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TOMMY DORAN ON... PRISON from the inside

My encounters with the criminal justice system began at around the age of 17 when my methamphetamine use began to get out of hand. I remember feeling overwhelmed with fear, resentment and confusion when I was left in the police cells for a number of hours while in a drug-induced psychosis. Before I carry on, I feel as though it’s important for me to point out that never once have I been someone who feels comfortable taking the victim stance, wailing “oh poor me”, because at the end of the day, I take full responsibility for my actions. Everything I have been convicted of I was guilty of. But don’t get me wrong, my path to redemption is not something that took place overnight. It was a process that required the connection, empathy, compassion and patience of others, and a degree of honesty, vulnerability and accountability from myself. Although these traits are ones that are important in the progress towards drug and alcohol rehabilitation, they are also traits that are rejected within our current prison system, and in many cases are viewed as weak. Expressing these traits in prison may potentially make you the target of other inmates.

I spent the majority of my time in prison in the Mt Eden Corrections Facility (MECF), on remand. My last experience on remand in MECF in 2016 is one that stands out in particular. Because of overcrowding, most prisoners were only allowed to be unlocked for one hour at a time. This made no sense to me, especially considering that some of these prisoners had yet to even be found guilty and convicted of a crime, and appeared to still be being punished as though they had.

Along with this, on remand in particular, there was little to no rehabilitative material or programmes available to inmates. The average time unsentenced prisoners spent on remand in 2020 was 77 days. Some prisoners serve out their entire prison-time on remand before finally being sentenced and released with time served. How can we really expect people to come out of prison reformed if they spent their entire prison sentence with no rehabilitation?

I think something people often forget is that going to prison IS the punishment. Having your liberties and rights taken away from you IS the punishment. When I entered our prison system, I felt as though my personality and uniqueness were stripped from me. I became no more than a number, and was treated as such by the staff. The need for more excessive punishment within our prisons is unnecessary and detrimental, especially when we look to countries such as Norway, which treats its prisoners more humanely than anywhere else in the world and maintains a recidivism rate of only 20%, the lowest in the Western world. In Norway, humane treatment of prisoners is prioritised over punishment.

In Aotearoa New Zealand, there seems to be an ever-increasing demand for the harsh punishment of those in prison, from the public as well as anti-crime advocacy groups and politicians. This has had a significant impact on our law and order policy development, but our 70% recidivism rate would suggest that punishment is not successfully turning people away from crime. Although the easiest solution in the eyes of some is to simply “lock them up and throw away the key”, this is not a long-term solution. Intervening in the lives of individuals who have already been convicted of criminal offending is necessary, to break the cycle of unhealthy coping mechanisms and generational trauma and prevent this being handed down further to children and grandchildren. In my situation, the actions of a police officer, who decided that my drug-induced criminal offending was a health issue not a criminal one, saved me from going back into the justice system and gave me the opportunity to return to sobriety.

In many ways, I have been lucky, because I come from a middleclass, educated family, so have always had them to look to for a sense of normality, even when I was at my worst, which has been a key part of my rehabilitation. This is why today I recognise the gaps for many individuals on their road to rehabilitation, and the importance of support services to bridge those gaps.

Tommy Doran is an honours student in criminology at Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington. He is a former methamphetamine addict, works as an addiction recovery coach and is the co-host of podcast True Justice.

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2022-09-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-09-25T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://fairfaxmedia.pressreader.com/article/287810062077712

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