Attacks on guards grow

Prison officers want tougher sentencing for inmates who attack Corrections staff as incidents in some Auckland jails increase tenfold.

Figures released to Stuff under the Official Information Act show the number of non-serious assaults has spiked massively at prisons across Auckland.

Auckland Prison saw a rise from nine attacks in 2009 to almost 40 in 2018.

Auckland Women’s Corrections Facility went from two in 2009 to 29 in 2018, while Mt Eden Corrections Facility went from nine in 2011 to 40 in 2018.

Assaults were deemed ‘‘nonserious’’ by Corrections when they may have resulted in physical injuries that required medical attention, but not overnight hospitalisation or ongoing medical treatment. Meanwhile, serious assaults – requiring overnight hospitalisation or extended treatment – had fallen or remained static. While Auckland Prison saw eight serious assaults on staff in 2016, there was only one in 2017, and three in 2018.

Auckland South Corrections Facility had two serious assaults the year it opened in 2015 and in 2017, but none in 2018.

Alan Whitley, president of the union for prison staff, the Corrections Association, said the increase in assaults was ‘‘not acceptable’’. ‘‘There’s a lot more violence in crime now, so the people that are coming to prison are at the upper end of the offending scale.’’ He said prisoners who assaulted Corrections officers often did not serve any additional time for the assault. That, he said, was not enough of a deterrent to stop attacks in prison.

‘‘If somebody’s doing five years, and they get six months for assaulting a Corrections officer, and the judge doesn’t make that cumulative, it just runs alongside that five years.’’

Corrections national commissioner Rachel Leota said the overall increase in assaults happened in the context of a 20 per cent rise in the prison population since 2013.

She said gang members were disproportionately identified as responsible for assaults in prison and the proportion of gang member inmates had been ‘‘steadily increasing over the last 30 years’’.

‘‘We manage some of New Zealand’s most dangerous people in an environment that can be complex and challenging.’’

Whitley agreed that ‘‘a lot of the assaults correlate back to gang members’’.

Corrections Minister Kelvin Davis said any sentencing of prisoners who assaulted staff was a matter for the courts.

National’s Corrections spokesperson, David Bennett, said National had supported the first reading of a bill that would bring in tougher penalties for people who assaulted Corrections officers, as well as police and paramedics.

NZ First MP Darroch Ball’s member’s bill would put people in jail for a minimum of six months if they were convicted of assault with intent to injure a first responder.