Bomb stopped at prison gates

Could you imagine trying to explain the colour blue? That’s Josie Moon, trying to explain synaesthesia, writes Eleanor Wenman.

Lorde’s songs are colourful. Sitting in a dark room, eyes closed, musician Josie Moon can see it – greens and golds, browns and whites.

Moon has synaesthesia. Specifically, sound-to-colour synaesthesia and a touch of grapheme synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is a neurological condition where senses can merge: when one sensory pathway is activated, another unrelated one is activated as well.

For Moon, this means that when music plays, she has sounds and textures appear alongside notes and musical instruments, creating a landscape of music. But she also experiences grapheme synaesthesia, where each letter has its own colour. ‘‘ ‘O’ in a word is usually white and ‘K’ is definitely green for me. ‘F’ is always purple.’’

Usually, asking Moon to describe how she experiences the world is a tricky thing – after all, how would you explain the colour blue to someone who’s never seen

A visitor was stopped from bringing a homemade bomb on to prison grounds amid a year when assaults on guards soared and jails struggled to deal with people with ‘‘significant’’ mental health issues.

Figures supplied by the Department of Corrections, under the Official Information Act, have laid bare what prison workers have to deal with on a regular basis. Assaults on prison staff were up in the past financial year, during which four prison visitors were stopped from bringing guns on to prison grounds.

‘‘Staff were carrying out searches of visitors’ vehicles at the entrance to the prison,’’ deputy national commissioner Brigid Kean said of one search at the entrance to Hawke’s Bay Regional Prison in June 2019. ‘‘A visitor was asked whether he had any drugs, alcohol or weapons in his car, and confirmed he had knives in the back of his ute and a firearm on the back it? She takes a stab at describing it anyway, pushing play on Lorde’s song The Louvre. ‘‘The guitar notes [at the beginning] are between a brown and a gold colour, and her voice is a distinct shade of white.’’

Generally speaking, the whole song has a green-gold colour for her, mostly because of the sounds within the chorus.

‘‘When each sound is introduced, new things pop up, so it turns into a landscape. When I’m listening to albums I really want to experience properly for the first time, I always turn off all the lights and listen.’’

Moon knows what she’s experiencing isn’t really there – the colours are somewhere between her brain and her vision. When she reads, for example, the text might be in black and white but, in her mind, colours flare up in association: yellow for E, white for O and so on.

This has always been the way she’s seen the world – it took her until her early teens to realise that not everyone else did.

It was only when she stumbled across the term synaesthesia while reading that she had a lightbulb moment.

‘‘It’s kind of funny, because I didn’t even realise it was a thing until other people didn’t have it. It’s almost like a source of comfort now that I know it’s something not everyone experiences.’’

Synaesthesia wasn’t necessarily either a huge hindrance or help in life, Moon said. ‘‘It’s just another layer.’’ seat. A comprehensive search took place and a number of items were found including various sights for a gun, an improvised explosive device, a rifle, ammunition, drug paraphernalia including pipes, and three knives. Police arrested the driver and took possession of the items found in the vehicle.’’

A month later at the same prison, a visitor was arrested after trying to enter with two metal pipes, a glass pipe, a glasses case containing drug paraphernalia, a carving knife, a hatchet, and an air rifle.

In August a prisoner arriving at Manawatu¯ Prison was found with a makeshift gun, then in October police took possession of a replica gun in the glovebox of a car coming into Auckland South Corrections Facility.

The Corrections data also showed that attacks on prison staff were increasing, with

29 serious assaults, 415 no-injury assaults, and 213 ‘‘non-serious’’ assaults by prisoners on staff in the 2018-19 year. At Christchurch Men’s Prison alone, the overall number of assaults increased 40 per cent between

2017-18 and 2018-19.