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List of prisons in New Zealand

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJul 3, 2026
Entity authorityQ6613708
Source-derived summary

There are 18 adult prisons in New Zealand. Three prisons house women, one each in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. The remaining fifteen house men; ten in the North Island and five in the South Island. The facilities are managed by the Department of Corrections. In addition, there are five youth correctional facilities, termed youth justice residences, which are managed by Oranga Tamariki (the Ministry for Children).

There are five security levels in New Zealand adult prisons: Minimum, Low, Low-Medium, High and Maximum.

In 2018 North & South magazine published a long-form article by Paul Little titled "The Case for Closing Prisons" which included data on New Zealand prison inmate populations.

List of prisons

Northern Region

Northland Region Corrections Facility (Ngawha)

Northland Region Corrections Facility is located 5 km northeast of the town of Kaikohe and is colloquially known as Ngawha – after the local area. Maori in Northland tried to persuade the Corrections Department not to upset a local taniwha by building the prison on thermal land. They were unsuccessful and the facility opened in 2005.

Editorial summary

This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “List of prisons in New Zealand” as wikimedia list article. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.

Editorial reviewA dependable orientation record for establishing vocabulary, names and a first evidence trail. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—2018, 2005—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. The account is most persuasive where List, prisons and Zealand can be independently traced.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 3, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6613708. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2018 and 2005.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from List of prisons in New Zealand” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.