Anna Leask - Behind Bars: Real-life stories from inside New Zealands prisons

Prison was not a happy place for me. It was horrible I was fucking terrified. I was violated, I was beaten. The only place I ever felt close to safe was in my cell, at night, when I was locked in. That was my sanctuary. I knew no one could get me in there. You are never quite comfortable in prison, no matter how many times you go back. You exist, you survive. You see many things and you see many people that you wish to God you had never met. Nothing was more of a punishment than the people I had to mix with You are quite safe when you are locked in your cell, but when you have to mix with people they are right in your face and that can be quite traumatic. Prison is not real. What happens in there happens, but its not real life

Sarah, former inmate

YOURE IN A SMALL, bare room, and the door is locked from the outside. The room feels cold, sterile and desperately lonely. A bed juts from one wall, surrounded by concrete from floor to ceiling. Its barely a single bed barely a bed really, more a plank of wood screwed to the wall, not far off the ground, its paint chipped off by age and bored fingers.

Theres a mattress, a couple of sheets and a blanket, but no pillow or duvet. Theres nothing comfortable or comforting about it: like the rest of the room its basic, bare, barely adequate. Along the wall is a stainless steel toilet with no seat or lid and next to that a matching sink. There are steel plates on the wall with push buttons the most important reading flush and a vent, probably too small to circulate much fresh air. Same goes for the small window, where any view is obstructed by the bars. You suddenly feel confined, restricted, trapped. The bars on the door, painted the same hue of dull dark grey as those at the window, reinforce the fact that you are stuck in this room, powerless to leave and sentenced to stay.

All over the walls, etched into every surface, are names, sayings, messages some faded, some fresh, the marks of those who came before; a guest book of sorts. As you look down at your threadbare, ill-fitting and marked tracksuit the one they gave you when they took your clothes from you and after they strip-searched you it dawns on you that youre now one of them. This concrete cell is yours. For the foreseeable future you are not in control of your life. There are eyes on you every moment of every day: the guards, monitoring and supervising, the cameras trained into every corner, and the other inmates trying to work out what side, gang or team you are on.

Every freedom you had on the outside is gone. Every person is a possible threat, every liftable item a danger, and you have to be constantly aware: dont sit in the wrong seat, dont look at the wrong person, watch whom you speak to. One mistake could get you maimed or killed. The worst part is, there is nothing you can do to change anything. When you leave if you leave is not up to you. You are an inmate, in prison, and youre here to stay.

Right now, there are about 10,000 people serving custodial sentences in New Zealand prisons: a melting pot of robbers, fraudsters, murderers, rapists, burglars, thieves, child killers, drink-drivers, paedophiles, white-collar criminals, abusers and violent thugs. Most are men less than 7 per cent of the prison population are women and they range in age from teenagers to pensioners. They live their lives behind bars, within razor-wire fences, and under rules that govern when and where they sleep, what they eat (and how much and when), how long they can spend outside their cell each day, whom they can see and speak to, and what contact they have with the outside world right down to whether they see natural daylight, breathe fresh air, or feel sun and breeze on their skin. They live in a world that many of us can only imagine based on what weve watched on television or in movies. Few of us know anything about what its like to live in a prison and have every facet of our lives controlled by a group of interchangeable uniformed men and women weve never met before.