16 Jul 2018

School holiday programme at Northland prison

From Afternoons, 1:28 pm on 16 July 2018

It's the school holidays and school-age children around the country are now planning what to do with their spare time.

For some of those kids, visiting a parent in jail might be on the cards. At any one time, more than 20,000 children in New Zealand have a parent in prison.

Today and tomorrow corrections staff at a prison near Kaikohe will be running a holiday programme so these kids can have some bonding time with their dads.

Will Stewart is Operations Support Manager at Northland Region Corrections Facility and joins us now to tell us more.

A message on the wall of the outdoor play area.

Fathers and children gather for a story-reading in Māori.

From left: Linda Biggs, project co-ordinator of the First 100 Days initiative of Storytime Foundation, Ian Leader, board chair of Storytime Foundation, and Gill Ireland, NRCF corrections officer, who initiated the child-focused visiting at the prison.

A corrections office plays a game of noughts and crosses with a young visitor. Prisoners have made the fabric toys and games.

Educational activities give dads and kids time to engage in a purposeful way during the NRCF holiday programme.

Making a kite during the NRCF holiday programme.