#nz prisons

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"They [the prison guards] ruled by fear and were afraid of the men they ruled. And yet those men who fought against the system were not always the worst, by any means. There was often more hope of the man whom the authorities would call ‘one of the worst men here’ than of the ‘good’ prisoner, who was often subnormal and who, obedient and well-behaved under orders, was quite incapable of looking after himself in the normal life of the community." - Archibald Baxter, We Will Not Cease (2nd ed., Christchurch, NZ: The Caxton Press, 1968) reprinted in Peter Brock, ed., ‘These Strange Criminals’: An Anthology of Prison Memoirs By Conscientious Objectors from the Great War to the Cold War. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. p. 117.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Many of the prisoners complained of a lack of sex feeling. One would have thought this would have been an advantage, in a place where they saw no woman from year’s end to year’s end; but they strongly resented it and were unanimous in putting it down to dope in the tea.

Nothing could shake this conviction. ‘I know them,’ they’d say, with the queer over-excitement characteristic of them, resulting, partly at least, from the constant repression, and certainly the strange appearance and taste of the tea lent some colour to the theory.

They were full of theories, always to do with prison life or police court proceedings that were so closely connected with it .

...

To make a complaint against a warder was doomed to failure from the start. According to the regulations, which I did in the end manage to memorize, if a prisoner considered that an order given him by a warder was not justified, he was to obey the order immediately, but was allowed to make a complaint to the authorities. If he failed to substantiate his complaint, he was deemed to have made a frivolous complaint, and he was punished.

In actual fact, no prisoner could make anything but a frivolous complaint, as his word was never taken against a warder’s and the only witnesses he could bring were prisoners too.

The only successful complaint that I ever heard of was when, a little while before I arrived in the prison, nearly all the prisoners combined to complain of the staleness of the bread. Stale bread, when it has to be eaten dry as the sole article of food at a meal, is not very attractive.

The consequence of this most unusual solidarity was that when I was there the bread arrived for tea damp and smoking. As it was usually consumed then and there its effect on the digestions of men who ate it every night for years on end and remained in their cells for the night afterwards, can hardly have been good.

In prison one can hardly ever get the men to stand together for anything and it is this characteristic that makes it easy to rule by fear."

- Archibald Baxter, We Will Not Cease (2nd ed., Christchurch, NZ: The Caxton Press, 1968) reprinted in Peter Brock, ed., ‘These Strange Criminals’: An Anthology of Prison Memoirs By Conscientious Objectors from the Great War to the Cold War. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. p. 113-114

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"One night, to create a little diversion in the wearing monotony of those long evening hours, when I heard my neighbour’s shutter click, I placed myself up against the door where I was out of sight from the spy-hole.

‘Where are you, Baxter?’ shouted the warder and, hastily unlocking the door, he threw it open, appearing in the doorway in great agitation.

He was plainly relieved at the sight of me. ‘What do you mean, standing where I can’t see you? don’t you know you’re not allowed to do that?’

‘Is that another regulation?’ I asked. ‘I thought at least I had the freedom of the cell.’

‘You’ll get something you won’t like,’ he said, and slammed the door.

Those regulations! As every prisoner had to obey them it seemed only reasonable that there should be a copy in every cell. Far from it. We were not even allowed to read the copy pasted up in the hall. I tried to, but was driven away every time by the warder in charge.

‘No loitering in the passages.’

Finally, but starting every time where I had left off the time before, I managed to commit most of the printed form to memory.

I don’t know why there should be this objection to the prisoners knowing the regulations. Possibly because the warders are afraid of being held too strictly to them themselves.

That first night, when I started to go to bed, I found I had struck one of the worst things in my prison experience. No sheets, no pillowcase; only blankets, hard and brittle with age and much baking, and foul smelling beyond belief. The pillow was a greasy, filthy bit of ticking, filled with small hard pellets of what appeared to be metal of some sort. I never found out what they were. The blankets were too old and hard to have much warmth in them. They were baked to destroy germs and lice, but the knowledge that the dirt and the odour were hygienic did not help me much that first night. In time I seemed to get accustomed to them. Or perhaps it was that I never struck anything quite so bad as those first ones. Often during the night – and during all the nights I passed in prison – the silence was broken by horrible, long-drawn howls, expressive of pent-up misery, bitterness, hate. The warders rushed about, trying to locate the culprit. But they seldom succeeded. Such sounds echoing and re-echoing as they did were exceedingly difficult to trace to their source." - Archibald Baxter, We Will Not Cease (2nd ed., Christchurch, NZ: The Caxton Press, 1968) reprinted in Peter Brock, ed., 'These Strange Criminals': An Anthology of Prison Memoirs By Conscientious Objectors from the Great War to the Cold War. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. p. 106.