The Department of Corrections have been on a recruitment drive lately, but who are they recruiting and for what purpose? Tommy Doran (Advocacy Campaigner) brings his own lived experience to capture what he feels is an honest description of the current role, and imagines how it could be if we put compassion and rehabilitation at the heart.

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Current description from an inside perspective

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Job Description: Corrections Officer

Do you have good intentions to make positive changes? Do you think you can do this in prisons built upon imbalanced power dynamics? If so, please look no further. Apply today to join our team of understaffed officers in our ‘less-than-ideal’ workplace where your daily tasks contribute to a system adding to the trauma already experienced by many of our inmates. At the Department of Corrections, we seek to humiliate the already humiliated, oppress the oppressed, and strip human-beings of all their unique aspects until they become nothing more than a number. If the salary in the job description does not tickle your fancy, don’t worry, there is a lot of wiggle room when it comes to turning the other cheek in the face of illegal transactions within the facility.

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Responsibilities and Duties: 

Responsibilities include but are not limited to the following:

• Opening and closing doors
• Ensuring that if an inmate is not traumatised by fellow inmates, they’ll be left traumatised by you
• Limiting access to basic human rights
• Making life as difficult and uncomfortable for inmates, who are already being punished by being taken out of society and locked away from their whanau and community

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Qualifications and Requirements:

The Ideal applicant will be:

• Be dependable
• Enjoy being dishonest
• Be discreet in their day to day movements
• Arrogant
• Place little value on human life
• Have the mentality that they can bench press over 100 kg’s, regardless of whether or not they are capable of this.
• NZQA Level 3 or Level 4?

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Even if this doesn’t sound like you, we are so short-staffed anyone will do! Join today. 

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A new vision, with wellbeing at the heart

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Job Description: Corrections Officer

Are you interested in being a part of the solution, putting a stop to our ever increasing incarceration and recidivism rate here in Aotearoa New Zealand? Are you keen to be a part of a team that works together in the best interests of those vulnerable people whom they serve, to nurture and shape them into happy, healthy, pro-social contributing members of society? Please join us on our mission to once and for all put an end to the revolving door that is our prison system, by providing our many misjudged and misunderstood inmates with the support they need to flourish within our society on whatever path they choose based on their own personal goals, hopes and dreams.

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Responsibilities and Duties:

• Promoting a recovery based and rehabilitative/reintegrative culture
• Providing a listening and empathetic ear
• Engaging only in empowering and encouraging kōrero while speaking with inmates
• Implementing by Māori, for Māori practices and programmes where applicable
• Speaking Te Reo Māori to those who prefer this
• Guiding and supporting individuals on their own individual rehabilitative journey’s
• Resourcing employment, educational, reintegrative and rehabilitative material for ALL inmates upon request
• Supporting low risk inmates to find alternative housing for bail, so that remaining in custody is a very last resort

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Qualifications and Requirements:

• Empathy
• Patience
• Integrity
• Humility
• Honesty
• Social work, criminology, sociology, psychology or some other type of degree which involves learning about why people commit crime/reoffend, however this is not mandatory
• Open-mindedness in regards to trying new things/methods as opposed to punishment and the willingness to listen and learn from others

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