GUEST BLOG: Arthur Taylor – A History of Smuggling Tobacco into NZ prisons

In December 2012 the High Court upheld my case that the smoking ban bought in by the Minister of Corrections Judith Collins was “unlawful, invalid and of no effect”.

Undeterred, Corrections got The Governor-General to sign off those regulations continuing the ban. A few months later I persuaded Justice Brewer that those were “invalid, unlawful, and of no effect”. His Honour who by no means could be accused of being a Liberal, having spent 20+ years as the New Plymouth Crown Prosecutor- (a reserve army colonel to bootl).

In a move that Robert Mugabe would have been proud of, the National/Act government then bypassed the normal Select Committee process and hastily passed the legislation through Parliament affectively nullifying Justice Brewer’s judgement.

I have never been a smoker and I know full well the ill effects of smoking. So why then did I so vigorously challenge what Judith considered a health measure? Unlike Judith and her ilk, I knew full well what would entail in a prison context. Unlike in the outside world, prisoners spend their days in unrelenting boredom and idleness. What the rocket scientists who closed most psychiatric facilities in the early 80’s-90’s might not have guessed is where most of those former inmates ended up.

They would normally end up in psychiatric care. In your average prison wing, we have a mix. This can be a very volatile mix. So the defacto medication that lubricated all this boredom, stress and anxiety was tobacco. I, as did many frontline prison guards, knew the absence of tobacco would raise the level of violence that it would bring. Your risk of being assaulted/injured would outweigh the health benefits. That’s why the smoking in a prison context is fundamentally different than anywhere else.

Subsequently it would open up a whole new black market.

Up until about 1990, prisoners could buy a ‘fig’ (1 0z) for 14cents. In those days, tobacco was smuggled out of prison and was regularly traded in pubs. When a lowly paid (compared to the police) prison guard can stop in on the way to work at a dairy or garage, buy a perfectly legal product for a massive profit (a packet of tobacco costs $500 inside) so the free market economy bought freehold in by national/act unfortunately would prevail. This has a further downstream effect on prison security.

A guard who would see no problem bringing in tobacco by comparison, would certainly baulk and never attempt to smuggle in weapons, cellphones and serious drugs such as P and Heroin. By smuggling in cigarettes however the guards open themselves up to threats, stand over tactics and blackmail for smuggling.

Arthur Taylor is a prisoner rights activist and TDBs blogger inside prison