Writer champions female prisoners

Celia Lashlie continues to champion the underdog, reports Catherine Masters, of the New Zealand Herald.

When Celia Lashlie was manager of Christchurch Women's Prison, Maka Renata's mum was jailed there.

Meanwhile, Child, Youth and Family put Renata into the care of an uncle who taught him how to rape.

His mum, writes Lashlie in her new book, was a hard woman for whom life had not been gentle.

She wasn't easy to manage in prison and didn't let anyone draw too close.

In Lashlie's view, the woman saw her criminal offending as the way it had to be in order for her and her children and grandchildren to survive in an unforgiving world.

On the evening Lashlie delivered the news of her 14-year-old son's arrest for rape, the tough woman wept.

"Her beloved son, barely out of childhood, had just inflicted violence of the sort she had experienced numerous times in her life," writes Lashlie.

"Her son was a rapist... It was as I watched her weep and felt her genuine sorrow and grief that I realised, not for the first time, that in some way I had yet to fully understand, the mothers of our at-risk children are part of the answer."

Lashlie is sometimes angry and often cynical in The Power of Mothers: Releasing Our Children.

Few escape criticism - not the media, not Child, Youth and Family nor the Corrections Department, not the politicians nor the bureaucrats.

All are culpable in her eyes for contributing anything from lip service to wasted opportunities, from careless cruelty to abject systemic failures.

It is the third book by the former prison manager who is now a social commentator and agitator.

It is also her last, she says, because now she just wants to get on with the practicalities of finding ways to effectively help disempowered women - and if you do that, you'll cut down prison rates for men, she says.

Lashlie has written previously on how people end up in prison and also on how to raise good men, but received most notoriety the time she was working for the Special Education Service when she made an off-the-cuff comment that a blond, angelic 5-year-old boy was sitting in a classroom somewhere in New Zealand and that he was coming to prison.

He would probably kill someone on his way, she said.

The latest book is not a fix-it book, it's more a coming together of Lashlie's thoughts and lessons from the past nearly 30 years, 15 of those in the prison service and the rest working in the community.

It was written, she says, as a test of whether she is able to pick up all the pieces and turn them into something meaningful.

As the book weaves its way through various stories - from Bailey Junior Kurariki's hounding by the press since he was 12 and which she likens to "bear-baiting", to CYF's failing of Maka Renata and the needless death of Nia Glassie - it builds momentum as it moves towards the story of a woman Lashlie is working alongside now, a woman she calls Jane, whose small children have been removed by CYF and who, despite working hard and making big changes, is unlikely to get them back.

Jane was herself a foster child who suffered terrible abuse and who, Lashlie says, is being psychologically raped again.

Basically, the system is "buggered", she says down a phone line.

She agrees she might sound angry in the book, but says she writes emotionally for a reason.

She wants to crack the wall of apathy that cuts many off from the tragedies she writes about.

She believes we are in the mess we're in because we train people to distance themselves from their emotions.

From prison officers to social workers, people are told to work by the book and to leave their heart, soul and intuition at home, she thinks.

Sure, her book is grim reading, she says, and of course there are extraordinary people out there doing extraordinary things.

But she is "over" the superficial debate and "CYF acting like bullies".

She is critical of the Government's new push for the faster permanent placement of children, which will leave in its wake, for some, a burning anger and resentment and a pathway to prison.

Lashlie talks of moments as turning points in people's lives and says in both Renata and Kurariki's lives, such moments were created by CYF.

It could and should have been otherwise, she says.

Instead, more than $1.4 million was spent keeping them incarcerated, money for which there is nothing to show.

One of Lashlie's key messages is for the women's prison service.

As of March this year, 496 women were in prison, compared to 8000 or so men.

We should lead the world in how we manage these women, she says, "because it is, by and large, the women in prison who are raising the criminals of the next generation".