Dumped Director of Serco Mt Eden Speaks Out
"Fight Club Made My Stomach Turn"

The director of Serco-run Mt Eden Prison has spoken out for the first time, a year after losing his job over the fight club scandal.

Gareth Sands spoke exclusively to Stuff Circuit for an investigation into the state of our prison system.

Serco lost the contract to run Mt Eden Corrections Facility in the wake of the fight club scandal, which saw video footage of prisoners in organised fighting bouts, uploaded to YouTube.

Sands told Stuff Circuit he was out of the country when the fight club scandal broke, but checked the videos online, and “the images made my stomach turn”.

“Yes they go on for a long period of time, whether they’re a short period of time or a long period of time violence is unacceptable and that should not have happened. It did happen, and it happened on my watch.”

Reacting to criticism that there was no intervention from prison staff during the fight club videos, he said, “It’s a very challenging environment, a very challenging contract, very challenging operationally, the client group - the prisoners - were very difficult. It was a very ambitious contract, there’s no two ways around that, but I was responsible for running it and I was in charge when it happened”.

However he says he doesn’t believe he failed in his duty as director of Mt Eden Corrections Facility.

“I’ve never worked in a prison where contraband hasn’t been coming into the prison, I’ve never worked in a prison where there hasn’t been mobile phones found, I’ve never worked in a prison where there hasn’t been violence occurring. But what we had there, the key difference, was a number of incidents that were captured with the use of mobile phones and uploaded onto YouTube. We’re not the only prison in the world that’s had this, but to that extent it had never happened before in this jurisdiction”.

In the second episode in the series, to be published tomorrow, Gareth Sands explains how he was asking questions of Corrections about allegations of violence at Mt Eden, but he was ignored.

Ends

Stuff Circuit produces video-led investigative journalism for Fairfax. The full episode “The First Rule of Fight Club” can be viewed at
https://assets.stuff.co.nz/interactives/special-features/private-business-public-failure/

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