Visited Auckland East Maximum Security Prison, at Paremoremo on the 24th August 2000. █████ ███ showed me around.
SIDE A.
Okay, here we are now in east Division. The complex is made up of East Division, West Division and there’s a sixty-bed unit, a sixty bed specialist unit- all residential units. Peoples concept of Paremoremo is this… this is Maximum Security. And Medium Security, Low Medium and Minimum and these are child sex offenders units.
I’ve been working here for fifteen years. The Sally Ports, they’re unique to this prison and they’ve mutually exclusive doors… Bit of a nuisance when we’ve got a fire and people to get out in a hurry… this is as quick as it gets.
Chapel
In here they wear mostly overalls
Haven’t been down the pound for ages, haven’t had a fight since yesterday. Doesn’t matter, he still forgives me man, still takes me as I am You may as well, you actually… you’re probably in with the fixtures, but you’re not a fixture- you promise me every time you go out you won’t be back See our hanging yard out here? When this place was built (this is our boardroom now), that was actually built as the hanging yard and this is where they were going to actually witness the hangings… if they ever bought capital punishment back in. So, there’s something for you innit… bit of a fucken mess out there Photograph all the weeds that’ve grown up because there’s been no hangings Be mindful that I have some pretty sick units in there, okay? Particularly in the High Care Unit, I got some fragiles over here as well, I got George Baker over there who’s been the most prolific at risk or self harmer in the country and I’ve just got him into the block. I don’t want him coming up cos he sees your dial Ha ha he saw it on Saturday night, when I did the c…? For you The Hanging Yard… never been used… it’s not a yard that’s used. The only entry into it is through that door there, which has been bloody well rusted shut… it hasn’t been opened for years. For obvious reasons! That’s the Assessment Unit which is our special needs unit, High Care… and that’s the hospital
These cameras are operating from central control
X Shot of sign
These shoes are outside the wrong one
This is detention
That’s where they put their hands
Individual exercise yards… we can try a sunnier one if you want
What you’ve got there is the six that side, three this side and two quiet cells- they’re no longer in use They don’t comply with standard size and light… be about nineteen eighty-nine, ninety since they were used. One person in there for, probably at least a couple of years, of his own choice… go out for a shower, exercise and go back in again Through the, we have access then to the water, toilet flushing and all the rest of it to each cell Used to have to do, in here, years ago, we’d come down when… at five o’clock when the day starts, we’d be coming and turning the water off so that they were in there all night without water. Because what they used to do… they would block, block the toilet, and flush, and flush, and flush… The man that was in those cells, that number ten, was ████ █████████, by his own choice
This is Jono Rotman, who has come with jurisdiction of the minister to take photos
████ ██████? He doesn’t have any jurisdiction down here
That’s why I’m asking you
He knows nothing about nothing… okay go for it
That’s a good one… what used to be the operating theatre is now their lounge… that’s a sign of the times… Seriously substandard… too dirty and too old… and inmates were getting treatment that other people out in the community couldn’t get… so I stopped it This is what we use more of, our lumps and bumps, put plasters on…
Oh, we can have a shot of the dental… oh sorry, it’s locked!
Everythings locked, it’s a prison or have you forgotten
I’ve just remembered now… they gave me some keys. They gave me a lot of keys Again this structure here… is one at the entrance to every block.. .that, in the event of central control going down, ah then we can operate individually each of those places This is the most modern part… it’s seventies! Run of the mill, not state of the art Did you go out to the yards in the special needs unit? Because one of the things that I photographed of the architecture here was when I did my masters paper on the aged in prison and the doorway out into the yard is twenty four inches, and you can imagine, if you had a frame or a wheelchair, and the access up to and over was just like stairs, and there’s no where here for any older person because, even in the main block there’s three tiered living facilities. The bottom floor is the dining room and the next two are the living areas. And with the stairwells, you look down it like I did and took photographs from down you can just see how steep it is and how many stairs they have to go down. If you’re an older person… very difficult I’ll take him to the area where you’ve got the dents in the concrete where the others went… And that’s a mechanical restraint bed… which we have to use fairly regularly… comes complete with restraints and straps etcetera… ankle ties, head ties, wrist ties, body ties…
Lots of hideous laughter
Dream on you’re not getting fish
Why not? It must be meatloaf then
We got four yards and a guard posted up there
We get a few mice
Hey ah… we got a stripper up here
The actual cell design is exactly the same in every single block
SIDE B.
That’s our biggest problem (birds inside)… five o’clock in the morning, the dawn chorus and because the birds outside start, the ones inside wake up
Airstrip?
2nd roll
80 yards
Ninety-three the razor wire went up
What sort of houses are you looking for?
Y’ rich ones, with TV and stereo
I thought you’d want something that was nice and tidy and spotless
Ha, we’ve done that, we’ve been in the assessment block
Number three- spotless and number nine & ten – grubby When you had yards, a staff member would come down, open it up and you couldn’t see down here. You could get forty-eight inmates in here at one time. So they built this wall, make it smaller and split the number of inmates. At one stage you could 48 inmates… 48 together is a problem Used be written up in the corner of the wall over there… nineteen and one third laps of the yard was equal to a mile… the full yard, it’s changed now with the wall coming up… they’ve still got a shower… two cameras to each yard These were workshops but they’ve painted them up now… handball
This is more interesting than talking to criminals aye
You’ll excuse us for being a little cynical cos this doesn’t usually happen
Note: it feels like they’re keeping me away from other blocks (B maybe?)
Shot of ████
That one you were talking to has been in since seventeen… double murder … he’s about twenty two now.. Detention is the full isolation, this is the next step up… these guys are like an hour in the morning… it’s split into four sections, what we call behaviour modification regime… they work their way through and then eventually go through… when they rahk it up in any jail in the country, they end up here… every place in the country is meant to have one of these, but it doesn’t matter, they always end up sending their problem childs here Choose this side it like (the) Sunnyside
The pound is detention… it’s gone now but the gate number used to be a pound sign If you have a look in there at those cameras… See those cabinets besides the doors? He opens those, that’s what those are and those operate the cell. So what you’ve got is two or three staff in there that open the cell and get the inmate out; hes watching their back all the time. That’s the other end of the airstrip. This guy is nuts (has scribbled list of demands from inmate)…lookit the things on here now; sugar, teabags, ham, cake, kiwifruit, butter,… He can’t talk, well he can talk, but he’s deaf, but he can’t….. ohh man Whats unique about T block?
Unique? The cooks, White boards- y’know they’re marvelous- trouble is, you put stuff here you forget to put it in your logbook D and T have got this camera set-up, they’ve got the cameras in here and here, up and down the landing, so that the staff from here can see the movements of any inmates. See that? That cycles, that camera- that’s by choiice anyway, they do that. You can bring up any camera you want, by doing that (computer control). You bring that camera up and it’ll tilt and pan and whatever- they’ve spent a lot of money on it and it’s not proving to be very effective. That shows you that aspect and you can go over here. What they didn’t realise though, is they put the cameras that we can zoom and swivel and what ever, right in front of the office- where they should have put it over that area, cos the staff sit here, we can see down there, you don’t need onethat can peer down there- you need one over the other side. That’s another thing that they didn’t bother to ask us, but it’s a major improvement on what there was, which was nothing. It feels like they’re just graduallly getting rid of the staf f and one day you’ll just have one person in here. But then you’ve get out and give them toilet paper and feed them. (on ████ █████████) everybody thinks he’s out. But what happened was he was, when he did the second murder, he was arrested for that and before he was up for sentencing he was recalled on the first one. So he was found innocent on the second one and that’s when he was set to walk out the door, but I’m sorry he was recaslled on the first. He maintains his innocence whch is why he was here for seventeen years on the first one. By not admitting any guilt, he then can’t go before the board. What do I think? He’s guilty as hell. It’s just his style-whats the word.. you have a look at his writing, he’s anal retentive,Ha Ha, it takes an hour to write something, but its absolutely perfect. It takes him hours to write things, and he writes lots. Central control.
Gosh, you forget about the weather when you’re down there aye? It’s beautiful.
Glad you didn’t come yesterday, it was my bloody golf day. How many people have escaped? ████ █████████ got a hundred yards away once and then was caught, he then got out a second time, a number of years afterward and then has been re caught. Then █████ ██████ and ███████ got out and ███████ has been recaught. So theres only one out there that’s ever escaped- six thousand, three hundred days ago- something about that. Cos I had to count the days for him, to add onto his sentence for when he came back, Ha Ha- He’s still out there. These are the fire escapes, obviously they’re all locked, internally and externally, the idea is, if we have to we can get them all out that way or get crews in that way.
It’s a lot of concrete.
These towers that you can see there, number one that you can see there was manned 24 hrs a day as was number three. Number four was manned anytime these yards were in use. That’s the new yards which we showed you on the camera in there, B block and C block are exactly the samethey got those four full yards in there and again you’re talking, probably they would work on six to a yard at a time. So that if they wanted to go at one time, the whole top landing could go out and be split up into sixes or the next time they go out the whole bottom landing could go out- so the facilities there to take six per yard. It makes the whole place just so much better for us, because what we had before was forty eight of them. What we used to do was come in at seven o’clock in the morning and A,B,C, just unlock forty eight doors. Sometimes you’d have staff members that were on at night, who were not very proffesional, whatever, and would actually rark some of them up. So you’d come in in the morning and unlock them and they were all rearing and ready to go! The people around here (living in the area) are all saying, ahh bloody prison, you don’t get….. but, theres nobody here that was here when the prison came? They have all come since the prisons been here, they can’t say the prison’s spoiling their area- they came to the prison area. You get a lot of them complaining about this and complaining about that and bloody hell…. Hey you chose to live here. The land here, way back, long before the prison was actaully exellent for growing tobacco, very good quality soil. We’ve got farming, they do a lot with strawberrys and those glasshouses over there.. we did thousands and thousands of Pohutakawa seedlings for operation red…..? So that’s your D block. The original term for the block was intractables… good word, not enough in use. That riot hose is connected to the ring main, fire main and the button beside the door? You hit that button and that starts the riot pump up, which knocks one hell of a lot of pressure to the end of that hose, and you can knock any body off those walls, right off. We would check them every Friday, we would clean out the yards, once the yards were empty he would clean them out. But first thing he would do was try and get the staff as they left.. Ha Ha. We just got to be careful talking- He ( ████ █████████) was in this yard here and what happened was, he went down into the yard and the guy from the cells here, who were allowed out in the corridors in those days, they threw the rope into the yard, so he climbed up that onto the wall, ran round onto that wall, did the run and jumped onto the end wall (without the razor wire) and then dropped down. I took the police round and they photographed it, and the imprint of his heels, his elbows and his head whre he hit the soft mud and he climbed up the corner- over the first set of wire, over the second set of wire. The day he escaped, this is the second time, I was the one who did the fence check. Because what haoppened was, we got one little alarm that said something had sent the word, but in those days a big bird settling on the fence would set off the alarm. Of course I came round and had a look, but you can’t look at a fence and see somebody’s climbed over it. Unfortunately at the time he was going into the boiler house and taking the boilerman hostage. And I drove rund twice and, ahh nothing there and in fact of course he was down there. But the problem ws that the man that was in there never saw it, and he was in there. Those lights been paint bombed, they’ll’ve got themselves some paint, makes it a bit darker in there at night. Nowadays of course, with the new ruling, the lights stay on at night, the corridor lights. So it’s better for us. What we use to have was, on that corridor we have three grills which are locked at night. So you come down at night and you’re in the dark fumbling for a keyhole and you get it and you open it, and all of the time theres a cell right beside you, so eventually what we had was We’ll go up to the roof.