A flat white and a first step

Baz has been in Pathway's Navigate unit for a long time. He has been in prison since 2002. Twenty-four years. When you spend that long inside, the ordinary texture of everyday life becomes completely foreign. Not difficult. Foreign. As part of his reintegration plan, he was required to complete work experience outside the prison, what staff call "outside the wire." Due to his health, that option was not available to him. What was available, it turned out, was something more tailored. 

Emma Wallis, Pathway's Wellbeing Navigator and trained occupational therapist, identified that Baz could benefit from a structured community outing focused on practical social skills. She completed an observational assessment, looking at how he communicated, problem-solved, and interacted with people in everyday settings. From there, Emma and Uelese, Reintegration Navigator and Unit Lead, made a request to Christchurch Men's Prison Outside the Wire panel: could they take Baz into the community themselves, without custody, to practise those skills in real time?

It was a request that had not been made in years. The panel said yes.

"It's called temporary release," Emma explains. "We had him in our care for four hours. This hasn't actually been done for many years."

The outing was simple. The Botanic Gardens, the Art Centre, some food. But what Emma observed was significant. Within 20 minutes, Baz had stopped walking ahead of them and was just walking alongside them. He was relaxed. He talked freely. He noticed the quails. He stood on the bridge looking for fish.

At the cafe, Emma had asked him to work on eye contact. When his coffee did not arrive with the others, Baz looked up at the server and said, "I'm waiting on a flat white, thanks." He told Emma later that he had wanted to say something sharper. He chose not to.

"He was aware of it," Emma says. "That was huge."

When he got back, Baz said he had felt relaxed. Not rushed. His summary of the day was one word: excellent. Emma says she had never heard him use that word before.

The detail that stayed with her was not the eye contact, or the easy conversation, or even that word. It was that Baz had known what he wanted to say, and chose differently. That kind of awareness does not come from a programme. It comes from practice, and from someone believing the practice is worth doing.

Getting to that afternoon took years of relationship-building between Pathway and the Department of Corrections, and a willingness from both sides to try something that had not been tried in a long time. That trust made it possible.

What Baz did with it was his own.

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*Name has been changed

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