behaviours – to kneel at the back of the cell while food was placed on the door hatch; be cuffed whilst making telephone or video calls; have visits through separating glass, and so on. But while the path to further restrictions and prohibitions was clear, it was less clear what the women had to do to demonstrate good behaviour. One Management Plan, for example, stated that ‘a TV will not be issued straight away, it depends on your behaviour and until the staff are satisfied with their observations on you’. “Women’s management plans were very much focused on compliance and detailed sets of punitive responses to any deviation from the prescribed behaviours...” I saw little evidence in the paperwork, or in practice, of staff support and encouragement of pro-social behaviour, in line with Correction’s overarching Hökai Rangi strategy. This was commented on by a number of the women we spoke to. “All I want is a plan forward. If we knew what we have to do…” “Management plans are used the wrong way. What is on there is what’s not allowed… ‘no, it’s not part of your management plan’. You live by the management plan, but it can’t cover everything.” Day to day staff decision making appeared correspondingly inflexible. Talking about one of the women at the unit, an officer said that the woman “is in good spirits today, but the cuffs will remain [when she leaves her cell]. That’s part of her management plan, and staff safety is paramount”. Decisions to, for example, remove items from a woman’s cell or to forego a scheduled telephone call were made in an arbitrary manner, often at the cost of further aggravating an already fragile situation. The following description, extracted from Incident and Debrief Reports completed by the five officers involved, provides a good illustration of how quickly things can escalate. A woman was about to be escorted from her cell to a scheduled telephone call with her children. Staff enter her cell to handcuff her (‘as per management plan’) at which time she rushes out to a neighbouring cell and hurls abuse at its occupier through the door. She is then restrained by staff and immediately apologizes and explains that the other woman had been screaming throughout the last few nights depriving the entire wing from sleep. 35