Salvation Army report highlights housing as key factor in ex-prisoner reoffending in New Zealand
Chelsea Daniels interviews Salvation Army Social Policy Mission Officer Ian Hudson about why New Zealand's reintegration system is failing released prisoners.
Summary
Chelsea Daniels of the New Zealand Herald's The Front Page podcast speaks with Ian Hudson, the Salvation Army's Social Policy Mission Officer, about a new Salvation Army report on prisoner reintegration. Hudson outlines the six pillars of reintegration developed by Corrections and explains why housing is the most fundamental — without stable accommodation, none of the other pillars can be effectively addressed. The report finds that people in unstable housing are 4.6 times more likely to be re-imprisoned, and that New Zealand's reoffending rate sits at over 43% within two years of release. Hudson argues that released prisoners face compounding obstacles — from lack of ID and a $350 grant unchanged since 1991, to landlord resistance and poor coordination between government agencies — that make reoffending almost inevitable without systemic reform.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
Chelsea Daniels: A new Salvation Army report is putting a spotlight on why an alarming number of ex-prisoners go on to reoffend. In New Zealand, more than 43% of people released from prison end up back there within two years. Almost two-thirds reoffend. The Salvation Army believes more focus is needed on reintegration services to make sure people return to the community with stability, support, and resources. Today on The Front Page, the Salvation Army's Social Policy Mission Officer, Ian Hudson, is with us to discuss why our current system is failing to build the home base that so many people need to break the cycle of re-imprisonment for good.
The Six Pillars of Reintegration
So Ian, tell me about these six pillars of reintegration. What are they?
Ian Hudson: They're a model that's been developed by Corrections to cover all of the things that would help to make a successful reintegration of prisoners into the community. We think they're a good model. Those pillars are accommodation — which is what this particular report focuses on — but there's also hauora, or wellbeing, which can cover addictions, mental health, and anything around that end. There's education and training. There's employment. There's family and community support. And then there's skills for life.
For a lot of people who are in prison, many of them actually don't have a lot of those things in place. And being released straight out into the community without some kind of support in those areas can quickly lead to reoffending.
The Obstacles to Finding Housing After Release
Chelsea Daniels: How hard is it to find accommodation for people released from prison at the moment?
Ian Hudson: Well, there are a lot of obstacles in the way of a person. If you think of it from a prisoner's point of view — they're in prison, and sometimes they don't know what date they're going to be released. For example, about 40% of the people who are in prison at the moment, just over, are on remand. And sometimes they won't know until sentencing how long they're in there. Sometimes they're released on the day of sentencing in what they call a time served. So they can't prepare for that. Unless they've got family waiting for them, those people haven't got a plan, haven't had time to join the dots, get everything sorted. Studies have shown that quite a few prisoners don't have a clue where they're going much before they actually are released.
And the obstacles, once they are released, are quite substantial anyway. Some of them don't have ID — which means no bank account. If you need to go to MSD and you haven't managed to get employed from prison, you're unemployed and you need income. Without ID you can't get a benefit. You'd already be on a two-week stand-down anyway. And all you'd be released with is a Steps to Freedom grant of $350, which has been the same for over 20 years — I think since 1991 or something.
Chelsea Daniels: It's not going to get you far, is it?
Ian Hudson: No.
Chelsea Daniels: And it sounds like prisoners are just set up to fail. There's a University of Auckland study mentioned in the report that shows people in unstable housing are 4.6 times more likely to be re-imprisoned. Is this mainly a supply problem — not enough houses — or is it also the stigma from landlords that they have to go up against?
Ian Hudson: I think it's a combination of all those things. Obviously at the moment we know we're in a housing and homelessness crisis, and prisoners won't be number one on the list. We're doing other work around homelessness, and we had a meeting with a group of people where they were saying homelessness was increasing — and I'm not saying that people released from prison were a huge contributor, but they were one of the contributing factors to the homelessness we have in the country. Because even when they have support from somebody helping them find a house, that person doing the support sometimes encounters resistance from a landlord to taking a prisoner in. So even with support — but if they're trying to do it on their own, which many of them will be — it's pretty hard to get out there in amongst it. It's very difficult to get a house for some people.
Chelsea Daniels: I mean, I'm going back to the time when I had to move out and I found it really difficult to get a place. I remember going to these flat viewings and finally one landlord called me back and I could have cried, Ian. It was that much of a relief. And I won't go into how much I spend on rent — it's certainly not $350. The bond wasn't that either.
Ian Hudson: On top of that, if you don't mind me saying — you looked like a person that would be much more likely to get a place. If you come out with tattoos, or arguably if you're Māori, or even if you don't look like that — if people class you as respectable but they know you've got a prison record, then it's a mark against you, isn't it? It just makes it a thousand times harder.
The Bond Bank Proposal
Chelsea Daniels: The Salvation Army is advocating for something called a bond bank. How would that system work, and why isn't the state already providing something like this?
Ian Hudson: The report outlines that, and the idea is that it would be worked out between MSD and the person being released. That would give them something — say, for example, if they have some idea that they're about to be released. Parolees are in a bit of a similar situation sometimes to people on remand. They might be released at the parole hearing but not know for sure beforehand. So if you go to a landlord or some other housing service and you don't know the date and you can't tell them if you've got the money — because of all the other obstacles — then it's very difficult.
The idea is that it's set up in such a way that it comes out of their payment retrospectively. They pay it back, but it's a loan that's set up so that they can actually line up some sort of housing before they leave, and with some money — because obviously if you don't have money, nothing's going to happen for you. Some of our services — we do have reintegration services — plus people in other programs that take released prisoners sometimes have to do a lot of this work, kind of carrying the can, if you like, until it gets sorted, and hopefully get back-paid for accommodating the person in the meantime.
The Steps to Freedom Grant and Societal Attitudes
Chelsea Daniels: You mentioned the Steps to Freedom grant — that $350. I can see here it's been in place since 1991, so 35 years, and it's still $350. I suppose I was going to ask why it hasn't changed, but do you think there needs to be a societal shift about how we think about prisoners and ex-prisoners? Because we're quite keen to have conversations about locking people up and putting them in prison — that seems to run especially on election years. But the conversation seems to die out once they're in prison — how we rehabilitate prisoners, and that costs money. And then it falls off the plate even further when we think about reintegrating prisoners into society. It begs the question: should we be thinking more about the prisoner as a person versus a number on a spreadsheet, or what they've done — the worst thing that they've done?
Ian Hudson: Absolutely. I mean, some of the — and if you had a chance to read the report, we've included a few stories. You can see how, for many people, there are so many different things that have contributed to why they've offended. In recent times we had the abuse in care inquiry, and so in some cases some of the people that are in prison have experienced trauma and all sorts of other things that have contributed to why they've offended. Some of them need support to actually deal with those things.
In fact, one of the people I quote in the report is a manager of a service we have. He talks about how, sitting there in the service, people get to face and deal with some of the deeper things that are transformational — because some of them have recycled through prison numerous times but they've never been able to deal with those things. In a safe environment they can face it and work their way through it, and it's transformational. That's the kind of thing that people need to think about when we're looking at releasing prisoners.
In a way, we're housing them in prison and then releasing them back. I think 90% of prisoners probably want to live a better life — they don't want to go back to prison — but they don't know how, in many instances, to deal with the stuff because it's kind of deep. They don't really know what it is in some cases. So I think we do need to think of them as a person and see how we can turn that around. Because it's not only about them. Some people would say, "Oh, it's all for the offender — what about the victim?" Well, I think we need to care more about victims, but it's not one versus the other. And often the offender has been a victim themselves. This is all part of a cycle that we need to try to break.
International Comparisons
Chelsea Daniels: How does New Zealand compare internationally when it comes to reintegration support? Are there any other countries perhaps doing it better?
Ian Hudson: I think countries in Scandinavia do a lot more reintegrative work and more support for prisoners, and they probably don't imprison at the same rate anyway. A lot of those countries have better systems. Some do it worse than us — I'm not sure that the US is a good place to look at. And we've got such a high imprisonment rate apart from the US internationally, among Western countries anyway. It's a bit of a worry that we've got this increasing prison population, which means in the future a lot more people will be released. And if we don't do release well, all we'll be doing is recycling people back again. So it's really important to deal with these things.
The Catch-22 of Release Without Support
Chelsea Daniels: Every part of the Corrections budget will have gone up since 1991. Your boss — the CEO of Corrections — the salary for that role has gone up by over $300,000 since the mid-90s. How is it OK? I guess we're pragmatists and we work with what we've got. And I've heard the argument as well: "These people don't want the help. They just go out and don't want to better themselves." But if you've ever had a conversation about addiction and how they ended up in prison in the first place — if they don't receive treatment for addiction in prison or directly afterwards, then once they get out into the world, the first thing they're going to think of is picking up. So we're setting them up to fail. Of course they don't want to better themselves in that moment because they haven't been given the tools. It's a catch-22 situation: we've put them in prison, said you've done a bad thing, then sent them out into the world with $350 and hopes and dreams, basically. Show me a person who can get accommodation in Auckland or Wellington with $350 in their pocket.
Ian Hudson: You can't do it. And I think what this report is trying to say is that if people don't have a good, secure home base, pretty much all of the other pillars can't be worked on. That's kind of why we focus so much on housing this time — it's the first one, but it's also a fundamental one. If you don't get that right — now, sometimes you need to do two things at the same time, because some people have got mental health issues or addiction issues and they can't sustain a tenancy because they can't deal with those things. It's a bit like our homelessness work in that way. But you can use release as an opportunity to give people those opportunities to work on these things.
At the moment, the way it tends to work is — and we don't want to blame Corrections for this, because with the numbers in prison and everything, it's probably quite hard for them to achieve all of this and they're probably not adequately funded or resourced to do it all. But between MSD, between health, and all of the different parts and services, somehow we need to join them up better so that when someone leaves prison, they've got the opportunity to really set themselves up properly. Maybe connect with their family — some of them have burnt bridges and some of them haven't — but they need to find a community they can connect to. It all starts with having some secure place to launch from.
Chelsea Daniels: Yeah. And I think basically getting the idea to people that not all prisoners are bad people at their core. They've done bad things perhaps, but you've caught them generally at the worst moment in their lives, and they do deserve a second chance. What do you think are the most practical changes that could make a difference — what could we do, say, tomorrow?
Practical Reforms
Ian Hudson: I'm giving you a magic wand, Ian — well, what we've put in the report is that we would like there to be accommodation coordinators connected to the prisons who actually work through some of that stuff for people, so that they can get into housing and smooth the way. I think to a certain extent some of the housing programs we have — things like transitional housing — could be connected up with that sort of thing if there were the right connections going on between people. There are different types of housing needed, and those kinds of programs could help, but you need someone in the prison to help connect people to them, because many of them just don't get that chance.
I also think that information about housing that's available needs to be provided to all prisoners — good information about what's available, what processes they need to go through, and what help they can get, not just for them but for their family as well. Because a lot of them don't really know when they're in prison where they can go looking or who might help them.
We also think that assessments should take place at some point about what kind of housing they need, including more supportive accommodation, because that would pick out whether someone has got mental health issues or maybe should do some sort of addiction course. There's a whole range of different things in there.
And obviously, having ID sorted when you leave prison, having already connected to MSD for benefits, and obviously a significant increase in the Steps to Freedom grant — those are just basic things. If they could have their bank account set up before they leave — those are just basic things that would make it so much easier for them to get past go, really.
Chelsea Daniels: Yeah. Thanks for joining us, Ian.
Ian Hudson: Thank you for the opportunity to talk.