People Against Prisons Aotearoa

[95bFM Radio Interview with Emilie Rākete from the 26th August 2015. Thanks to Sophie B for the transcript.]

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Kermath: Transgender prisoner Jade Follett is currently being held at a minimum to high security all-men’s prison. Rimutaka Prison, based in Upper Hutt, is an all men’s facility capable of holding up to just over a thousand prisoners. A recent amendment in the legislation should allow all those who   identify with a certain gender to be paired with the respective gender-matching prison, but is not the case with Follett. I’ve reached out to the Department of Corrections this morning who have said they aren’t doing any interviews at this stage, but have followed up with a statement by Rimutaka Prison Director Chris Burns. He states that the request was only received over the weekend, and is the first of its nature at the prison this year. The department has acknowledged that the request is of significance, and will be treated with urgency. I did get to speak with Emilie Rākete, spokesperson for No Pride in Prisons. who are currently campaigning for Jade’s transfer to a women’s prison. Good morning Emilie! Thanks for taking a moment to speak with me. Jade Follett’s case is quite concerning regarding the significant battle she’s facing to change to a gender-matching prison. Has the group been in touch with Jade Follett and   Rimutaka Prison - is Jade in real danger here? 

Emilie: Yeah, we’ve been in touch with Jade for a little while now, writing letters to her and stuff, and she said that she’s safe for now. But we know from studies done in the United States that trans women in men’s prisons are sexually assaulted 13 times more than the rest of the population. So we know that she’s strong, and she says that she’s safe at the moment, but by no means is she in like a totally safe environment. 

Kermath: What is the general attitude from the Department of Corrections towards transgendered [sic] prisoners in New Zealand? 

Emilie: For a few months now we’ve been sending in a number of Official Information Act requests, trying to get information from the Department about how many trans people they have incarcerated, and how their policies for caring for trans people while they’re incarcerated are being carried out. And they’ve turned down and dodged every single one of those Official Information Act requests. So the attitude so far is one of kind of abusive neglect. 

Kermath: So do you think they actually hold information about these prisoners and aren’t letting the public see that? Or do you think they’ve just not collected it at all? 

Emilie: I think they’re deliberately not collecting the information because then they’d be accountable to the public. Cause there’s no way that, in a prison of several hundred people, if there was a trans person, it would be well known by staff - the information exists, they’re simply not collecting it. The thing that’s really troubling: we’ve got no way of knowing how many trans people they’ve got incarcerated, what they’re doing with them - in 2014 they nominally kind of reformed their policies around trans people to make sure that they were safe,   but we’ve got no way of checking if any of those policies have actually been implemented because they won’t give us any information. We’ve put in a bunch of Official Information Act requests that the Department is legally obligated to respond to. They’re saying that they don’t have the infrastructure to collate the demographic data that we’re asking for, and that they don’t collect because they don’t collect data to protect the safety of incarcerated people; they only collect it to meet their health and safety requirements - which I think this comes under, but apparently they don’t. 

Kermath: We’ve seen changes pretty recently in the legislation where it allows, if you’ve got male on your birth certificate, then you’re taken to a male prison. 

Emilie: Uh huh  

Kermath: Is that being enforced? 

Emilie: Yeah it is, and it’s troubling because it’s actually quite difficult to get your birth certificate changed. Most trans people don’t get their birth certificates changed because it’s a big investment of money, actually, and it’s quite a   confusing process to get all the paperwork done. So the policy changes that Corrections put through last year actually won’t be addressing the problem for a lot of trans people -  like we’ve seen with Jade. 

Kermath: Can prisoners change their gender while being in prison? 

Emilie: Well if you get incarcerated in a facility which does not match your gender identification then you can apply to the Chief Executive of Corrections to be moved to a correct facility. That’s what Jade’s done two months ago but it still hasn’t happened. So there’s definitely, within Corrections policies at the moment, there’s leeway for prisoners to be moved to the correct facilities, but as we’ve seen, Corrections doesn’t seem interested in actually enforcing any of those policies. 

Kermath: What steps is No Pride in Prisons, your group, taking to make Corrections aware of the issue, and what’s being planned by the group? 

Emilie: We’re staring a hunger strike. Starting Thursday - that’s tomorrow, actually - until Jade is moved to an appropriate facility where she’ll be safer. They’ve been informed that the hunger strike is in action and they already   seem to be responding, which is positive. And we’re gonna continue from there, with a number of things I can’t really talk about just yet, to make sure that Corrections first of all release the information that we’re asking for about the scale of transgender incarceration in Aotearoa. We’re gonna be, every day, or probably roughly every day, starting tomorrow we’re gonna be having a vigil on K Road outside St Kevin’s Arcade; we’re gonna have teach-ins, we’re gonna have speakers, we’re gonna mostly be sitting there not eating, but I think it’ll be more interesting than that sounds.

Kermath: And if someone wanted to get involved, how would they get involved in the vigil? 

Emilie: If you just search No Pride in Prisons on Facebook, our page is there and there’s a link to the event on there; or you can also find us on Twitter, @noprisonpride. We wanna know how many trans people are currently incarcerated in Aotearoa, what facilities they’re being held in, how many of   them have had their application for assignment to a correct facility approved or denied and on what grounds. Basically we just want Corrections to address the Information Act requests that Corrections have had sitting on their desk for months now. 

[Closing music] That was a 95bFM podcast. To hear more, head to http://95bFM.com/bCASTS