The dismaying bleakness of the penal institution at Mount Eden presents a daunting literary challenge to a writer. Few heartwarming and uplifting anecdotes emerge from such places, so those that do deserve particular mention.
In early 1877, Mary Ann Kane, aged 20, entered the women’s section of the prison. The facts of her crime were plain, and cruelly common. She had migrated from Ireland three years earlier and found work as the chambermaid of the Thames Hotel in Coromandel. In 1876 her employer gave her notice to quit, suspecting from her pale and trembling appearance that she was pregnant. In fact, the young Irishwoman was discovered to have just given birth to a baby girl in her room, and its corpse was found there in a carry-all.1
The crime of infanticide, although far from unusual in that time, carried the death penalty. However, Kane’s otherwise unblemished character moved the judge to show humanity. Since no evidence had been produced to prove that the baby had been born alive, he said, the charge should be reduced to one of concealment of birth, and he handed down a 12-month sentence.2 He added that he would greatly have preferred to punish the accused’s seducer instead, and offered the hope that the Mount Eden gaoler would ‘keep her apart from the hardened classes of criminals’.3
There was little prospect of that. Women inmates were held in the most overcrowded of the old wooden buildings, a dilapidated structure standing outside the stone wall to the west of the main prison and housing anywhere from 25 to 50 inmates. With no provision for separate cells, even for the sick, they were simply ‘huddled together’ in fetid conditions, and may have been glad of the chance to work out in the yard where the washtubs stood, and where some two thousand items of bedding and clothing from the town’s lunatic asylum, hospital and Old Men’s Refuge were washed by hand each week.4
At all times, indoors and out, the women were required to keep at least 100 yards from any male prisoner. Nonetheless, by some unknown means Kane managed to attract the attention of one of them. His name was William Smith, also from the Coromandel district, who had been convicted of ‘forging and uttering’, the quaint legal term that in his case meant passing bad cheques.5 Although by temperament an eccentric and dressy individual, Smith spent his days in the quarry and stoneyard wearing the coarse and shapeless convict’s uniform of moleskin trousers and yellow jacket.
As a well-behaved inmate Kane had become popular with the prison staff, and as O’Brien’s servant she was free to roam about the rambling institution almost at will. This enabled her to plant further fond messages in a crevice in a far corner of the quarry, assuring Smith that she would wait for him as long as necessary. In reply he told her that he was due to inherit a sizeable property soon after his release, and would support them both. Innumerable prisoners convicted of dishonesty offences have made similar assertions, but Kane had faith in her fiancé’s good intentions.
Finally the day came when William Smith was permitted to pass out through the prison wall’s great arched gates, jauntily attired for the occasion in plum-coloured pants and a wide-brimmed hat. Two days later the couple were married, and in the following months, improbable though it seems, the groom apparently did inherit some family property.6 His very common surname has meant that all traces of their later life remain lost within the archival record and we can only hope that their union, formed in such grim and unpromising surrounds, was a long, happy and fruitful one.
The squalid state of the women’s quarters was noted at this time by government architect Edward Mahoney as part of his vigorous campaign to replace the Stockade buildings with a secure and permanent stone-built prison. All of the existing facilities, he declared, were ‘unfit for the ordinary purposes of a prison’.7 Both of the Visiting Justices endorsed this view. Visiting Justice Thomas Cheeseman told the Justice Minister: ‘There are no separate rooms for females waiting trial, and although they may be found innocent of the charges preferred against them, yet they have to associate with the old gaol-birds — some of whom may be classed with the most depraved and abandoned of their sex.’8 His colleague, Mr Barstow, was more specific and said that every woman inmate on remand, ‘and therefore still presumed to be innocent, is necessarily obliged to herd with the most debauched prostitutes. Young girls, whom painful necessity compels to send for a first time to gaol, are associated with veteran brothel-keepers; the consequences of such contaminating influences can readily be imagined.’9
Barstow also drew the Minister’s attention to the dire medical facilities in the women’s ward. ‘There is no female hospital, and women are regularly delivered of children in cells occupied by three or four other women. Any woman with a cough disturbs the rest of the occupants; the consequences of diarrhoea are of course very disagreeable.’ Chronic overcrowding greatly worsened these conditions. Barstow found that ‘from thirty to forty women are penned together in one yard for work or exercise, one room for living and eating, and six cells for sleeping accomodation. I have known the number of female prisoners to be as high as 47 — nine and ten sleeping in the larger cells.’10
A sizeable proportion of these women were imprisoned under the 1866 Vagrant Act for nothing worse than advanced age and destitution. In 1880, 83 female inmates and another 94 males were held under this Act, including several who, noted the prison governor, ‘were committed to prison for the sole purpose of giving them food and shelter and it is much to be regretted that these can be provided only by classifying such old or sick people with criminals’.11 These aged ‘vagrants’ were unable to work while in prison, and therefore could not offset the cost of their maintenance, making them even less welcome in the eyes of the staff.
While the women’s division boasted its own wash-house, only one cold-water bath was provided for the rest of the inmate population, and the toilets consisted of earth-closets in the exercise yards; these were not connected to a sewerage system. The Stockade’s hastily constructed wooden buildings were in a poor state by the late 1870s and the shingled roofs, in particular, were leaking and beyond repair. ‘The rain comes through,’ Governor O’Brien informed the Justice Department, ‘and is causing damage to the interior. Some of the cells are unfit for occupation in consequence of this, and as the accommodation is exceedingly limited it is necessary that something should be done to the roofs without delay.’12
The hospital, which Mahoney described as a ‘miserable makeshift’, was sited directly above the kitchen and therefore subject to continuous heat and cooking odours. Most alarming of all, to Mahoney and many others, was the extreme fire risk from the wooden buildings whose cramped corridors and primitive water supply would condemn inmates to be burned alive before warders could unlock their cells. In 1877 O’Brien estimated that it might take 20 minutes to remove all prisoners and their bedding from the penal ward alone.13
The following year fire did indeed break out, in the kitchen of the remand ward, but by good fortune it was extinguished before any serious damage was done. ‘If the fire had extended a very little more than it did,’ declared O’Brien, ‘the consequences would have been most serious as the only water obtainable would have to be drawn from the tanks by a tap.’14 This near-disaster provoked the Department of Prisons to unusually prompt action, and within months a piped water supply, including a fire hose, was laid on from the Khyber Pass reservoir.15
Mahoney’s damning assessment of the state of the Stockade buildings was provided to yet another commission of inquiry into the prison, and its members unanimously agreed that the facility was ‘not only unsuitable in construction and faulty in arrangement, but utterly inadequate for even the present number of occupants.’16 They endorsed Mahoney’s proposal to progressively replace most of the wooden buildings with ‘erections … of a permanent character’, using both the local stone and the large and largely unpaid inmate workforce.17 This 1877 commission reported to the central government rather than to its torpid provincial equivalent, and therefore stood a rather better chance than its predecessors of having its recommendations acted upon. Its report was accompanied by two sets of sketch plans for the proposed stone prison — one by O’Brien and a more detailed version from Mahoney. They were floor plans only, with no indication of how the exterior structure might look, but both appeared severely functional. They employed a roughly hexagonal design with cell blocks circling a central administration area, and separated by exercise and recreation yards.18
The completion in the late 1870s of the impressive perimeter wall added weight to the case for a newly built prison on the Stockade site. Nevertheless, bureaucratic inertia and perennially stretched budgets meant that although a large supply of dressed building stone accumulated during the decade, it lay unused as prisoner numbers increased in line with a rapidly growing general population.
Two years after the commissioners had firmly endorsed Mahoney’s proposed new designs, the New Zealand Herald observed that the town’s gaol was still ‘utterly and hopelessly inadequate and unsuitable’.19 Lack of finance could not convincingly be advanced as the excuse, as the colony was experiencing a surge of growth prompted by massive public borrowing for railways, roads, immigration and public buildings. Yet it remained unwilling to find the funds for such a disfavoured purpose as adequate accommodation for criminals.
The country’s numerous prisons and lockups had, like many other features of a frontier society, developed in an ad hoc, highly localised and often chaotic fashion. In 1878 a commission of inquiry into the country’s goals observed: ‘Every gaol in the colony is … managed to a great extent according to the views and experience of the gaoler.’ As a result standards of discipline, prison regulations, wages and conditions for warders, and all other features of prison operation and management varied widely across the country. ‘The first essential step towards a reform in prison discipline and management,’ declared the inquiry committee, ‘is an efficient system of Government inspection. The inspector should be a man thoroughly trained in the soundest principles of prison management, and should not have been connected with any gaol heretofore established in New Zealand.’20 Similar bodies had voiced the same view since at least 1861, but following the dissolution of provincial government in 1876 action was finally taken to bring consistency and order. Julius Vogel, New Zealand’s Agent-General in London, was instructed to seek suitable applicants for the prison inspector’s position. After a tortuous selection process, the successful candidate arrived in Wellington with his large family, then embarked on a nationwide tour of the country’s prisons to familiarise himself with the scale and scope of the task ahead of him.
Mount Eden Prison staff knew that their institution would change beyond recognition when, on a February morning in 1881, a stiff-backed, bristling-moustached Englishman arrived to make his first inspection of the premises. This was Arthur Hume, the country’s first Inspector of Prisons, who would hold this position for the next 28 years. Hume’s reputation as a ferocious disciplinarian, tactless and intolerant with subordinates, had preceded him. He noted with cold disapproval the lack of sanitary arrangements in the gaol, and ordered the immediate construction of a new bath-house. More significantly, he approved the longstanding proposal to replace the wooden buildings with a capacious and well-designed new prison using locally quarried stone and prison labour.21 Hume considered that in coming to this distant colony, his role was to transform its multifarious and loosely managed prisons into a nationally consistent system closely resembling the one he had left behind. The battlemented towers he imagined rising within the grey stone perimeter wall were to look as nearly as possible like those of his home country.
Captain (later Colonel) Arthur Hume had joined the army at 19, straight from a minor public school. He served in India with the 79th Highlanders before entering the prison service, and rose within it to become deputy-governor of a succession of convict prisons, including several of the most notorious in Britain such as Dartmoor and Wormwood Scrubs.22 By the time he accepted the appointment in New Zealand, he had spent almost his entire life either under strict command or exerting command over others, and had developed an iron will and fierce powers of self-discipline. These characteristics were compounded by a lack of imagination, a vindictive disposition, and an expectation of instant and slavish obedience from those under his control.23
Hume’s arrival was opposed by a fractious group of local prison officials. In an early instance of counter-imperialist nationalism, they demanded to know why New Zealand’s prisons should not be inspected by one of its own citizens, and proposed the highly experienced and well-liked James Caldwell, head gaoler of Dunedin prison, for the position. In addition, Visiting Justices who, since the abolition of provincial government, had held sole authority to impose punishments for offences committed by inmates, felt their powers undermined by ‘the pretentious protégé of Sir Julius Vogel’, and also registered strong protests against Hume with the Justice Minister.24
Hume did not help his own case by the bluntness of his opening attack on the existing prison system. In his first annual report he announced that the daily diet was too generous and that prison schools should be abolished (‘a man who has performed his day’s allotted task of hard labour cannot possibly benefit by attending school in the evening’). Inmates who offended against discipline should be punished by whipping with a birch rod, since his British experience had shown him that this had ‘a humiliating effect, and therefore is deterrent, and a valuable addition to the cat’ (the ‘cat-o’-nine-tails’ or multi-stranded whip). Hume was also of the view that many warders were ‘too old and slovenly’, and that governors should be successively replaced by retired naval and military officers.25
In the longer term Hume hoped to introduce the ‘silent system’ common in British prisons. This meant providing single cells for all prisoners, who would be forbidden to communicate with each other apart from very limited conversation among work parties. Most New Zealand prison staff regarded the silent system as cruel and inhumane; in any case, it was impossible to introduce unless almost all the existing prisons were replaced.
A journalist who applied to tour the Stockade in late 1881 found himself prevented from doing so ‘by a new ukase [i.e. order] issued by Captain Hume’, and instead wrote a cutting critique of the inspector’s penal theories. ‘The captain is an enthusiastic believer in two theories as a means of effectually reforming criminals — the “silent system” and the birch. These he regards as the most effectual means of degrading the self-respect of criminals … and reducing them practically to the level of wild beasts.’ Hume was so enthusiastic about the ‘silent system’, claimed the aggrieved journalist, that he was now extending it to the press, ‘and perhaps the severe comments of the newspapers … have filled him with a desire to try the virtues of the birch as a further aid to the enforcement of his favourite reformatory regime’.26
The war of attrition between Hume and his critics straggled on for years, with both sides recording small victories. Although gaoler Caldwell had not become Inspector of Prisons as his advocates had hoped, he was transferred from Dunedin to become governor of the Stockade after the long-serving Loughlin O’Brien retired in 1882.27 Hume withdrew his opposition to prison schools after a year but was able to make interim progress towards his ‘silent system’ by ending the custom of prisoners associating freely in the exercise yards, and requiring them instead to walk silently in circles.
Despite his stated commitment to seeing the Stockade rebuilt in stone, the Inspector-General regarded a national high-security prison as a more urgent priority and believed it should be built in Wellington, where he himself was based.28 From 1882 construction of a massive brick prison began at Mount Cook, the low hill just south of the capital’s centre. Hard-labour prisoners were transferred to Wellington from throughout the country to help with construction, but progress was glacially slow and further obstructed by public opposition. The town’s citizens objected vigorously to having an unsightly structure on such a prominent and valuable site, and after it was completed in the early twentieth century the prison remained empty and unused. It was later named the Alexandra Barracks and converted into the country’s defence headquarters, and was demolished entirely in the 1930s to be replaced by a national war memorial and museum.29
For the first years of Hume’s tenure as Inspector-General, therefore, life carried on much as usual in the flammable, insecure and increasingly ramshackle Stockade buildings. Hard-labour men worked alongside penal-servitude convicts in the quarry, distinguished only by dark-grey jackets for the former and yellow for the latter, known therefore as ‘yellow-tails’.30 Both groups, and the much smaller numbers who worked at bootmaking, blacksmithing and carpentry, wore prison garb well spattered with the broad-arrow markings that were the stigmata of their state — 27 arrows on the outer clothing and 16 on the inner, leading old hands to refer to the outfit as the ‘butterfly suit’.31
The system of exertion money introduced by Loughlin O’Brien was retained by his successors because it produced sustained effort and obedience among the inmates, and provided modest sums for rehabilitation on their release. In the stoneyard and quarry especially, warders noted approvingly that the system encouraged vigorous rivalry among inmates who might otherwise be shirkers or troublemakers. Exertion money was paid only for work carried out in excess of a stated daily standard, and the sums involved were pitiful even by Victorian standards. Once women had fulfilled their stipulated seven hours in winter and eight in summer of sewing or washing, they received just a penny for each further hour’s work: at that rate the prison undoubtedly made a tidy profit on their labour. Even so, highly motivated prisoners compiled significant sums, in the range of £5 (the equivalent of about $1000 today), in the course of their sentences. Some arranged to have this money paid to their spouses, and many used it to buy comforts not supplied with their prison uniform, such as socks and warm underclothing.32
From the first few years of Hume’s tenure, the exertion money system was accompanied by a parallel system of marks awarded for effort and good behaviour, or deducted for lack of them. Inmates could use their accumulated marks to have up to a quarter of their sentence remitted, so a well-behaved prisoner with a one-year sentence typically served no more than nine months and 23 days. This system proved so effective at Mount Eden that it was implemented nationwide.33
In keeping with its paltry remuneration, the only work available to almost all Mount Eden inmates was arduous and unskilled.34 The few prisoners who already possessed trade skills such as carpentry were permitted to practise them for the benefit of the prison but no trades were taught within its walls, and Hume was adamant that no rehabilitation programme would be introduced under his authority. Instead he introduced a regime of rigid classification according to security risk and behaviour. Staff had discretion to transfer inmates to higher or lower classes, and therefore acquired additional authority over them.35
Among the various privileges that might be extended, restricted or denied altogether under the classification system was that of writing and receiving letters. Depending on the class in which they were placed, prisoners were entitled to send a letter and receive the reply every one, two, three, four or eight months, and to receive a 20-minute visit on a Saturday afternoon at the same monthly intervals. The head gaoler read all inward and outward mail, and the gaol regulations stipulated: ‘All letters of an improper or idle tendency … or containing slang, or other objectionable expression, will be suppressed.’36 Since no member of the prison staff could understand letters written in Māori, these were automatically destroyed, whether inward or outward, and irrespective of whether correspondents could write in any other language.37
These restrictions particularly troubled one of the prison’s more notorious yet pathetic residents in this period, a Timaru land agent named Thomas Hall, who was serving a life sentence for attempting to poison his wife (who, however, remained loyal to him throughout his prison term). Hall was ‘by far the most interesting prisoner detained within the walls of Mount Eden gaol’, thought the Auckland Star some years into his time there. ‘His quick intelligent glance and the habitual look of … indescribably hopeless woe on his face at once interests the most casual observer.’38
By 1894, a decade into his life sentence, 45-year-old Hall had qualified for a letter and a visit at three-monthly intervals. He wrote at length to Arthur Hume, pointing out that since he had no friends or relatives in the Auckland region he received no visits at all, and pleading to be able to write and receive more frequent letters instead. ‘My letters are divided equally between my wife who lives in England and my father and mother in New Zealand,’ he wrote. If those correspondents happened to live nearer each other, he explained, one of them could pass his letter on to the others, but this was not possible in his case, so he was forced to wait several lonely months for a communication from any of them. Hume was unsympathetic and declined to make an exception to the regulations, although he advised the head gaoler that Hall might occasionally be permitted to write a ‘special letter’ if he could justify doing so in each instance.39
This uncompromisingly punitive attitude marked most of Hume’s reforms to prison management and discipline. From 1883 he banned the use of tobacco by prisoners, causing many of them intense discomfort — and creating a thriving black market. His enthusiasm for birching and, in more serious cases, for flogging was opposed by the 1883 Prisons Act which, to his strong disapproval, ended corporal punishment as a means of disciplining adult inmates (although young people’s training centres could continue to punish their inmates by whipping until 1936). The 1883 Act also banned most of the imaginative punishments inflicted by Joseph Tuckwell, and restricted warders to punishing inmates by means of the bread-and-water diet, the solitary cell and loss of privileges. However, the courts could still impose flogging as part of the sentence for certain crimes, and prison staff were then ordered to administer it.
In 1884 Henry Goodward was dealt with in this way for the rape of a young woman. A description of his punishment was leaked to the press, which reported that the gloomy faces of the two warders who performed this duty ‘showed clearly that the task was not a congenial one’. Another warder ‘sent in his resignation sooner than lay himself open to be called upon to perform an action so revolting to his sensibilities’.40 Goodward was given 25 strokes of a knotted whip, and the warders took turns to deliver them. His back was left striped and bleeding but he uttered no sound throughout the procedure.
The incident was raised in Parliament some weeks later. Several MPs pointed out that warders ordered to flog an inmate risked retaliation from their superiors if they refused, and from other inmates if they obeyed. Sir George Grey, by then an ageing but still formidable backbencher, proposed abolishing flogging completely, as this would ‘attain to a better state of civilization than has hitherto prevailed in the British Empire’.41 His was a lone parliamentary voice on this issue, and flogging, primarily for sexual offences, continued in prisons for another 50 years.
As a staunch upholder of Britain’s imperial traditions, Hume was resistant by temperament to innovation, and he brought few lasting changes to New Zealand’s prison system. Among these, however, perhaps the most valuable was in raising the status of its staff.
In 1878 Mount Eden prison’s warders worked a routine 13-hour day, including on weekends, for less pay than their southern colleagues. MPs praised the prison as ‘the best and cheapest managed’ in the colony, but able and dedicated staff could not be recruited on those terms.42 From his first years as Inspector-General, Hume determined to replace ageing and incompetent warders with strict, mature and incorruptible men. Reflecting his own background, he favoured recruits with military training, and in the first years of the new century took on veterans of the Boer War.43
Once employed, officers living in the prison had to be in bed by 10 p.m. unless on night shift, and required permission from their superior before marrying — a privilege frequently withheld since it meant one fewer officer sleeping on the premises. To compensate for these unappealing conditions, Hume also introduced uniforms and an improved salary scale, with bonuses and long-service pay. Promotions became fairer and more frequent, and by the turn of the century staff were given two training periods a week.
The other consequential, and still visible, outcome of Hume’s long spell at the head of the prison service was a phalanx of new prison buildings.44 In Auckland particularly, almost all the construction work was carried out by inmates themselves — a form of hard labour of which Hume greatly approved. ‘There is no labour more suitable for prisoners,’ he thought, ‘than their employment upon buildings rendered necessary by their own misconduct, more especially if it can be proved that the cost of erection is minimised.’45 He rejected the floor plan drawn up by Edward Mahoney, and in 1882 ordered a new design from another architect, P. F. Burrows, who produced a plan more closely modelled on the British ‘panopticon’ prisons that Hume was familiar with, with cellblocks radiating from a central control point.46
The design was in the form of an irregular cross, with its vertical arm forming the administration and central surveillance wing. The horizontal arm crossed the vertical towards its lower end, and an additional wing stood at a right angle from each end of this horizontal arm. This allowed, at least in theory, for 220 prisoners of different types, including women and debtors, to be confined separately while supervised by a relatively small number of guards. A useful feature of this modular design, as Mahoney had originally noted, was that each wing could be built in succession, with prisoners from the Stockade moved into it as soon as it was complete, while further construction carried on alongside.
Hume rejected the more elegant features of Burrows’ design for the exterior of the prison in favour of a stark and forbidding gothic style. The final plan included a large basement floor with two-storeyed wings above it, except for the central wing, which rose to three storeys, topped by a handsome hexagonal tower reached by a spiral staircase. Smaller turrets giving panoramic surveillance rose from the ends of the cellblocks, each topped with a pointed roof, which, the Herald suggested optimistically, would ‘relieve the somber aspect of the structural mass’.47 The use of iron roof girders, concrete floors and other inflammable materials relieved the extreme fire risk that daily threatened the Stockade.
By late 1882 Burrows’ revised plans were approved, and prisoners set to work in the open ground alongside their rotting wooden cellblocks, excavating the foundations for the buildings that still stand on Mount Eden’s lower slopes.48 For the next 25 years, apart from breaks when state finances ran short, prison-building was the dominant daily activity for most inmates. For much of that time only a foreman and two instructor stonemasons were employed on the construction, while prisoners supplied all other labour. ‘It is very rarely a stonemason gets “ran in” [i.e. imprisoned], and his services become available gratuitously to the State,’ the Herald revealed. ‘The prisoners employed on the work have the melancholy satisfaction of knowing that their labours are all tending to one remit, namely, making their own bondage more secure.’49
The entire external structure was built from the dark-grey basalt that the prisoners quarried nearby. Although much modified, damaged and surrounded by newer structures in the following 120 years, this is fundamentally the same louring edifice that Aucklanders drive past daily on the Southern Motorway, which now passes closely beside it at the height of the second-storey windows. The first section to be started was the north wing. The basalt blocks for its walls, typically measuring about 30 x 45 centimetres, were laboriously passed by hand up the levels of scaffolding until they reached the blocklayer. Much larger blocks weighing up to three tons were also used at certain points, and must have required a block and tackle to hoist into position. Every door and window opening was topped by an arch with a central keystone, although these magnificent examples of Victorian stonemasonry were mostly replaced later by concrete beams.
The windows were heavily barred, and the wrought-iron cell doors pierced with a small window. Cells were equipped with hammock beds and an ‘indicator’ — a button the inmate could press in an emergency to release a small hinged arm that swung out into the corridor and alerted the warder on duty. At the end of each corridor, hot and cold baths were installed, and prisoners were required to use them weekly.50 An unfortunate dogleg entrance to these bathrooms obscured them from the view of warders in the passageways, and they were favoured locations for numerous rapes and beatings, sometimes fatal, in years to come.51 The building had no heating, insulation or damp-proofing and proved bitterly uncomfortable in Auckland’s dank winters.52
The first occupants of the new prison, mostly long-serving penal-servitude men, were installed in the ground floor of the north wing in 1888, while construction of its upper floor was still underway. It took a further six years to fully complete the wing, and in that time the problems caused by combining a penal facility with a construction site created onerous security headaches for the staff. At some points the outer walls of the new wing reached to within three metres of the perimeter wall, and the scaffolding that surrounded the unfinished structure narrowed this gap further still. A warder with a loaded carbine patrolled the gap during the day, and after the evening lockup an unarmed night watchman replaced him. Escaping from the unfinished building was difficult, but a sufficiently determined and agile man could break into it.
Just on dusk in March 1889, a skilled housebreaker named Joseph Hood, released a week earlier from his three-year sentence, surreptitiously approached the outer side of the boundary wall with a long ladder. He climbed to the top, hauling a heavy sack, waited until the night watchman had ambled out of sight, then swung down onto the scaffolding and concealed his load in an unfinished cell in the upper floor before returning by the same route.
Next day the excitement among inmates working in that area aroused the suspicions of the foreman of works and other staff. After lockup that night they searched the site and discovered a treasure trove hidden under lime-sacks. Tobacco, tooth powder, sugar, cheese, butter, apples, jam, preserved milk, pepper, writing paper, postage stamps, currant cake and other delights had been smuggled in by the philanthropic Mr Hood. He had even included a flask of brandy ‘for the use of one of the female prisoners’.53 Hood was picked up shortly afterwards for a jewellery theft, but although police suspected him of smuggling in the contraband they were unable to prove it in court. He was given a further four years on the theft charge and returned to the prison, presumably hoping for another benefactor on the outside.
The constant presence, within reach of alert inmates, of building materials and half-completed structures resulted in the first escape from the new prison in 1896. A young burglar and recidivist escaper named Alley spotted a long plank lying near the boundary wall and found the temptation too much to resist. He propped the plank in a corner of the wall, crawled up it, and dropped the full five and a half metres to the ground on the other side.54 This impromptu feat brought him several days of freedom, before a detective arrested him at the home of an accomplice.55
Once completed in 1894, the north wing’s solid outside walls reassured visitors and nearby residents. However, some were disturbed at the prison’s bleak appearance and feared that it would soon appear outdated. Premier Richard Seddon made a visit of inspection and told the House that he thought the new structure resembled a fortress. He would have preferred a more attractive, better-lit building, ‘one more in accordance with modern ideas, and constructed by free labour’.56 This impression was insightful, and anticipated many later comments on the prison’s already outmoded design.
In addition to his new building’s deliberately dispiriting appearance and lack of comforts, Hume favoured a cell layout that kept prisoners apart as much as possible, on the grounds that any association would lead them to further corrupt one another. This lack of common spaces created endless problems for later generations of staff, and was a disadvantage not shared by the Stockade, whose design included large shared cells. One of those became known as ‘the Pa’, since it was occupied for many years by the Māori prisoners who, until well into the twentieth century, made up only a small proportion of the total inmate population. They were typically sentenced for minor dishonesty offences such as cattle-, sheep- or horse-stealing, or for crimes stemming from cultural differences in matters such as the age of sexual consent. ‘When in single cells, they are rather given to fretting,’ a fellow inmate reported, and placing them together in the Pa was found to be the most suitable arrangement.57
Details of the prison’s impressively complex stonework. DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS
As early as 1879, before work on the stone prison had even begun, a distinguished visitor toured the Stockade and asked to speak to its Māori inmates. The fully tattooed Waikato chief and military leader Rewi Maniapoto gave the 13 Māori then in residence a stern lecture. ‘It is right that those who break the laws should pay the penalty … but if you remain quiet, patient and obedient, you will be allowed to return to your homes, and I advise you to sin no more.’58 The previous year the old chief had made a peace treaty with the government, and this speech may have been intended to impress his hosts with his loyalty.
A few years later, one of Rewi’s kinsmen, a tempestuous Maniapoto chief named Te Mahuki, was admitted to the prison to serve 12 months with hard labour. He and his followers had vehemently opposed government plans to build the Main Trunk Railway through their tribal territory, and a surveying team that entered the district to mark out the route was ambushed and captured. For this crime Mahuki was regarded by the other Māori inmates as a political prisoner rather than a criminal, and they referred to him as ‘the prophet’.
During one Sunday morning church service he gave them a memorable lesson in equal rights. Archdeacon Clarke conducted the main service, attended by Māori as well as Pākehā, and then announced, ‘My white brethren will now retire; the Maoris will remain, as I will hold a short service for them in their own language.’ Mahuki rose to object. ‘Why make a difference?’ he asked. ‘We Maoris have sat all through the pakeha service, not understanding a word … let the pakeha sit through the Maori service.’ When the archdeacon translated these words, ‘there was a sort of general “Good on you, Mahuki!”’59
A second Māori prophet and military leader whose name and reputation were known throughout the country spent a short period in the prison in 1890. Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Tūruki, a former guerrilla commander later pardoned by the government, had been arrested near Ōpōtiki while leading an unarmed cavalcade to visit followers of his Ringatū religion. He was convicted of breaching the peace and ordered to pay sureties amounting to the enormous sum of £1500. While his supporters sought the means to pay this amount, he was transported to Auckland and held at Mount Eden for two weeks. Other Māori prisoners were exceedingly deferential to this elderly and near-legendary figure. ‘He spoke little to anyone. At a [church] service he never looked to the right or left, or moved, sitting on a form by himself.’60
In the final years of the century, several Hokianga Māori were imprisoned for their armed resistance to paying a deeply resented dog tax. Their leader and four others were sentenced to 18 months’ hard labour in mid-1898 but released less than a year later for good behaviour and after political agitation on their behalf. During their time in prison they received enforced medical treatment from the now very elderly Dr Philson. He insisted on vaccinating new inmates and particularly Māori, whom he believed were widely infected with tuberculosis. Any prisoner who could not show the scar of an earlier vaccination on his arm was liable to receive the doctor’s attentions. The five ‘dog tax’ prisoners may have been given a faulty dose of vaccine, as their arms became so severely infected they were unable to go out to work in the quarry for some time.61
For several years in the mid-1880s a small and dismal auxiliary penal facility, occupied only by women, stood alongside the Stockade. This was the Lock Hospital, established under the Contagious Diseases Act 1869, which empowered city authorities to compulsorily detain suspected prostitutes and, if necessary, treat them for venereal disease. One patient, Mary Alice Eggerton, was just 10 years old. The women’s clients were not subject to the same restraints, and feminist agitation eventually forced the repeal of the Act in 1910.62
Women inmates of the Stockade itself were shifted to a new female division in 1893, when the second wing of the new prison became available. They found this accommodation more spacious than in the Stockade, in part because the number of female inmates had dropped to as few as 12 at a time.63 This welcome development was thought to be due to the earnest efforts of the Salvation Army’s Prison Gate Brigade and particularly of one of its staff, a Mrs Hutchinson. She offered short-term accommodation to women on their release, and often saved them from being swiftly re-arrested for drunkenness or other minor offences.64 The first Prison Gate Brigade in the country had opened in Auckland in 1884, with the aim of helping all recently discharged prisoners ‘towards employment and giving them fellowship’.65 Hume, a father of seven sons but no daughters, had little faith in these efforts in respect of women since ‘the female criminal population of the colony … is, with few exceptions, of the most degraded class, and long past all possible chance of reformation’.66
From the 1890s women’s groups such as the National Council of Women and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union added prison reform to their agenda of social concerns, and agitated for a separate women’s prison in both the North and South Islands, and for women to be able to serve as Visiting Justices. Hume predictably scorned both proposals. He argued that the relatively small number of women inmates, mostly serving short sentences for drink- and disorder-related offences, did not justify separate institutions, although he conceded that women’s prisons would inevitably be introduced at some future date. Female Visiting Justices, he believed, were also unnecessary since women committed few offences while in prison.67 As late as 1907 he advised the government that:
the extreme leniency shown to female offenders is a distinct menace to the health and morality of the community. Each of these women is a plague-spot in their neighbourhood, and from them vice spreads throughout the district, often beginning with their own daughters. No short term of imprisonment will ever reform these women, probably a long sentence would be equally useless; but in the latter case society would be free from their baneful presence for some time, and they themselves would live a cleanly, useful life, for the worst women can be made useful in prison.68
The work of the Prison Gate Brigade was supplemented by an increasingly active prison chaplaincy. The Presbyterian Inner City Missioner, Duncan MacPherson, visited Mount Eden regularly, spending time in the prison hospital, the recreation yards and the women’s division.69 Inmates appeared to have particularly high regard for the diminutive Anglican chaplain, Reverend Hill, who, like Mrs Hutchinson, sometimes took discharged prisoners into his own house until they could find employment and accommodation. On his departure from Auckland in 1890 they sent ‘the little parson’ a heartfelt written tribute: ‘As chaplain, you are the one official whom prisoners can be permitted to regard as their friend, and not one of coercion.’70 Humanitarians such as these helped counteract the Inspector of Prisons’ more bigoted attitudes.
Hume believed in making prisons so unpleasant that the poor would be deterred from entering them, and as the ‘long depression’ of the 1890s began to bite this policy had a growing appeal to political leaders. Ensuring that conditions within the prison were less attractive than those faced by even the most deprived sections of the unincarcerated community was known as the principle of lesser privilege. ‘It is the duty of all interested in the reformation of criminals,’ announced Hume, ‘to set their faces against anything like luxuries or too good feeding in places such as prisons’; and from 1890 the allowance of bread and meat for boys under 16 was sharply reduced.71 However, social conditions in Auckland grew so desperate that some homeless men made deliberate efforts to be admitted to prison. To discourage this practice, rations for those serving less than three months were cut further still.72
To Hume’s credit, he recognised that some classes of inmate — drunks, lunatics and children — could not be held wholly responsible for their offending and did not deserve the harsh treatment imposed on the remaining prison population. Year after year he protested in his annual reports about the practice of imprisoning young offenders. Both boys and girls as young as 10 were routinely admitted to Mount Eden for up to three months, although, he advised, ‘it is invariably found that the prison discipline has absolutely no reformatory influence upon them’. The only other options available to magistrates when sentencing these juvenile offenders were to discharge them or, in the case of boys, send them to the Kohimarama industrial training school.73 Until 1887 no such institution existed for girls, so if they were found living in ‘a wretched condition amidst squalid surroundings’, they were imprisoned with hard labour for having no lawful means of support.74 After an industrial school for delinquent girls opened in Auckland, where they were trained for jobs as domestic servants, the prison received fewer of these highly vulnerable inmates.
From early in his term of office Hume advocated for non-custodial sentences for children, and was gratified when a First Offenders’ Probation Act was passed in 1886, long before any other country in the British Empire. It empowered magistrates to sentence first offenders to probation rather than prison, and appointed probation officers to monitor their activities. However, very few young offenders were treated in this way in the years immediately after the Act was passed, and for much of the 1890s a large number of young boys and girls continued to be admitted to Mount Eden’s slot-like cells.75
Not everyone shared Hume’s approval of probation as a diversionary sentence. The Mount Eden governor in this period, Francis Severne, thought the First Offenders’ Act was ‘responsible for a large increase of crime amongst youths and servant girls’ because it encouraged them to believe they could break the law with impunity, thus launching them on criminal careers.76 In 1904 Hume pointed out in response that of more than 1500 offenders placed on probation since the Act was passed, 85 per cent had not re-offended. He commended the probation officers for the way they performed their ‘onerous and unpaid duties’, and the Act itself for ‘giving those placed under it a chance of redeeming the first false step’.77
Hume and Severne were in accord, however, in resenting the constant problems resulting from imprisoning alcoholics and the mentally ill. Habitual drunkards were the prison’s most recidivist inmates, commonly spending less than 24 hours outside its walls between their two- and three-month sentences for disorderly behaviour and similar petty crimes. Hume was adamant that ‘[d]runkenness is a disease requiring a conscientious and judicious medical treatment’, and ‘to punish it with a fine or short imprisonment … is an expensive and useless cruelty’. He pointed out that this view was widespread in other countries, yet in New Zealand a chronic drunkard had ‘not the slightest chance of being admitted to a hospital even when in a dangerous state of delirium tremens’.78 Once in prison, these unfortunates were greatly over-represented in the punishment cells and infirmary and, with melancholy frequency, among those who died before their sentences expired.
Year after year Governor Severne denounced the inhumanity and inconvenience of imprisoning drunkards, and by 1906 his irritation on this matter had overcome his customary deference to higher authority: ‘I suppose it is quite useless for me to again point out the necessity of providing a fitting place for the treatment of persons suffering from delirium tremens. It is quite obvious that a prison is not such a place; it is unfair to the patient, to the officers of the prison, and to the prisoners.’79 In that year his pleas were finally answered by the passage of the Habitual Drunkards Act, which gave magistrates the power to commit alcoholics to institutions providing for their care as well as their detention. The Salvation Army set up the country’s first ‘inebriates’ retreat’ at Pakatoa Island in the Hauraki Gulf, and then added another facility on the larger, neighbouring island of Rotoroa. Thereafter drunks and drunken behaviour could still be found inside Mount Eden’s walls, but not the distressing spectacle of men and women ‘drying out’ through agonised fits of delirium.
In 1891 the prison cannot have housed a more despairing inmate than the Italian-born Louis Chemis, aged 39 and serving life for murder. Two years earlier, he had been living quietly as a roadman near Wellington with his wife Annie and their five children. Then his neighbour was brutally stabbed to death and Chemis was convicted of the crime, although the prosecution case amounted to little more than an assertion that Italians were known to be excitable and to carry stilettos. Although he had no previous criminal record, Chemis, as a lifer, was sent to Auckland where the most dangerous and desperate convicts were held and where he was far removed from his family and acquaintances.
One evening he took the blunt tin knife issued to prisoners with their meal and hacked into a vein on his arm, losing a large amount of blood before he was noticed by warders and carried to the infirmary.80 He was returned to his cell as soon as he was sufficiently recovered, and for the rest of his sentence received no special treatment apart, perhaps, from extra surveillance from sympathetic warders. He made a second and successful suicide attempt some years later, after his release.
By the late nineteenth century the nation’s more floridly mentally ill could be housed in several large mental hospitals, but those whose symptoms were combined with criminal behaviour were held in prisons with no facilities or expertise for managing them apart from truncheons and straitjackets. Both Hume and Severne abhorred this situation, since these inmates created many of the same problems as drunkards, and often to a more extreme extent. In early 1900, within a few months of his appointment, Severne was obliged to admit ‘a dangerous lunatic’ who had committed a savage assault on a police constable.81 Two years later he gave evidence that prisoners of unsound mind were regularly held in the prison ‘and considerable difficulty was experienced in getting them removed to the lunatic asylum’, which was often overcrowded.82
By 1901 the basement of the central wing, the core structure of the entire facility, was almost complete and the governor’s only complaint with the work was that he could not find more prisoners to carry it out, especially as the old wooden cellblocks alongside were ‘rapidly falling into decay, particularly the roofs’.83
Inmate numbers reduced somewhat in this period due to improving economic conditions, but also to slowly advancing theories of penal policy. Hume had come to realise that low-risk prisoners could be held in cheaper and less secure surroundings than a massive stone prison, and tree-planting camps were established in rural locations — the forerunner of today’s prison farms. Within the wider prison system, Mount Eden’s role was changing to become the nation’s maximum-security institution, and the longest-serving, most dangerous and repeatedly violent offenders were progressively transferred to it from throughout the country. Systems for admitting and managing inmates had become more regularised and better documented from the 1890s, offering a more detailed picture of the daily routines.
On admittance, an inmate was placed in a cell furnished with a straw mattress; a set of tin bowls for washing, bodily wastes and food; a small shelf for books and a larger one for a table. At 6 a.m., and an hour later in winter, a clanging bell marked the start of a new day and cell doors were unlocked to allow their occupants to empty their slop tins into a sink in the yard. After breakfast they were allowed an hour’s outdoor exercise, walking in circles in their separate classes — convicts serving three or more years, hard-labour inmates and ‘short-timers’.84 This was the only time of day when conversation was allowed. Their diet had barely changed from the days of the Queen Street gaol, with porridge, or ‘skilly’, and bread served for breakfast and dinner. The midday meal consisted almost invariably of a stew of boiled beef and vegetables, and potatoes (sometimes rotten).85
Meals were prepared in a subterranean kitchen, with individual portions ladled into mess tins and sent up in lifts to each corridor. By the early 1900s one small but treasured luxury had been added to the daily routine — each wing had a box of tobacco pipes, to be handed out by a warder for a 15-minute smoke.86 The offices in the central administration wing included a room for the resident fingerprint expert and an armoury, with racks of ready-loaded rifles and revolvers awaiting use in an emergency. The chief gaoler’s office contained a special feature, a shiny steel dock placed well back from his desk, in which an inmate seeking an interview stood at attention until invited to speak.87
By the early 1900s, about half the total prison population had been transferred to the new buildings, which boasted one undoubted improvement on the Stockade — each pair of adjacent cells was lit with a small gas lamp. The acute fire risk in the adjacent wooden buildings, where only shorter-sentenced inmates now remained, meant they had no form of lighting; ‘next to the loss of liberty, being locked up in the cells in the darkness, from an early hour in the winter afternoons, is most keenly felt by the prisoners’, the New Zealand Herald reported.88 Reading and solitary study was a valued privilege, and the prison library’s small stock of books was issued at the rate of one or two a week, depending on the prisoner’s classification. Edward Bellamy’s socialist-utopian classic Looking Backward was a particularly popular title after its release in 1888.89
In both the old and new buildings, infestations of lice and other insects were a constant torment. The staff blamed this problem on indigent new arrivals bringing vermin in their clothing. The usual remedy was ‘to strip a prisoner to the skin and bury his clothes six feet under the soil as the only effectual means of exterminating insect pests’.90
As a consequence of the generally falling crime rate, and of growing public unease at the courts’ practice of imposing death sentences for a wide range of crimes, the condemned cells at the southern end of the central wing were seldom occupied in the last years of the Victorian era. The machinery of execution, however, remained ready for use, and was significantly upgraded after the horrifically botched hanging in 1882 of Taurangaika Winiata. He was an Epsom farmhand who murdered a colleague and took refuge for several years in the King Country, from where he was captured and returned to Auckland. His execution in the prison, carried out by an ex-inmate named Lewis, was described as ‘a shockingly bungled and mismanaged affair. The scene below the scaffold was brutal and revolting.’91 These well-worn euphemisms referred to the hangman’s failure to ensure a prompt death, so that he was obliged to add his own weight to the lurching body beneath the trapdoor until Winiata eventually expired.
A few years later a double hanging of the ‘Great Barrier Island murderers’ took place, with the usual macabre group of onlookers stationed on the hill above the prison walls. Although the task was again carried out by Lewis, an improved scaffold mechanism was employed, and it was afterwards asserted that ‘no execution in New Zealand was ever carried through more smoothly or with greater certitude’.92 This reliably lethal device was reassembled in 1893 for the final execution performed in the prison in the nineteenth century, and again it operated with impressive efficiency. The condemned man, Alexander Scott, became the twenty-third to be executed in Auckland since Maketu’s hanging 40 years earlier.93
By 1905, with the second major stage of the building programme well advanced, Hume could claim that the ‘Stone Jug’, as hardened offenders now referred to it, ‘bids well to shortly be one of the best prisons in the Australasian Colonies’.94 Not all public officials were so enthusiastic. Auckland MP, William Napier, was concerned that even before it was finished Mount Eden was a prison ‘of an obsolete type’ and its proximity to the central city would come to be regarded as a mistake.95 That prediction was borne out within a few years when the neighbourhood was subjected to a vociferous riot by inmates.
In late 1904 a shrewd career criminal named Thomas Ramsey, serving a 12-year sentence for robbery with violence and regarded by police as ‘the most dangerous criminal in the colony’, was transferred from Dunedin to the greater security of Mount Eden. Within a few months he and other prisoners attacked a warder and were placed in punishment cells in the north wing. These happened to overlook the railway line and Khyber Pass Road, and for the next several days people in that vicinity were assailed with ‘a flood of the most disgusting language that the human tongue can fashion’. Using planks broken up from their beds, the prisoners smashed everything in their cells. They barricaded the doors to prevent the warders entering, and soon ‘the whole prison was in revolt, and the furniture-breaking had become general’.96
Even after warders succeeded, with great difficulty, in removing the ringleaders to solitary cells in the basement, the uproar continued, and the following morning a culprit named Ashton was detected in an escape attempt, using ‘a rope about as thick as a man’s waist, contrived out of his cell blankets’.97 It later emerged that the offenders had deliberately contrived to be moved to the basement cells to better their chances of making an escape.
This riot occurred, it was claimed, because Mount Eden ‘has been made the dumping ground for the worst offenders in the colony — men of the most desperate character, whom it is not considered safe to leave in prisons less strongly built’.98 The disciplinarian Hume reiterated his earlier call to allow flogging ‘for insubordinate and mutinous conduct’.99 More temperate voices pointed to the need for a special maximum-security institution, well apart from residential communities, where the most reckless and violent criminals could be held. ‘A proper system of classification would remove such individuals altogether from the common gaol, and place them on an island where they could be subjected to a regime of sternness fitted to their temperament and disposition.’100
Given the investment in building the prison over the previous 20 years, there was no immediate likelihood of constructing a further high-security institution elsewhere, and instead legislation was introduced to deter a repeat of the alarming scenes of 1905. The Habitual Criminals and Offenders Act 1906 provided for the most serious and recidivist offenders to be imprisoned for an indefinite period, at the discretion of a Supreme Court judge. A law of this kind was already in force in New South Wales and it was believed, although with little real evidence, that Sydney’s most desperate lags had fled across the Tasman to ‘constitute the nucleus of a professional criminal class’ in New Zealand.101 In 1908, Mount Eden’s new governor Thomas Pointon could count 11 inmates held under the Act, which remained in force for the next half-century.102
By 1909, two-thirds of the total prison population of about three hundred were housed in the new stone buildings. This was Hume’s final year as Inspector-General of Prisons. After three decades of remarkably dedicated if uninspired effort, he could take satisfaction at the sight of Auckland’s massive new prison, although tempered with disappointment that most of his reactionary penal policies had not been adopted by the New Zealand authorities. A later successor, Charles E. Matthews, described Hume’s reign as one of ‘discipline, discipline, discipline. Discipline means repression. Little wonder that such a system led to outbreaks of savagery on the part of men so treated with retaliation by warders.’103
The government had largely abandoned the practice, of which Hume himself was the prime example, of recruiting prison staff from the armed forces, and his replacement as Inspector-General came instead from a medical background. Dr Frank Hay had formerly been inspector of the country’s mental hospitals, and he intended to draw on that experience to address the psychological elements of criminal behaviour. In his enthusiasm for reformative rather than purely punitive policies, Hay found a powerful ally in the new Minister of Justice, an eloquent liberal named John Findlay who hoped to ‘restore a measure of self-respect to the criminal, to find out his physical and mental state, the temperamental conditions, the environment, the circumstances that led to the crime’.104
Findlay told parliamentary colleagues that ‘the old method of punishment looked only at the enormity of the offence; it cared nothing for the criminal … No attempt was made to go beyond the crime and look into the character of the prisoner.’105 As a preliminary step in this new direction, he ordered all prison cells to be equipped with lighting so every inmate had the opportunity to read and study throughout their sentence. The prison libraries, he found, were so poor that some prisoners had read every work they contained at least once, and he gave instructions to stock them with a larger and better-selected range of reading material, including popular journals.106
The new minister was greatly influenced by Reverend James Kayll, who had served as Mount Eden’s Anglican prison chaplain in the early 1890s.107 For prison to have any long-term beneficial effect, Kayll believed, inmates should be given opportunities for education that would return them to where they had departed from ‘the social track’, so that on release they would regard themselves as functional members of society.108 Together, he and Findlay planned a system of specialised prisons to hold different types of offender, including one specifically for the criminally insane.109
As noted earlier, a large new prison building intended to become the country’s main central prison had been constructed on the summit of Wellington’s Mount Cook from about 1894. Effective local opposition to this proposed national prison appears to have been the main reason why Mount Eden remained in use for a century after it was first declared unfit for purpose. In spite of concerns at its gloomy appearance and oppressive design, Mount Eden was seen as an outstanding facility which, when its construction was completed, offered great promise for reformative projects. Its long history of putting prisoners to profitable work raised hopes that they could eventually be trained in a range of industrial skills.110 Findlay promised a penal policy based on reformative rather than vengeful principles: ‘A new spirit, and a new purpose, and a new measure of criminal punishment has arrived.’111