Rhonda Hāpi-Smith: Working inside the wire

Rhonda Hāpi-Smith followed her father and several of her siblings into prison life. She spent 20 years as a prison officer, working at Mangaroa and Rimutaka prisons, becoming a member of the Riot Squad — all of which she’s written about in a newly published book, Inside the Wire.

In this kōrero with Dale, she talks about why she wrote the book and how she managed the challenges of being a female prison officer — and wāhine Māori at that — walking among men locked away for their crimes, many of them Māori.

 

Kia ora, Rhonda. Please start us off by talking about the names you carry and your whānau dynamics and iwi connections.

My full name is Rhonda Joy Hāpi-Smith, and I am the youngest of nine siblings. My first name is Welsh. My mum picked it because there’s a Rhonda Valley in Wales, and she always dreamed of Wales, for some reason. My mum’s middle name is Joyce, so that’s how Joy came in — and because I was the last one, they were obviously happy to have me!

Hāpi comes from Tūwharetoa, which is where my great-grandfather came from. My father is from Mahia, on the East Coast of the North Island. The name Smith came about because my dad and his twin brother wanted to join the Māori Battalion, but their mum didn’t want them to go to war, so she made sure everyone around Mahia knew that. So they travelled to Rotorua to join up, and changed their name to Hāpi-Smith.

We grew up as Smiths, but as I’ve got older, I’ve brought my full name back in, as Hāpi-Smith. I’m very proud to have it on a book.

We grew up in Napier. My father was a prison officer, so I grew up in that world. But being a prison officer myself was never on my radar. I had watched my dad and my siblings go in. Six of my dad’s children went into the prison service. I was the second-to-last one to go in.

So I had watched, had listened, had been around a lot of things. I had a good idea of what was required to be able to work within a prison. And I always said: “Hell no, I will never do it!”

Lo and behold, I turned into my dad! I decided that I needed to have a career, not just a job, and I thought, well, everyone seems to be doing all right in the prisons, so I may as well give that a go. So, I did, and I never looked back.

It was 20 years of my life. But it wasn’t all of who I was. I’ve done quite a lot of different things. After I left Corrections, I went out and worked in the orchards. That was soul-cleansing, to go out and work in nature and do real hard labour. Physical work. Not having to think much.

Later, I dabbled in several other government departments. I like working in those sorts of environments. It’s structured, it’s got routine.

Were you the spoilt daughter at the back end of a big whānau?

How can I explain it? All my nephews and nieces were a year or two younger than me. Being the youngest in my own family, I grew up with my nephews and nieces. And because there were always so many people in our family, I kind of got lost in it. But my dad loved me to the ends of the earth. And yup, my family did think that I was spoilt. But we never had material things. I’m not materialistic. Things are just things.

I grew up with a bit of a smart mouth because I did have to defend myself quite a lot. There were a lot of males around me at the time. I was pretty rough when I was young. I was really tomboyish. But my brothers were strict in making me respect myself and not forget that I am a girl. Even so, there was nothing girly about me at all.

So, it’s hard to say. Yes, there was envy, a lot of envy, because I had my father’s love. I shared a wonderful relationship with my dad. We could talk about anything. Whereas I think a lot of my family found it hard to sit down and have conversations with him. He kept me curious and answered a lot of my questions.

And because Dad was a prison officer, and our home life was really busy, he needed to find space and time to relax. Boating was one of his loves. He loved the sea. He loved going out on his boat. Any boat he owned, he always renamed it Rhonda Joy, and that really brassed my family off, because you’re not supposed to change the name of a boat. But Dad always did, and it was always Rhonda Joy.

He and I would always go out on the water. We wouldn’t even go fishing. We’d go and sit out at Pania Reef. Dad would take his books, and I would just sit there and daydream and talk. And I loved it. And he loved it. And that’s where we would go and get our peace. We spent many hours out there. But yes, I have been thought of as spoilt. You know, if being loved incredibly is considered being spoilt, well, then, I was very spoilt.

But as far as getting more than anyone else, not really. I grew up knowing that life was hard. I didn’t expect a lot, but I had everything that I needed. I had a roof over my head. I had food. I had people around me who loved me. And I had a great childhood. I was lucky to have my brothers, and they did pave the way for me a little bit. They all had their reputations out in the community. And I was always proud to say that they were my brothers when I was out and about.

We were very sporty, and one of my brothers nurtured me into softball. He coached me. He pushed me. I went quite a fair way into it. Softball was one of my great loves growing up. Sport was a natural part of life. We used to live near the local primary school, and just about every afternoon my brothers and all of the people down our street would end up at the school playing rugby and bullrush and whatever.

In those days, everybody knew each other. We were like one big family. And it carried its way into the prison, because our dad always let us know that you had to have compassion and empathy. Basically, there but for the good grace of God go I.

I’m fair-skinned, but I’m Māori all day and every day. When I was growing up, I really didn’t know the difference between Māori and Pākehā. I just thought we were all one. To me, it wasn’t about people. It was just about a skin colour. I’d look at a brown fleece sheep and think: “Oh, those are Māori sheep, and the ones with white fleeces are Pākehā sheep.” Colour to me was just a surface thing. I’m proud to be Māori, and I always wanted to carry that through in my job. And so did my dad, and my family.

Corrections is not an area that most of us think about, especially when it comes to the challenges of working on the inside. Prison officers can spend half of their lives inside, almost doing time themselves. How did you feel working on the inside, having to care for and support so many Māori? There must have been a time when literally your own cousins were inside, and you’re having to face their reality as well. Was it difficult to come to terms with that?

Absolutely. It was really sad to see our people there. But I was also very lucky to be able to get into a position like that. I would do things to help. You know, to be able to look at somebody and ask: “What do you need? What can I do?” And then to take that to the bosses and say: “They need this.” And sometimes it’d be: “Well, they can’t have it. They’ve already had so many phone calls” or whatever, and you’ve got to fight to say: “They need another one.”

So, you had to be able to put yourself out there, and be able to take the hits, to be true to yourself.

If I could help, I would help. And I would go all out to help. Because you know yourself, when you’ve got things going on, and you’ve got no avenues or nobody to help you, you’re absolutely lost. You’re stuck. You need somebody to come in and find out what’s wrong, find out what you need. And you need somebody to go and action it. That was me.

I never rose through the ranks. I stayed pretty much a grunt on the floor, mainly because I didn’t like that you had to sit tests and do interviews to progress. I wasn’t very good at those sorts of things. So I stayed a grunt. But I was a grunt with seniority. I was able to push a lot more for things to get done.

When I first went in there, the first time I locked that door, it rattled me a little bit. You look at somebody inside that cell and lock the door and walk away and leave them. But the more you do it, the more you learn to be very observant of the person. You make sure that when you lock that door, they are okay. Or that they’re going to be there when you go back and unlock that door — intact, alive. That was always my bottom line. If we don’t do this, and we don’t make something happen for this person, they’re not going to be there. And there was no way I could live with that.

So, I would just go all out to do whatever I could to make sure that people were settled. It wasn’t to the point of corruption or being bent or anything like that. It was allowing them to have a few more phone calls to family, allowing their families to have a bit more contact, just showing concern and care. And actually doing something about it. You could always do little things to make it easier.

But yes, there were times when I had close family come in. Close friends from my life before the prison. Luckily, people knew that I was there to do a job. You know, “I’m sorry that you ended up in here, but hey, such is life. We’ll make the best of it. It is what it is.”

Because I had chosen my side when I walked into the prison as a prison officer, I chose my line. I could go right up to the line. I could maybe put a bit of a dent in that line, but very rarely did I go past that line.

Everybody’s line is different. Mine was set to my integrity. If it bothered me, that’s when things had to be done. I needed to be able to walk out of that place at the end of the day and know that I’d done the best that I could with what I had for the moment. That was always my thing. Like I said, that might have been me, but for the good grace of God — and I always walked with that. I was there to ensure that they got back out to their families intact.

Not everyone who works in corrections writes a book. You’re dealing with some of the darkest aspects of humanity. People have done some atrocious things on the outside, and now on the inside, your role is to ensure their safety while they’re doing time. What’s been the reaction?

It’s been quite unreal. I don’t think there’s a prison officer around who hasn’t said, “I’ll write a book one day,” or “Jeez, that’d be good enough for a book.” The biggest barrier is the department. You’re with them 24/7. You may finish work at 5, but you’re still theirs. You go home at night, and anything you do that brings the department into disrepute is not looked on as a good thing. And I was very scared that I would bring the department into disrepute, even though it wasn’t about damning them.

It was actually about trying to explain what it was like inside. It’s true. Everybody worries that the department will sue our ass if we say something, or anything — that’s what puts everybody off. I had to think about it for a long time. I started with a Facebook page. I was writing for female corrections officers throughout the world, because we get a bad name. And rightly so, because it’s really difficult to find who you are as a female in a male institution. You want to be female, but you don’t.

Let’s stay there for a minute, because it’s an issue: wāhine Māori in a prison with predominantly Māori men. There’s the safety aspect. There’s also working on the inside and then going home to your family life, with the realities of what you’ve been confronted with during the day. How tough is it to be a wahine on the inside with the guys?

It is tough. And, you know, you’re trying to be a female and maintain that femininity, but at the same time — no disrespect to males — they’re quite virile, if you know what I mean. Some of the men have been locked up for a long time, and it doesn’t take much to excite them — make-up, nails, hair, all that stuff. You have to be mindful about it. The thing for me was that you had to go in clean and tidy, have your hair back, have your nails cut. Because your hands are the tools of the trade, and you’re using them all day long. If you’ve got long nails, you can’t do things.

I always smelled nice, and I was always clean. That was the one thing I would never let go. And the boys would go: “Oh, you smell nice, Miss,” and I’d say: “Yeah, it’s called soap and water, you want to try it.” You’d just come back with things like that so that eventually they’d drop the subject. They know that’s your thing — you like to smell nice and that’s it — don’t go there. It’s what I do. But that’s the only feminine part of me that you’ll ever see.

Yeah, we’ve got to be mindful. You know, some women look at the male officers as their saviours. And when they do that, their mouths get carried away sometimes. Next minute, the guys are falling in love with them, and the women aren’t doing what they need to do to stop that. It’s just about the way you behave inside.

I’m not damning women, but if we’re going to go in there and work with the males, we’ve got to be in sync with it. We can’t be going in there trying to tempt them with different little things. You can be feminine. But don’t be prancing around with your hair and your nails and all your make-up. It’s just not the right place for it.

But at the same time, women have a good influence too. We can be maternal. And especially with Māori, we can go into that mode of “I’ll bloody boot your ass,” like what you’d say to them if you were on the marae, if they were your kids or your nephews. That’s how I treated most of them, like they were my nephews. It’s a hard one. You’ve got to work it out for yourself.

Well, one thing, Rhonda, you can handle yourself. I see you’ve done martial arts and you’re an 8th dan. The book’s called Inside the Wire: True Stories from a New Zealand Prison Officer. We don’t often get this insight into the realities of working on the inside. You write about some of the absolute scoundrels, lowlifes, of our society. After all the experience you’ve had, you say you can smell trouble looming. Tell us about that innate sense that wāhine carry intuitively.

I stayed on the floor, and I walked it. I was present in the compound all the time. You get to pick up on what’s normal — normal noises — and then what’s different. Like a noise level can rise, or things just go quiet, or people just start moving in different ways, or even just looking at you differently. They give you the side eye.

And then you start looking, and you go: “What’s going on here?” Because it just feels different. You notice those little things. Well, I did. You know, if I’m walking past, just the ways that their eyes would dart would give me an idea that someone’s over there doing something, or something’s happening. It was just subtle things that I looked for.

I know that you lived through riots — and you were actually on the Riot Squad. That must have been very testing. Did you ever get hit?

Surprisingly, no. But there were many times when they said: “I wanna smash your face in, Rhonda.” I was lucky not to have been hit, but at the same time, I was always aware. I was quite wound up. I was on high alert. That’s what I would go into as soon as I walked through the prison doors. A different demeanour would come over me. A different thought pattern. Once I went through those doors, all the senses were on.

Even just walking to my unit, I’d listen to what was happening in the institution just by the noise. Just by people moving. You couldn’t walk around with your eyes shut. If I walked out into the compound amongst prisoners, I would know who was behind me, around me, and if I didn’t like people there, I would move them. I made sure that I knew who was in my space.

I owned my compound. I worked hard to make sure I would get a harmonious compound. But you had to get in and do the job. You had to get in and do the searches. You had to drop a couple of them to show that you weren’t mucking around — if you had to. You create your unit, you make it how you want it to be. And then you know when things are going wrong.

It’s just by being present. It’s also about having a rapport with the boys. Because they like to feel safe, too. And if you’re trying to keep them safe, they feel comforted. Because you’re doing your job.

So, the boys would quite often let me know: “Hey, Rhonda, something’s happening. Better go and sort it out. Get them out of here, because they’re causing us trouble.” And it works like that.

Would you rather work in a men’s or women’s prison?

Men’s any day. Women, never [laughs]. I’m not a woman’s woman.

Well, you had so many brothers you’re probably comfortable in that environment. What about the gangster life in there. Have you seen some of that play out violently?

Oh yes. In Hawke’s Bay, it’s predominantly Mongrel Mob. So yes, unfortunately, that was huge. That was a big part of our day, gangs. It was always about trying to keep them separate and not mix them. Though sometimes we’d think: “Just put them all together and let them go for it!” [Laughs.]

But yup, you had to look after the gangs. You had to acknowledge them, because they’re so huge in prisons. But the bosses would be like, “We don’t acknowledge gangs,” so we’d go and put them all together, and then we’d have to go back in and drag them out. Or, you know, there’d be a riot going down.

You’ve got to respect them. Especially in prison, which is a really out of it thing to say, but they have places inside the prison. You work with them. You acknowledge them. You get to understand their ways. Like their patches — they would do anything for their patch. So, you know, when you’re handling their gear, you can throw it all around the place, but then you’re going to have a rumble. You had to acknowledge that, yes, this is your patch. I’ll look after it. It’ll be nice and safe when you get out.

Was suicide an issue?

Yes, and they were very sad. They weren’t common, but they did happen. Anything where anyone got hurt or died felt like a failing on our part. It affected us, because in our environment we’re the carers, and we’d lost a life. We had a lot of processes to try and eliminate that. But it didn’t always work. And the ones who were really intent on taking their lives would take them eventually anyway.

Our biggest thing was that anybody who comes in under our care goes out exactly the same way. Not feet first. So yes, there were times when it was very sad. There was nothing that we could do about it. Those are the things that are really hard to deal with. It’s like, where do you put it?

What prompted you to write the book?

Initially, when I first started putting these stories out on Facebook, it was because my head was exploding, and I didn’t have anywhere to release it. So I looked for prison officers on my Facebook page, and mainly I looked for the female ones.

I would share my stories, share my emotions, share the processes that we had to go through, and share the hurt that we suffer. You don’t often hear that we had feelings, or that things affected us. I wanted people to know that these things really affect us. But we have to be able to put it in a place where we can move forward and carry on.

They call that professionalism, but the damage it does to a person, I don’t think it’s professional. I was just trying to show people that you have these emotions. When we go through something like this, this is what you feel. It’s a natural thing to feel that.

I’d always finish with: “It’s not you, it’s the person you’ve created to do the job that you’ve got to do.” Just encouraging people to keep loving themselves and telling themselves that they are good: You’re okay. You’re not just a piece of scum shit that locks and unlocks doors and doesn’t give a damn about anybody. We do care. And we do get affected, but it’s the job. It’s what we decided to take on.

You’ve got to do the process to put it somewhere, because there are plenty more situations in there that could be worse than that one. So you build up an intestinal fortitude. You build up walls. You build up all sorts of things. And you become a different person. And you get to a place where you don’t even know who you are. You get confused.

So, it was just trying to explain that that’s what happens. You know, just come back out the other side. Because we can get stuck in a dark place, and it’s hard to get out of there sometimes.

I was a person who didn’t really express my vulnerability or my feelings much, so I suffered a lot. So it was about trying to encourage others to speak up and to not take so much on board. It was basically to help.

Some of us females go in there and try to do the job. And we lose being a female, because we’re trying to do the job. I was encouraging my readers to get back out there and be a female again, the best way that you can.

You’ve been out of there for seven or eight years now, and life goes on, so perhaps your chances of being sued by Corrections are lessened by the amount of time since you’ve left.

In my stories, it wasn’t about damning the department. I made my stories about me. If anything, the department should thank me, because hopefully it will help people coming into the service. I’ve got a lot of friends who are still in management within the department, and they wouldn’t sue me. Well, they could, but the lawyers have gone through all that stuff.

In the end, it was just, “Do it.” If you’ve got something to say and feel that it can’t be kept within any longer, then go out and say it. There are so many stories out there — mine are just mine. Others have amazing stories, too.

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

E-Tangata, 2025