There are eighteen adult prisons in New Zealand. Three prisons house female offenders, one each in Auckland , Wellington and Christchurch. The remaining fifteen house male offenders; ten in the North Island and five in the South Island. The facilities are managed by the Department of Corrections. In addition, there are five youth correctional facilities, termed youth justice residences.
These youth residences are managed by Oranga Tamariki the Ministry for Children. Northland Region Corrections Facility is located 5 km northeast of the town of Kaikohe and is colloquially known as Ngawha β after the local area.
Maori in Northland tried to persuade the Corrections Department not to upset a local taniwha by building the prison on thermal land. They were unsuccessful and the facility opened in Following completion, the foundations proved to be unstable. The prison accommodates up to prisoners with security classifications ranging from minimum to high-medium and employs staff.
Auckland Prison opened in and is at Paremoremo , on the northern fringe of Auckland , and thus also known as Paremoremo Prison. It has beds for prisoners, [ 21 ] and in , about 90 prisoners were classified as maximum security. The DTU houses up to 48 prisoners and provides an intensive week programme targeted at prisoners serving sentences of between four and twelve months. There has been a prison on the Mount Eden site in Auckland since The first building was made of timber and was known as the Stockade.
A new stone building opened in although the stone wall that surrounds the prison was not finished until the mids β using prison labour. The old Mount Eden Prison used to hold about prisoners and was squalid, substandard and unsafe. In the Department acknowledged the prison "falls well-short of the basic requirements for a modern corrections facility"; [ 25 ] a New Zealand Herald editorial described it as an "antiquated pile beyond redemption as a suitable place to incarcerate humans".
