The ex-offender
Daniel Johnson committed his first burglary aged eight.
He broke in through the window of a neighbour’s home using a butter knife and stole a pot of yoghurt.
‘‘I was just hungry,’’ he says 26 years on from that misdemeanour.
A miserable motive for a hungry kid but it was to be the start of a life of crime for Johnson who never had any other ambition other than to steal enough to live a good life.
Johnson doesn’t want to meet in a cafe. He is convinced everyone around him thinks he’d be there to rob the place.
And with good reason: He’s made a career out of burglary.
It has been his signature crime in a rap sheet of almost 100 convictions and 76 prison sentences, many served concurrently, over 17 years.
The longest stretch he has had outside the prison gates is six months.
‘‘Don’t ask me how long I’ve been in prison, the question is how long I have been out here. It’s a bit like being on holiday,’’ he says.
Sitting in a park outside the Porirua District Court after visiting his probation officer, the softly spoken 34-year-old, who likes to draw and read, says he sometimes worries he will reoffend.
‘‘But I’m going to give it a go on the outside. I am going to do my community work, do my probation. I have to try and get a job, get used to doing what everyone else does.’’
Johnson’s last crime would have earned him his 77th prison sentence. He was caught by police hiding under a bed at a house in Whitby that he was trying to burgle last August.
Johnson said he did the crime a few days after finishing a two-year sentence in Auckland Prison because he had no support, no place to stay and no idea what else to do.
‘‘After I was released I slept under a bridge in Auckland,’’ Johnson said.
With the standard $350 Steps to Freedom money given to prisoners on their way out, he travelled to Wellington to stay with his mother, but she had gone to a tangi elsewhere.
Johnson had no identification or bank account, and could not get an address without them.
‘‘I ended up sitting in the bush. I was lost and I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to try and get ahead somehow.
‘‘I feel sorry for the people who owned the house. I was going to use money to get a place. I was worn out from walking around in pointless circles. I had to do something so went back to what I know.’’
At sentencing last November, Judge James Johnston spared Johnson prison. His lawyer, Seth Fraser, was a driving force behind keeping him from yet another stint of incarceration.
An offer for Johnson to enrol in a Ma¯ori and Pasifika trade training scholarship at WelTec may also have worked in his favour.
Instead the judge sentenced him to 18 months of intensive supervision, cancelled existing fines of $782, and ordered him to do 150 hours of community work.
Johnson’s tumultuous childhood laid the groundwork for his life of crime.
At seven he was sent to live with an aunt in Stokes Valley. A year later he was breaking into neighbours’ homes.
‘‘I just took little things [but] I was really naughty and ended up running away. At 12 I ended up in a [state] family home and that’s where I met the real criminals.
‘‘That’s when I started doing proper burglaries.’’
His first stint at Her Majesty’s pleasure was in 2000. He was 17. The ensuing years have been spent predominantly behind bars.
No-one from his family ever visited him in prison, he says. He has a dad ‘‘somewhere’’ and a few brothers he hasn’t seen for years.
He was estranged from his mother till his release last year.
He doesn’t like prison but he does feel more comfortable there.
‘‘You have your own little place, your own routine. Everyone has their own way of dealing with it.
‘‘You get pretty healthy in there. No smokes, no drugs. You get fed three times a day. The main things you can do are work out or watch TV and most people work out.’’
Life outside the institution he has spent the better part of two decades in is ‘‘weird’’, he says. When you have spent 22 hours in a cell day in and day out, freedom can be a little daunting.
It’s noisy and busy. There are too many people around, he says, and yet he seems lonely.
‘‘Most people I know are in prison.
‘‘I don’t know anyone out here.’’
● Two months after this interview Johnson’s resolve to make it on the outside looks sketchy. He has not followed up on the WelTec course and for the past six weeks he has not clocked in with his probation officer. There is a warrant for his arrest. Johnson is walking the well trodden path that could lead directly back to prison.