Prisoners at a north Waikato corrections facility are readily accessing contraband and there is low morale amongst staff, according to a new report.

The Office of the Inspectorate today released its May 2025 inspection report for Spring Hill Corrections Facility.

"Overall, while we found some areas of positive practice, we had serious concerns with conditions in some areas of the prison, and with certain practices and processes," said Chief Inspector Janis Adair.

This included hearing about and observing several "concerning security issues". She said staff and prisoners told them contraband was readily available, and there had been no drug testing at the site for five years.

Spring Hill opened in 2007 as an end destination site for 650 sentenced prisoners. But Adair said over the past 10 years, it had become a remand site, with 76 per cent of prisoners on remand at the time of the inspection.

This change in population, she said, was proving a challenge for the site's infrastructure and staff alike.

The inspection found custodial staffing levels were at 94 per cent, but that morale was low amongst custodial staff and unplanned absences, like sick leave, were common and left units short staffed.

Adair said 38 per cent of custodial staff also had less than two years of experience working in a New Zealand prison and many senior and principal corrections officers lacked experience in their roles.

"The lack of availability of custodial staff and the unsuitable infrastructure had significant impacts across the prison."

She said morale was high in the health team, but many felt unsupported by custodial staff, and some did not always feel safe as custodial staff would sometimes leave them unsupervised with prisoners.

Corrections custodial services commissioner Sean Mason said it was positive to see many of the areas identified for improvement in the report aligned with work Corrections had already addressed or that was underway since the inspection was carried out more than a year ago.

"Many prisoners go to extreme lengths to get contraband into prisons and Corrections is constantly working to stay one step ahead in contraband prevention."

At Spring Hill, Mason said the intelligence team had developed a contraband dashboard which provided staff with information on trends, patterns and emerging risks.

Drug testing was reintroduced in November 2025 after it was suspended during the Covid-19 pandemic, when all non-essential prison activities were paused to reduce operational risks and support public health requirements and when staffing pressures were at their tightest.

"Throughout the period when drug testing was suspended, the site maintained a strong focus on identifying and managing drug-related risks.

"The current testing activity, combined with ongoing searching routines, intelligence-led monitoring, the vigilance of dog handlers, comprehensive screening of all mail and parcels, and continual assessment of operational and intelligence information, aims to ensure that drug-related risks are being actively identified, tracked, and managed across the site."

Mason also said following an extensive nationwide recruitment drive, there was now an additional 45 custodial staff working at the site, and this had reduced the day-to-day impact on the prison when staff called in sick.

The majority of staff, he said, now had more than two years of service.