Harsh and arbitrary measures

Yet another report paints a bleak picture of solitary confinement in this country. Oxford University’s Sharon Shalev, an expert on the practice, calls for urgent changes to how New Zealand isolates and restrains prisoners, mental health patients and children in care and justice facilities.

The case of a prisoner confined in a ‘‘tie-down’’ bed for 16 hours per day, 37 days in a row, is already notorious. So too is that of Ashley Peacock, kept in a seclusion unit in Porirua for six years.

To these Shalev adds such stories as that of a man segregated for more than six years in a health and disability unit while restrained in a ‘‘body belt’’.

These cases are extreme and rare, but they are also plainly outrageous. They suggest a sort of inertia – where prison or health authorities simply keep doing what they have been doing, instead of reserving an extreme measure for an extreme situation.

They also suggest stretched services. In the tiedown bed case, staff restrained the prisoner for an ‘‘after-hours’’ shift – but this began at 4pm and lasted until 8.30am the next day. In other words, it was as much about Corrections’ staffing pressures as safety.

Shalev calls for an end to tie-down beds in prisons ‘‘just as it has been [ended] in health and disability settings’’. She makes the case well. If deeply ill people in mental health facilities do not need to be buckled down for days, why do prisoners? And if Corrections can limit the use of the beds to four prisons, as it has recently, then why can’t it drop them entirely?

If the business of ‘‘restraint’’ is troubling, so too is solitary confinement without it. The practice has been known for decades to be a profoundly damaging one, yet it goes on at a serious scale here.

Shalev’s report says New Zealand prisoners are four times more likely to be ‘‘segregated’’ – put in cells where they are alone for more than 22 hours a day – than those in England and Wales. The use of solitary confinement on mental health inpatients has declined recently, but it still remains high, she finds. In 2015, 754 people, or 10 per cent of inpatients, were put in ‘‘seclusion’’ during their care. The system that governs it seems shamefully arbitrary too. Everything from record-keeping, to the state of the units, to the ways out of isolation, can be seriously different in different places.

Is this why, as the report shows, women are 70 per cent more likely to be put in solitary confinement than men? What other reason could there be?

The Corrections Department both welcomes the report and seeks to mitigate it. Its chief custodial officer, Neil Beales, says that England and Wales, for instance, have many more prison suicides. But this is at least disputable; figures reported last year suggest the rates are broadly comparable.

Beales also points out that some prisoners are sometimes extraordinarily difficult to manage. This is no doubt true, and it is reasonable to expect they will sometimes require serious responses.

But such realism cannot excuse a harsh and aimless system. Tie-down beds need to go; there are other options available, even for the very sick. Mental health care must improve in prisons. And solitary confinement needs much more selective, careful use.

If all this means more resources, the public should pay. The alternative is another decade of needless brutality.

Tie-down beds need to go.