Chief among it’s highlights was nearly $15,000 donated to community groups, the opening of a Family Violence Reflection Garden, and it’s inaugural Employee of the Year award.

The award was presented on Friday to Kitchen Supervisor Peter Foley, who had a background as a chef but said he’d found his place at Hopkins. 

“I love it. I wish I’d done it 20 years ago,” he said.

“It’s a great work life balance with a young family as well.

Although Mr Foley was selected for the award, he gave all the credit to his team.

“After about two years (working at Hopkins) I became a supervisor and I’ve just been running that ever since with the great team that I work with, which makes it easier to get an award like this, because of the work they do,” he said.

“We’re a really tight group here.”

Russell Graham, industry supervisor in the tube steel and powder coating workshops, was also recognised with a quarterly employee award. 

Mr Graham has been at Hopkins for 32 years and said in that time he has seen a big change in the way the system works with prisoners. 

“I’ve seen a lot of positive changes in that time in the way we interact with prisoners and a big focus now is to reintegrate them back into the community and to stop that recidivism, which is a big problem,” he said.

“By taking them down to the workshops and whatever else we teach them skills, and even just getting them into that routine of coming into work on a daily basis and just general responsibility that normal people on the outside of life are doing (is beneficial).”

General Manager Scott Jacques said the prison was performing extremely well, despite a statistical increase in reports of assaults and other incidences in the prison over the past four years.

“There are so many different factors to take into account,” he said of the data.

“If you were to purely look on 2016 figures against 2017 figures and they increased, then that wouldn’t look good and if that was taken on it’s own, that wouldn’t be a good news story. 

“However, the performance of this (financial) year to date says we’re performing better with more prisoners, so that’s something to be recognised and to be acknowledged.

“We are more complex – we have remand prisoners, we have old age prisoners, we have different cultures, we have people serving long sentences.

“We have people who need a lot of attention as they’re very complex people, and ... for the last four months we’ve been near enough to capacity, and we’re still doing better.”

Mr Jacques also said that the severity of assaults was less and that the increase in reports of incidences was due to a better relationship between prisoners and staff.

“Yes, the number of weapon finds have gone up, the number of assaults have gone up, but it comes from information from prisoners,” he said.

“So what we’ve been able to develop over the last few years is a community where prisoners feel enabled and safe enough to say ‘they’ve got that over there.’

“Two years ago, those (weapons or contraband) were still there but we were never told about it. Part of our security is our engagement with prisoners. 

“If you develop a positive relationship with a prisoner they will tell you things that they wouldn’t if you had a negative relationship.”

In October the prison also opened it’s Family Violence Reflection Garden, which was constructed by prisoners. 

The garden gives prisoners a chance to reflect on their own behaviour and to heal from the actions of others. 

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