Prisoner With T.B. Tells Of Treatment

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 856, 27 December 1929, Page 1

Prisoner With T.B. Tells Of Treatment

CONDITIONS IN GAOL SOLITARY CONFINEMENT Complaints regarding the treatment of prisoners suffering from T.B. at Mount Eden prison have been made to THE SUN, following the reply of Mr. B. L. Dallard, Controller-General of Prisons, to the Rev. Charles Chandler. The conditions under which these men live, while better than those of the ordinary prisoner, were criticised strongly. THREE weeks after being discharged from the Cashmere Sanitorium, Christchurch, the complainant was arrested and sentenced to seven years’ reformative detention. Mr. Justice Stringer promised to write to the Prison Department and arrange for suitable accommodation, as the sentenced man was gazetted as a T.B. ex-serviceman, and was receiving a full pension. He was, he claims, imprisoned in a cell at Mount Eden, along with three other T.B. patients, two of whom were declared habitual criminals, and were serving sentences involving hard labour. The prisoners refused to work and were segregated. The • complainant was placed in a special wing, where, he says, he was forced for nine months to live behind an iron door and with “the usual inadequate ventilation,” although as a T.B. patient he should have been allowed as much air as he wished. He was released early this month on probation.

“I complained in 1926 regarding the terms of my imprisonment,” said the ex-prisoner. “X was treated exactly the same as the two habitual criminals, in spite of the fact that I was sentenced to reformative detention. The Prisons Board said it could not. get us better accommodation, but there is no reason why I should not have been sent to one of the prison farms and have been given the chance to live in the open air. Why did the medical officer allow T.B. patents to be segregated in such cells when the Health Department stated that we must be allowed plenty of fresh air?” The ex-prisoner paid a tribute to the work of Mr. Chandler in the prison, characterising him as a fearless and determined fighter.