RELEASE, REOFFEND, RETURN, REPEAT
Queen’s story:
Queen has been in jail 11 times. She has a baby girl now and is desperate to stay out of prison, but her father keeps asking her for help with his own crimes.
‘‘My old way of life is always on my mind,’’ says the young mum, whose name we’ve changed to help the 20-year-old rebuild her life.
‘‘To this day, my dad will ring me for help to go and strip a stolen car and sell it.’’
It’s just one of many challenges she faces in staying on the straight and narrow, staying out of jail, hopefully staying away from sentence No 12.
The odds are against her: for most of her life crime has been all that she’s known – father a gang member, mother a long-time criminal, other siblings in and out of jail.
‘‘My dad sits at home trying to make his next $20; my mum drinks her last $20. That’s it in a little box.
‘‘I did whatever I wanted to do – drugs, crime, running away, just basically going way off track.’’
Queen had plenty of family support in following that crooked path. Her first experience of a police cell was at age nine.
‘‘I was helping my mum shoplift,’’ she says. ‘‘My mother had drugs on her, we were in the cells, and she was trying to blame it on me.’’
Queen stubbornly pushed on along that path trodden by so many career criminals. Stealing chocolates and cars became dealing drugs, assault and robbery.
Brief stays in Child, Youth and Family (CYF) homes became longer stints in the Justice, Care and Protection Facility in Lower Hutt and then in a Youth Justice unit in Christchurch.
The website for that facility says it offers ‘‘a safe, secure and supportive environment where young people can get their lives back on track and improve their prospects for the future’’. Queen can’t remember much of that support or the effort put into improving her prospects. She remembers being ‘‘prepared to go in to have a fight and then go to bed, every time I went to YJ’’.
There was the occasional offer of a course to improve those prospects, but people were often put off by her growing criminal record.
‘‘I’d go to the interview,’’ says Queen, ‘‘it looked all good and then I’d get an email saying that my criminal record is affecting me being on their course, and my social worker ended up giving up and letting me do what I wanted.
‘‘They tried horse [therapy] me talking to the horses about my feelings. I’d go to a paddock, it’s about your emotions and things, cause the horse knows about your emotions.’’
Those failures and Queen’s stubborn, rebellious attitude to rules and conditions would lead her back to the muscle-memory support of family and crime. Time and again.
It was a vicious, symbiotic cycle that would continue as she entered prison for the first time, after helping her brother assault and rob a man of his money. One jail term quickly became two, three, four and onwards. Queen’s record meant bail was off the table. Any offending would put her straight back to prison.
She would be released from Arohata Prison with $350 and a bus ticket, but with little support and nowhere to go but back to the familiar, familial life of crime and recidivism. Mandatory probation visits were about monitoring her way along that path, not helping her find a new one.
Challenges included so many things the rest of us take for granted. ‘‘It’s everything. Getting on the benefit is hard. You’ve got no ID, you’re in jail and everybody has stolen your stuff.
‘‘They give you this paper that’s got your Steps to Freedom, and they tell you the banks will accept it and everyone will accept it, but the banks say, ‘Sorry, we only accept passport and licence’.
‘‘It means I’d go in and try to get the benefit and they’d give me a list this long on what I need and
‘‘You’ve got no money, just got out of jail. Everything is a hassle. You don’t even have a phone when you get out.’’ Ex-offender Queen.
information I don’t have. I don’t even know my IRD number, don’t have a bank account, so I’m looking at the list and saying, ‘OK, thank you’, then screw it up and chuck it in the bin.
‘‘You’ve got no money, just got out of jail. Everything is a hassle. You don’t even have a phone when you get out.’’
Or a suitable place to stay. ‘‘There’s always somewhere to stay,’’ says Queen, ‘‘but it’s about finding somewhere stable and safe to stay.’’
During one release she offered a dozen places she could live. They were all rejected. Without a suitable place to stay, she’d be back in custody. The Probation Service offered hostels and halfway houses, but Queen knew those wouldn’t work.
‘‘They were telling me to go to these places where I used to go and sell meth to people. I’d be back on drugs straight away.’’
Queen’s desire to end her criminal life was finally matched by the support needed to help her on that path. She was sitting in jail on her 11th stay, pregnant and considering adoption papers. It was bringing up painful memories about having a son taken off her two years earlier.
‘‘CYFs sent paperwork to me about adoption, about home for life; I was reliving my son being uplifted and I was like . . . f..., I’ve just got to stop the cycle.’’
For the first time, Queen had help that went beyond a bus ticket and a $350 cheque.
Presbyterian support service Family Works helped her find accommodation and sort out a bank account, ID, and the benefit.
‘‘That first week is crucial to your future of freedom. Without that support in the first week, you’re not going to make it.’’
That lasted just a week, and when it ended and Queen’s recovery and reintegration looked in trouble, the door to prison beckoning once more, the Salvation Army stepped in with a place to stay for a young mum and her baby daughter.
‘‘I was real iffy, but they made me feel welcome. All I had to do was put my bags in the car, and that was it.’’
That was about seven months ago. She knows she could end up in prison again. ‘‘There’s nothing clear in my head about what’s stopping me,’’ she says. ‘‘Yes my daughter’s there, but naturally that should be there, but I don’t know what’s stopping me . . . I’m just over jail, over that life.’’
That old way of life still plays on her mind, but when things get tough, ‘‘I lean on my support, the Army, Family Works, church. Before, I’d lean on going to steal something, cars, or getting drugs.’’
Dad still rings, still tries to pull her back into crime.
‘‘I tell my dad, no, I’m not doing it again. No way. Why would you let me get arrested? I don’t have time. I’ve got kids now.’’
It’s a scenario gloomily familiar with his lawyer Seth Fraser, who says former prisoners such as Daniel Johnson are being ‘‘set up to fail’’ because of a lack of Government support helping recently released prisoners reintegrate.
‘‘Even if you say ‘It’s his life and he’s got to fix stuff for himself’, there’s a certain point where he’s not going to be able to get anywhere if he can’t do basic things like have a bank account or identification.’’
With the cost of keeping a prisoner upwards of around $90,000 a year, Fraser says it makes financial sense to invest a little in a released prisoner to ensure they at least have an ID so they can have a reasonable chance at surviving on the outside.
Johnson was badly prepared and he ended up in a humiliating situation, sleeping in the bush, he says.
‘‘Over and over again I see people who get out of prison and within hours they are arrested again.
‘‘Daniel was set up to fail. There was no help for him’’
He needed hand-holding to navigate his way through the various departments to get these essentials for life, Fraser adds.
‘‘Most people are on their own. They have to find their own way and it’s difficult if you have no ID, you smell, you’re hungry. It’s hard for someone who is already damaged and many of them have drug and alcohol problems due to post traumatic stress which stems from abusive upbringings, dysfunctional families, sexual abuse…
‘‘Just about every client I have is like that. We are not talking about proactive individuals here. They’ve got a learned helplessness.’’
What’s clear is that what we are doing with prisoners in our prisons is not working, he says
‘‘Prison in general sets people up to fail because it doesn’t work. The first thing to do is break down this idea that prison is a good idea in the first place. It doesn’t work, especially the short periods of imprisonment. They are the worst. That’s where you have someone in their cell 23 hours a day. The figures show it doesn’t work so why are we doing it?
‘‘We need to break down this myth in people’s head that sending people to prison will fix them.
‘‘It’s costing $90,000 a year. What else could you do with that kind of money? They could go to university, go to therapy... but instead they are locked up in a cage. They are not moving forward, they’re moving backwards.
‘‘It’s like putting a menacing dog in a cage with other menacing dogs and they are all barking away at each other. Actually that menacing dog needs to be taken away and put with nice dogs and have someone be nice to it and that might just change its behaviour.’’
People are troubled enough when they go to prison, he says. ‘‘If they’re not disturbed when they go in they’re disturbed when they come out.’’
Male prisons are particularly disturbing, he says. ‘‘You have all these men in cages, all that concrete and steel and bad food. For a lot of these men, they’ve been put in prison for violent acts and here they are in their cell for 23 hours a day so they spend a lot of that time working out. It’s all very masculine and macho.
‘‘These people are going round in circles. The system needs to be rethought if we’re going to see less recidivism.’’
The current system will never bring down our shocking recidivism statistics. Instead, he believes we need to look at the prison model in Scandinavia where prisoners are given jobs, better food, less security, more trust, respect from staff who have trained three years to be guards.
That’s going to be very difficult for the average person to swallow – the idea of being nice to prisoners, less restrictive accommodation, letting them do more for themselves. The way to sell it is to show how it can work financially, how it will bring about results, he says.
Tongariro Prison has got it right in many respects, says Fraser.
A former client serving his sentence there is allowed out to do farm work, he’s learning te reo, the staff are encouraging and respectful.
‘‘When he comes out he will be a trained labourer. He’ll be useful. Daniel Johnson is not useful. He has spent all his short terms in prison in his cell for most of the day. He’s learned nothing.’’
Many of his clients do end up back behind bars but Fraser’s mantra is ‘‘never give up’’.
‘‘I hope Daniel finds a niche somewhere that gives him a rewarding life where he fits in, where he has the right people around him.
‘‘I hope he knows there’s more to life than he has right now.’’
"It’s like putting a menacing dog in a cage with other menacing dogs. Actually that menacing dog needs to be taken away and put with nice dogs and have someone be nice to it. That might just change its behaviour.’’
Lawyer Seth Fraser on offenders in the New Zealand prison system.