Print | Send to friend | Email update

Prisoner payouts open old wounds

Nov 29, 2004 1:41 PM

A teenage girl is brutally murdered. Nearly 20 years later, her killer is asking for compensation for the way he was treated in prison.

This is the case for one woman who has talked to Sunday, but her anger and despair is shared by the victims of nearly 200 criminals who are claiming compensation for alleged abuse in prison.

It is a debate that raises a raft of philosophical, legal, and moral questions, and it seems there are no easy answers.

In June 1987, 16-year-old Colleen Burrow made what was meant to be an innocent trip out for takeaways.

Somehow Colleen became separated from her friends and fell into the hands of Mongrel Mob members Sam Te Hei and Tad Sullivan.

They wanted sex but when she refused they knocked her to the ground and kicked her for almost an hour with their steel-capped boots.

They then ran Colleen over with a car. When they were finished, the teenager was dead and unrecognisable.

Colleen's mother Ida and sister Tracey were left to grieve the loss, but now face a new trauma. One of Colleen's killers has made a claim for compensation.

Te Hei alleges he was abused by prison officers while serving time at Paremoremo Prison for Colleen's murder.

If he wins his case he could receive tens of thousands of dollars in compensation, and he's not the only one - up to 200 other criminals are lining up with their own allegations.

Te Hei's lawyer, Tony Ellis, has already won thousands of dollars for five other criminals whose abuse claims were proven.

He says his new clients like Te Hei are victims whose human rights have been breached.

But for Ida and Tracey, Te Hei's claim for compensation is devastating.

"You mean to say you can murder my girl and get paid for doing that?" asks Ida. "It's been like reliving the whole tragedy again. We're still mourning for her. It's going back to the actual day when he murdered Colleen."

Ellis is adamant that the prisoners deserve justice and compensation.

"When is it that somebody's criminality becomes so unacceptable that they can be treated like a dog, or worse?" he asks. "In fact, if they were treated like a dog in these circumstances the SPCA would prosecute."

Whether New Zealanders like it or not, abuse of inmates is not only unacceptable, it's unlawful under the Bill of Rights and under international human rights conventions.

Some of the allegations of abuse made by inmates are serious and disturbing - stories of beatings, prisoners being stripped naked and photographed, ritual humiliation, mental abuse and unlawfully long periods spent in solitary confinement.

The Sunday programme has been given a tape of one prisoner's testimony, in which he says: "They got me down and they held my hands and then they stomped my hands and they broke my hands."

The inmate alleges he was beaten in retribution for riots in Paremoremo Prison in 1998.

The Corrections Department was cleared in an internal report but the prisoner claims abuses continued after that date in Paremoremo's notorious Behaviour Management Regime.

"What they did to us was shocking, it was shocking. Just for looking at a screw wrong they'd come in and knock them over, and they call us the f***ing animals."

Ellis says he has seen one set of medical records which would indicate that if what the prisoner alleges is true, then it amounts to torture.

"That is unacceptable in any civilised society, but when it happens in Auckland, you can't get an investigation," says Ellis.

The lawyer claims there has been an effective cover-up and that the government finds it embarrassing to have these events aired in public.

Paremoremo's Behaviour Management Regime, or BMR, was like a super-maximum security unit used to control the most difficult inmates.

It was meant to work by removing and then restoring privileges for good behaviour, but inmates allege officers went far beyond these measures.

A group of Paremoremo inmates took a test case earlier this year in the High Court. It found that allegations of torture couldn't be substantiated, but that the BMR was inhumane and inmates' human rights were breached.

Five inmates were paid thousands in compensation, opening the door to further claims.

The Corrections Department is appealing the ruling, but in October the department was criticised by the chief Ombudsman, who told parliament that after five years prison bosses were failing to act urgently with assault claims.

He also said surveillance cameras hadn't been installed in volatile units, despite requests dating back two years.

And during this time, a former Paremoremo Prison guard says things were so bad in the BMR that even he was scared of some of his fellow officers.

"To sum it up in a word, thuggery. Thuggery and corruption," the guard told Sunday.

"If someone doesn't do their job properly everyone covers up for them. Cameras weren't in certain places and inmates were assaulted and told if you tell anyone, well, it'll happen again but worse."

The former officer says the now defunct BMR worked, but what didn't work was its implementation.

"I'm not a crim lover as the term goes, definitely not a crim lover, but as far as I'm concerned they've done the crime, they do the time. End of story."

But should criminals be entitled to monetary compensation for this alleged abuse?

Under international conventions, money is the appropriate remedy, but it raises the question of whether they should be allowed to keep the money.

The government  is planning legislation to give victims first call on prisoner compensation.

Ida says if she could, she would claim the compensation from Te Hei and give it to the Sensible Sentencing Trust.

She says she wouldn't want the money for herself because it's "blood money".

Ellis says the taped testimony proves that most inmates' allegations aren't about money, but accountability.

"They have been about vindicating their rights, making sure that people who have abused them...are brought to justice. Money has been an extra bonus, that's all."

For Ida and Tracey, the notion that some of New Zealand's worst criminals have already been paid compensation for alleged prison abuse is unacceptable.

"These are killers, they're murderers, cold blooded murderers, they murder people with their own hands," says Tracey.

Ellis admits he doesn't know the crimes of all his clients.

"It isn't my business to know. I'm not representing them for crimes they have committed, I'm representing them for what's happened since they've been in prison."

Ellis knows he is fighting for an unpopular cause, and says he has come under personal attack as a result.

"It's my duty as a barrister to do it, whether you like it, whether the public likes it, or whether I like it," he says.

Ellis says the Department of Corrections is the one in the wrong for allowing abuses in the first place.

The former prison officer agrees. "There's more to this than the inmates. The Department of Corrections has to be made answerable."