Review: Inside the Wire, by Rhonda Hāpi-Smith

This is a book that will stay with me for a long time. At the beginning the book appears to be a series of unusual work stories but then as you read further the tension rises and the reality of prison life in Aotearoa New Zealand starts to reveal itself. 

Rhonda Hāpi-Smith was a prison officer for almost 20 years and in a country with an enthusiasm for locking people up, her story is an important piece of social history. The book traces her day to day work, relationships with prisoners and other officers, and the effects of the job on her personally. This is social history direct from the penal coalface.

Hāpi-Smith’s story starts with her family, which has a history of working in the prison service. She then describes her training where we first meet a central theme of the book and of her future work, ‘control and restraint’. These words lie at the heart of what prisons are about and make up a large part of her experience as a prison officer. She was for example the first woman in the riot squad which was brought in when the normal controls had failed. Some of the most intense parts of the book are her accounts of confronting a prisoner or part of a prison population that was ‘out of control.’ Her involvement in these events led to a reputation with colleagues and prisoners as a ‘hard arse.’

But she’s not a ‘hard arse’ all the time. She describes young prisoners relaxing their guard and calling her ‘mum’ and the tragic effects on youthful prisoners of being moved to the adult section. She notes the ‘prison system created the men they became.’

Throughout the book Māoritanga is evident. Right from the start with her father, ex-28th Maori Battalion and also a prison officer noting that the prison where she would work, Mangaroa, had been built in a bad place, ‘...right next to an urupā.’ In her day to day work she gives people their full Māori names and acknowledges the mana of gang members. 

We meet prisoners of all types, members of different gangs: Mongrel Mob and Black Power, ‘segregated prisoners’, kept apart from the rest of the prison population, the psychiatric inmates, ‘patients not prisoners.’ Among the toughest she encounters are the trans prisoners who have had to fight every inch of the way and then there are prisoners so violent and disturbed the author suggests they should never be released.

Woven into her story is the gradual realisation of the personal cost of a job where you can never relax, where you deal with violence and suicide. This is compounded by low staffing rates, ’fifteen to one’ as she describes it. In an particularly open manner Hāpi-Smith reveals her own personal problems. Isolation, alcohol, anger, an inability to ever relax and overall exhaustion which she notes is the main cause of ‘death on the job,’ a fate that befell her own father. Untrained to deal with the emotional effects of all this Hāpi-Smith, despite her ‘hard arse’ prison persona describes experiencing PTSD and finally resigns from the job.  

The author also realises that the system she works in is not working. She states at one point that while there are ‘bad bastards’ who should be locked up, there are others for whom prison is not the place. Official figures show recidivism rates, people returning to prison, at 30% for first timers, and 60% for recidivists, eventuating in what the Justice Department website says is prisoners ‘almost endlessly cycling through a sequence of offending, conviction, imprisonment, release, and rapid return to further offending.’ While our prisons might punish, they certainly don’t deter. 

This is an important and very open book by someone who has walked the walk. We should listen to her.  Reviewed by David Veart