after the first convicts were delivered to the Stockade, and almost a century after the last stones were laid for the building that replaced it, the old prison’s walls no longer confined those sentenced for breaking the law. By then it had outlasted so much vilification, and survived so many calls for its demolition, that to those who knew it best the building seemed almost benign, and reassuringly abiding. The old villain had finally been rehabilitated, and its sentence planners looked forward to its future after a long life of crime.