Covid-19 tackled at expense of inmates

Steps to keep Covid-19 out of prisons has been at the expense of some prisoners’ rights, says the Chief Ombudsman.

Peter Boshier carried out inspections of 46 units in nine prisons in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch during alert level 3 and published his report yesterday.

After his probe, under the Crimes of Torture Act, he made recommendations for improving the conditions and treatment of prisoners in seven prisons.

‘‘I firmly believe that independent monitoring is essential during these unprecedented times.’’

Last week, he told Stuff that the Corrections Department had been ‘‘a bit overprotective at letting him in, and he was concerned prisoners could be in a facility with coronavirus and the outside world could not get in to find out.

‘‘I felt that it could have been a bit more robust – people can trust us, we have been around for a long time, we won’t get things wrong.’’

As it turned out, one prison had a case of Covid-19 at the time of his inspection.

Boshier said some inmates were kept separate from the general prison population as an infection control measure.

Although he believed Corrections responded to the pandemic in a well-resourced, balanced and efficient manner, he found that some prisoners in some units at four prisons were not receiving access to at least one hour of fresh air on a daily basis, or in some cases were not being provided with activities to occupy their time.

‘‘One prison was only able to provide some prisoners access to an hour of fresh air every other day. Some prisoners at another prison were unlocked for one hour a day but they only had access to fresh air on weekends.’’

Prisons with remand prisoners faced extra challenges in accommodating new arrivals during the pandemic.

Many prisons managed this by creating ‘bubbles,’ based on their arrival date, he said.

In most prisons, the amount of time inmates were able to spend outside their cells (known as ‘unlock time’) was reduced.

This was often due to the number of ‘bubbles’ operating in different units, increased sanitisation routines, different prisoner security classifications, and limitations of building layouts.

‘‘Staff reported that in some prisons, units were running more than nine different unlock regimes.’’

Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis said he valued the Ombudsman’s report, so issues could be identified to give Corrections the opportunity to remedy them.

‘‘I understand that steps were taken to give effect to each of them.’’