Human Rights and Prisons - Rethinking Crime and Punishment

There are concerns about telephone availability. Prison telephones are
run on a commercial basis, and there are insufficient telephones to
cater for the numbers of prisoners (Ombudsmen‟s Office, 2005).
Prisoners also demonstrate concern at the cost of basic provisions,
such as pens, paper and phone calls.
In exceptional circumstances, such as bereavement, prison responses
can be unnecessarily ad hoc and contingent on the reactions of
individual custodial staff members, who are not trained in grief support
(Hendry, 2009).
Families face a host of social and economic costs by having a member
in prison. In general, families who have a member in prison are the
most socially and economically vulnerable within society.
Imprisonment exacerbates pre-existing situations of poverty, housing
problems, social stigma and childcare problems (Christian et al, 2006;
Codd, 2008; Kingi, 2009).
For many children (although not all), the removal of a parent to prison
can be a fundamentally negative experience, instigating numerous
behavioural and emotional difficulties that begin to shape their lives.
Evidence suggest that children may experience physical and mental
health problems, can become withdrawn and secretive, angry or
defiant, exhibit self-destructive behaviour, eating disorders, lowered
self-esteem and declining educational performance (Codd, 2008; Kingi,
1999; National Health Committee, 2008).
PARS estimates that 20,000 children each year have a family member
in prison. The 2003 Prison Census indicated that about 26% of male
prisoners and 47% of female prisoners had dependent children before
being incarcerated (Kingi, 2009). Preliminary Year One results from a
three-year study on the children of prisoners in New Zealand (Gordon,
2009) has detailed that children are often living more than an hour‟s
drive away from their imprisoned parent and that more than a third of
studied prisoners with children (n=98) had not received visits from their
children.
There are issues about the „family-focused‟ nature of prisons. While
the organisation PARS does supply toys and books to some prisons,
and have child activity teams in a couple of prisons, visiting areas do
not often have adequate facilities for children or other family members.
As the Ombudsmen‟s Office (2005:17) noted, many visiting areas „are
anything but comfortable. Seating often consisted of four small plastic
stools without backs, bolted to a low table and attached to the floor.
We would not regard it as suitable for elderly or frail persons‟. Further,
at some facilities, visitors had to share a long table, meaning that there
was no privacy for conversations. Other concerns related to the
dominance of „non-contact‟ visits for higher security prisoners; the use
of disciplinary measures for prisoners who kissed children; comments
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