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A woman who was jailed for life after stabbing her friend at a pamper party is challenging Corrections’ phone policy, saying it’s unfair she can no longer talk to her family for up to three hours a day. Corrections announced plans in late 2024 to slash the amount of time prisoners could spend on the phone from three hours to 30 minutes a day. That has upset inmate Anna Browne, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2017 for the death of Carly Stewart after she plunged a knife into her friend’s face at a pamper party. Now, through her lawyer, Tom Powell, Browne has taken a judicial review, arguing that the decision to limit phone calls failed to take into account all mandatory relevant considerations and was unreasonable. Powell is asking the High Court for a declaration of unlawfulness and wants the policy to be quashed. Carly Stewart (right) was fatally stabbed by Anna Browne (left) at a pamper party in Te Atatū in October 2016. Photo / NZME From August 2022, prisoners had been allowed to make free calls to approved numbers for up to three hours a day. Before that, they paid for phone cards, which they used on pay phones. The court heard that, since the 30-minute policy took effect in January last year, Browne had been unable to maintain regular calls with her whānau, including her partner, six children and seven grandchildren. It had been particularly hard on two of her children, who lived with her partner and were used to talking to their mother every day, Powell said. He said his client was parenting her six children from prison, giving grandmotherly advice, and doing what she could to maintain her important role in the family. But lawyer Genevieve Taylor, representing the Department of Corrections, explained that, before the change, prison managers had noticed that a minority of prisoners were monopolising the phones, excluding others from using them. Browne, the court heard, was identified as one of the top 10 telephone users in the prison where she was housed. On average, Taylor said, prisoners spent about six hours unlocked from their cells each day, although in some units it was only two to four hours a day. With only so many hours in the day when prisoners could make calls and a limited number of phones in any one unit, some degree of sharing was required. “This wasn’t about a reduction, about cutting the time people could talk to their families; this was about a fair distribution of access,” she said. At the time, Corrections defended the change, saying some inmates had been abusing the system, resorting to violence and standover tactics. But Powell took issue with that, saying affidavits from Corrections had not provided evidence to corroborate or justify claims of violence. Any incident reports provided to the court did not relate to excessive phone use, he said. Powell submitted that the decision was unreasonable because it wasn’t supported or justified by evidence. But Taylor urged the court not to read too much into the fact that not every reason for the decision had been provided to the court. She said the decision-maker, Corrections’ commissioner of custodial services, set out the reasons for the change in an email to prison general managers, which concerned the fairness and access to phones, because that was the primary reason. He wasn’t required to set out all the reasons for his decisions, she said. 60% of Māori in prison have children Powell also submitted that the department had failed to consider the negative impact on prisoners who were trying to maintain and strengthen their contact with whānau, which, in turn, helped their rehabilitation. He submitted that the policy was detrimental to Māori, whose definition of whānau extended beyond that of a nuclear family. He said it appeared that no allowance was made for prisoners with large fami...
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