Women officers working in men's prisons.

• Author: Newbold, Greg
• Position: Research Papers

Abstaract

New Zealand was a late starter in the international trend towards employing female prison officers to work in men's prisons. Even after the first such officer was appointed in 1985, resistance to the idea continued in some quarters. This paper examines the recent history of New Zealand women's involvement in men's prisons and the debates that ensued. As will be seen, the fears of male prison officers that inmates would endanger women's safety proved largely unfounded, and the principal obstacle to women's integration was not the inmates but some officers themselves. Nonetheless, certain issues, particularly the risk of females entering into inappropriate relationships with their male charges, remain. The paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of having women officers working in a front-line capacity with male prison inmates, and how some of the problems have been addressed.

INTRODUCTION

Although New Zealand prides itself on being the first country in the world to grant women the vote (1893), it was relatively late in integrating women into some employment areas, such as law enforcement and prisons. By 1914 most large cities in North America, as well as many European cities, had appointed female constables, but it was 1941, following intense lobbying from women's organisations, before the first female constables were appointed in New Zealand (Butler et al. 2003:304). In prisons, likewise, female correctional officers were restricted to women's institutions until relatively late.

It was the United States that led the revolution which introduced women to male prisons. Until 1972 only two states--Virginia and Idaho--employed women as correctional officers in male institutions (Simon and Simon 1993:227). However, in 1972 congressional amendments to the Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act extended the prohibition on employment on the basis of sex from the private sector to the state sector, thus opening the door for women to work in all areas of corrections (Farkas and Rand 1997:995-6).

The 1972 amendments led to a spate of litigation which challenged the application of the new law. The most significant early decision was the 1977 case of Dothard v. Rawlinson, where the US Supreme Court ruled that in some circumstances--in this case where the security of an institution might be compromised--employment could be denied on the basis of sex. Some male inmates also opposed the employment of women on the ground that their personal privacy might be violated. In the outcome, apart from Alabama (to which Dothard related), no other state has successfully applied the ruling, and inmate privacy lawsuits have resulted in various compromises between inmates' privacy rights and the right to equal employment (Zimmer 1989). Thus, women officers gained an increasing presence in prisons catering for males. By 1978, 33 states had commenced assigning women to men's institutions (Jurik 1985:377), and by 1981 all but four state correctional systems had done so, with women comprising 6% of all staff in male prisons (Britton 2003:32-34, Farrell 2003:202, Zupan 1992:325-327). As the trend continued, by 1999 23.5% of the more than 200,000 staff working in US correctional facilities were female (Maillicoat 2005:190), and by the early 2000s 80% of all female correctional employees in the United States were working in male institutions (Zupan 2003:288).

Not until 1985, following the example of Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States, all of which had begun employing women officers in men's prisons from at least the mid-1970s (Farnworth 1992, Lashlie 2002:29), did New Zealand assign its first female officer to a male prison. As we shall see, the processes by which this transformation took place and the issues it created were similar to those that arose in America and elsewhere. This paper traces the progress of women's employment in New Zealand men's prisons and examines some of the debates that have come out of it.

HIRING WOMEN OFFICERS TO NEW ZEALAND MEN'S PRISONS

The decision in 1985 to employ women officers in men's prisons came amid a wave of legislation throughout the Western world aimed at gender equity in the workplace. In New Zealand, equal pay legislation for the public sector had been legislated in 1960, but it was not extended to the private sector until 1972. After that, discriminatory job titles allowed many employers to avoid the equal pay mandate, although this too was eventually prohibited with the passage of the Human Rights Commission Act 1977 (Department of Statistics 1993:280).

In 1978 a public service memo advised heads of government departments against discrimination when drafting job advertisements, but equal employment opportunities for women in the public sector did not really come until 1984. That year a statement, signed by all government employing authorities, explicitly opposed all forms of workplace discrimination, direct and indirect, and recognised the leading role of state employers in developing truly equal employment policies. That year a public service Equal Employment Opportunities (EEO) position was created in Wellington, which was expanded into a fully fledged unit two years later (Bartley 1993).

Men have always worked in women's prisons and for years a few women have been present in male prisons in voluntary or clerical capacities. However, it was the movements in employment law and policy that made the assignment of front-line women correctional officers to men's prisons inevitable. In February 1985 Minister of Justice Geoffrey Palmer issued a press release declaring that, beginning with minimum security and youth prisons, women officers would soon be hired to work in men's prisons (New Zealand Herald, 22 February 1985). In June that year, aware of the new policy, Celia "Ces" Lashlie, at that time working as a probation officer, was one of at least half a dozen women who applied for a vacant position at Wi Tako minimum security prison near Wellington. Her bid was successful, and in December 1985 Lashlie became the first woman prison officer to be hired by a men's institution (Lashlie 2002).

Lashlie's integration into the world of male prisons proved relatively painless and further recruitment soon followed. In 1986, as a result of a report by the first working party for the integration of prison officers, all male penal institutions were instructed to amend toilet facilities for the use of women (Hansen 1993). Early in 1986 a woman was appointed to the minimum security prison at Rolleston, and by August 1986 there were five women working in men's prisons (Lashlie 2002:33). That month the first female prison officer started at the century-old medium security jail at Mt Eden, and by March 1987 the Department of Justice had 37 women working as front-line officers in a dozen male institutions (Appendices to the Journals of the House of Representatives (AJHR) E5 1987:34). Later in 1987, as a result of government pressure to normalise the prison working environment, a decision was made at the national office of the Justice Department to employ at least one woman in every penal institution in New Zealand. Thus, in 1989, of a total of 1,600 prison officers, 90 were women working in male institutions (Lashlie 2002:33). From there, progress was rapid. Just two...