Source: Radio New Zealand
123RF
A coroner is calling for urgent psychological support for prisoners before and after their release, following the death of a man who served almost 30 years of a life sentence for murder.
Lee Rawiri Kohiti was sentenced in 1996 for the murder of his cousin. He was released on parole in May 2025.
Two months later, Kohiti was found dead at the Hamilton parole address he had been living at.
He was 19 when he entered prison.
According to the coroner, on his release at 49 years old, he wasn’t visited by friends or family and he expressed a desire to return to the prison environment.
“His closest support had been his mother; however, her health had deteriorated, and she had recently passed away,” Coroner Bruce Hesketh said.
Kohiti’s death has been ruled a suicide.
It’s a story that’s all to familiar to University of Auckland professor Tracey McIntosh.
“We’ve a parole board that largely looks at risk, with particular focus, as we can understand, on risk to community, but perhaps far less is done in actually determining the risk for individuals, particularly around their wellbeing,” she said.
McIntosh wanted more support on the inside to prepare prisoners for re-integrating into society.
“We’re letting people down … it’s very difficult for me to understand why these people wouldn’t be the highest priority, given that they’ve been in prison for such a long time because of the reasons of what they were convicted with.
“We do need to look at community, Corrections, probation, is there emphasis, particularly in that first six months, on the right things,” she said.
It was a significant and urgent issue, McIntosh said.
“When we think about how we do reintegration, I don’t know if there’s any country that really does integration extremely well, but we certainly, we’ve got so much more work to be done at the reintegration level,” she said.
“If you’re really going to talk about community safety, then it has to be a much broader view, and there has to be a much more nuanced understanding of safety.”
Work with other agencies needed
Coroner Hesketh’s ruling on Kohiti’s death recommended the Department of Corrections work with other agencies to address systemic issues in providing services to prisoners on release.
He also suggested Corrections collaborate with relevant partners to collate and review data on suspected suicide deaths after release, within a relevant time period.
“I add a further recommendation that long-term prisoners should have their cases marked as ‘urgent’ to receive psychological services support in preparation for their release in the critical weeks and months both before and after their release,” he said.
Corrections chief mental health and addictions officer Dr Emma Gardner said there were teams that regularly assess inmates’ risk of suicide.
“If a person becomes unwell after they have left prison, they will be having, if they are on probation, regular connections with their probation officer. That probation officer would be doing wellbeing checks on an individual and if they became concerned about their mental health then they would be able to refer them to services in the community…,” she said.
Gardner said a lot of work had been done for those in prison, such as expanding the mental health services across the prison network.
“We are now starting to turn our attention to ‘what does support in the community look like, how do we ensure that the relevant agencies that are already available out in the community are connecting with our people’, but it’s early days on that work and we’ve got a lot more to do,” she said.
Gardner said the Corrections executive have commissioned a piece of work looking at community support.
She said there was always room for improvement, but that Corrections had done a lot of work over the last four to improve internal services for inmates.
Gardner believed the systemic issues mentioned by the coroner were being addressed.
“We really do take every death in custody very, very seriously, and obviously every death for people on community sentences is an absolute tragedy, and we are really, really focused on doing everything we can to improve the support we offer those people and their whānau.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
