This is a part of No Pride in Prisons’ Abolitionist demands. These demands were originally published as a book. To see a pdf of the book, click here. To buy a copy, please email info@noprideinprisons.org.nz
No Pride in Prisons formed in opposition to the inclusion of uniformed police and corrections officers in the 2015 Auckland Pride Parade. Members of the organisation protested the presence of these officers by climbing over parade barriers and attempting to stop the police float from progressing. The protesters looked to highlight the racist practices of the police which has contributed to the disproportionate imprisonment of Māori in New Zealand. They also sought to highlight the plight of incarcerated trans women who are much more vulnerable to sexual assault while incarcerated, and who are often housed in men’s prisons against their will. In this sense, No Pride in Prisons emerged as a queer and trans prison abolitionist organisation which, while focussing on and advocating for incarcerated queer and trans people, fights for the total abolition of prisons in New Zealand.
Put simply, prison abolition means the end of prisons. It means that instead of locking people away for months, years, and lifetimes, that communities deal with social harm themselves, in a way that seeks to transform individuals and their social world so that the social harm does not continue. Of course, not all of those currently locked away in prison have done something harmful. Thousands of people are currently in prison for committing non-violent offences, where there was no apparent victim and no one was hurt.[1] Some of those non-violent offences, such as benefit fraud, occur because those convicted of the offence are living in poverty and need to feed, house, and clothe themselves and their loved ones.[2] Prison abolitionists contend that when people have done harm to others, putting them in prison does nothing to undo that harm. It does nothing to address the underlying issues the person may be experiencing, nor does it require them to deal with the pain they have inflicted on others.
Incarceration is not experienced equally across all sectors of society. In fact, only certain groups and classes tend to be criminalised.[3] Those who are criminalised and incarcerated are more likely to be poor,[4]Māori,[5]mentally unwell,[6] and intellectually disabled.[7] The disproportionate imprisonment of Māori, in particular, is referenced multiple times throughout these abolitionist demands. It is important to note that at every stage of the criminal ‘justice’ system, Māori experience structural racism. Māori are more likely to be apprehended by police,[8] more likely to be prosecuted,[9] more likely to be convicted,[10] and more likely to be sentenced to imprisonment.[11] As a result, Māori make up just 15% of the total population of New Zealand but over 50% of the prison population.[12]
Given the overrepresentation of certain people in the prison system, certain people and communities are also more likely to experience the destructive effects of imprisonment. As is detailed throughout these demands, incarcerated people are subject to dehumanising treatment every day. From routine sexual assault in the form of strip searches,[13] to being denied adequate medical care,[14] incarcerated people are treated as though they are cattle to be managed until they are let out of their cages. Incarcerated people are denied rights to privacy,[15]bodily autonomy,[16]fair wages,[17] and to vote.[18] Even the right to one’s own space, where you can collect your thoughts and be alone, is being increasingly undermined by the Department of Corrections’ policies. The expanding use of ‘double-bunking,’[19] where two or more people are held in a single cell, is stripping away what was left of an incarcerated person’s right to be left alone and is increasing the rates of violence in New Zealand prisons.[20]
For incarcerated trans women, a constant threat of violence haunts their every step. As demonstrated by a 2007 study in California prisons, trans women are thirteen times more likely to be sexually assaulted in a men’s prison than the general population.[21] This data is consistent with the experiences of the trans women No Pride in Prisons has spoken to. Every single formerly or currently incarcerated trans woman we have spoken to, bar one, has been raped by either a guard or a fellow prisoner while in prison. Sentencing anybody to imprisonment means sentencing them to psychological torture through the humiliating and dehumanising practices of state-sanctioned isolation, infringement on bodily autonomy, and denial of basic rights. For trans women, it means sentencing them to brutal violence which exceeds the already atrocious harm inflicted on all incarcerated people.
All of these practices, either enacted or allowed to continue by the Department of Corrections, have led to a situation in which New Zealand’s prisons are an unbearable place to be. A 2016 study into the mental health of incarcerated people found that 19% of incarcerated people had attempted suicide in their lifetimes – a rate four times higher than the general population.[22] The study found that within the last year alone, 6% of incarcerated people had attempted suicide.[23] Given that the average time served by sentenced prisoners in 2014/15 was “11 months and 3 weeks,”[24] a substantial number of those suicide attempts occurred while in the Department of Corrections’ custody. In fact, the rate of death by suicide in New Zealand’s prisons is six times higher than the general population, occurring at a rate of approximately 72 per 100,000, compared with a rate of 12-13 per 100,000.[25] In other words, the conditions of incarceration are so unbearable, the people being locked away so unwell,[26] and the mental healthcare so poor,[27] that suicide seems to be the only option for some.
Tracey McIntosh notes that “there are collateral effects and consequences [of incarceration] which spread from the individual outwards, reverberating along the radiating threads of social relationships and connections.”[28] Incarceration is never just violence against individuals, but also against whānau and communities. When a person is torn away from a community and locked up in a cage, they often leave families behind. Children lose parents, and parents lose children. Aunties, uncles, nephews, nieces, whānaunga, partners, lovers, friends, confidants, carers, wage-earners, and all other relations are lost to those impacted by the prison system. For those communities that are disproportionately affected, the regular and long-term removal of loved ones is not only an emotional and physical loss. These experiences also lead to increased likelihoods of being impoverished and experiencing intergenerational incarceration.[29] With an intergenerational cycle of poverty and incarceration comes an intergenerational cycle of poor health, education, and all other social injustices that impoverished people are subjected to.
Recognising the profound effects of prisons on incarcerated people and their whānau, No Pride in Prisons believes it is necessary to present a way forward without prisons in Aotearoa. This collection of demands for prison abolition attempts to do exactly that. Each of these demands is made with the total abolition of the prison system in mind, and thus while some demands may call for particular reforms, they have all been geared towards decriminalisation and decarceration. We see each demand as its own stepping stone which brings us closer to the eradication of prisons in Aotearoa.
As an organisation devoted to prison abolition but also engaging in advocacy for people incarcerated in New Zealand prisons, No Pride in Prisons came to write these demands under particular circumstances. By working with prisoners, this organisation has come to learn what the people incarcerated by the New Zealand state want and need. We have heard shocking stories of sexual violence, isolation, medical maltreatment, and harassment by staff. These demands arise in part, therefore, from the lived realities that have been recounted to us by current and ex-prisoners. It is, in part, through understanding the day-to-day reality of incarcerated people that one can come to understand the complexities of the harm enacted by the prison system.
These demands also emerge from years of research done by our comrades in Aotearoa and abroad. In particular, No Pride in Prisons recognises Suraya Dewing’s research into trans women’s experiences of incarceration in New Zealand men’s prisons.[30] These demands and our thinking generally have been heavily influenced by her analysis of the impact of overcrowding, double-bunking, and inadequate access to healthcare on incarcerated trans women. The voices of the women who spoke through her research have revealed the magnitude of the battle we are all undertaking.
Further, No Pride in Prisons recognises that these demands also come out of the work done by our comrades in Black & Pink, a US-based LGBTQ prison abolitionist organisation. Our organisation’s understanding of queer and trans experiences of incarceration is owed in huge part to Black & Pink, and the incredible research it has done with LGBTQ prisoners in the US.[31] These abolitionist demands are modelled, in large part, on the recommendations in Black & Pink’s study. None of this could have happened if not for the work already undertaken by our comrades. We hope that we can all continue to nurture the bonds of solidarity across oceans in the struggle to free ourselves from the prison system.
These abolitionist demands are the result of more than twenty people’s contributions. The contributors are a mix of students, unemployed people, workers, unionists, activists, and academics. Whilst individuals contributed certain parts, the moulding of those parts into what you are now reading was a collective effort. As with everything we do, we hope the collective nature of the effort strengthens this work. As you read these demands you may notice that there are different voices coming through, particularly in those sections where te reo Māori is used often, and out of necessity. We hope, however, that when these demands are read together, a single, loud and clear voice can be heard, demanding the abolition of prisons.
No Pride in Prisons’ abolitionist demands are arranged into three sections: policing and criminalisation, courts and sentencing, and prison conditions and incarceration. We have arranged them as such so that they speak clearly and directly to the three key stages of the Criminal Injustice System. We have chosen to refer to this as the Criminal Injustice System (CIS) in direct opposition to the better-known ‘criminal justice system.’[32] Our reason for doing so should become clear as you read these demands. No Pride in Prisons firmly believes that there is no justice under the current social, political, and economic arrangements.
Further, we have organised each of these three sections into their own temporal parts. Under each section you will find short-term, intermediate-term, and long-term demands. No Pride in Prisons has arranged the demands as such so as to acknowledge that different tasks require different lengths of time and collective effort in order to be achieved. Some demands, those categorised ‘short-term,’ are achievable with simple amendments to legislation or policy. Others, such as those found under ‘intermediate-term,’ may require long-term campaigning, lobbying, and the uprooting of particular areas of legislation and policy. Finally, the demands classed ‘long-term’ require absolute revolution in terms of Aotearoa’s social, political, and economic arrangements. Our calls for the short-term and intermediate-term are all made with these long-term goals in mind.
There may however be certain points throughout these demands at which the temporality does not make perfect sense. For example, we may very well achieve the abolition of prisons before we have to eradicate prisoner strip searches, and we may very well abolish the New Zealand Police before we have to worry about defunding it. In this sense, these demands are not intended to be absolutely prescriptive. No Pride in Prisons means to present them as indicators of the task ahead of us, and as a means to mitigate the violence of the CIS as we work towards its abolition.
When figuring out exactly what would and would not be included in our demands, we were influenced by our experience advocating for and working with incarcerated people, as well as by the domestic and international research on prisons. However, the guiding principle for whether or not something would be included in these demands was whether or not it was an abolitionist demand. In other words, does the demand expand the prison state or does it work to undo it? For this reason, suggestions such as that from the Equal Justice Project (EJP),[33] that a separate prison just for trans people should be built, is fundamentally rejected by No Pride in Prisons. While we recognise the important role EJP has played in advocating for incarcerated trans people, we believe that any policy that involves building more prisons or increasing the capacity to incarcerate more people must be opposed. Further, the suggestion by many of our supporters that all trans women should be placed in women’s prisons has also been rejected. This is because it denies the reality that some trans women would prefer to be in a men’s prison – something that No Pride in Prisons has learnt from women we have worked with.
In writing these abolitionist demands, we have found it impossible just to talk about the CIS. As abolitionists, we look to all the other structural factors that lead to certain people being criminalised. We also acknowledge that many of the issues that incarcerated people experience are not caused merely by the fact of their imprisonment, but because of factors that are both found in the prison and also go beyond it. For example, when we write about the inadequate gender-affirming medical care for incarcerated trans people, we note that those problems exist on the outside too. When talking about the stigma of incarceration and the negative effects of any conviction, we had to talk about the criminalisation of abortion, student loan defaults, and benefit fraud. In this way, this document addresses issues such as mental illness, disability, free and fully-funded education, healthcare, abortion, PrEP, housing, homelessness, wages, workers’ rights, and labour unions.
Our analysis therefore begins with the assumption that it is impossible to isolate a prison abolitionist politics from the world in which we live. The demands we outline here attempt to demonstrate how the prison comes about as a result of a capitalist social system, which is reproduced through further structural factors such as racism and heteronormativity. We hope these demands collectively demonstrate that the prison will not be abolished without a revolution in social and economic conditions. Steps can be taken, however, towards its abolition, and those steps can help mitigate the harms of the CIS until a social and economic revolution allows for the institution to be abolished entirely.
In Aotearoa, it would be impossible to make these demands without acknowledging the role that colonisation and the prison have played in creating one another. When the New Zealand government crushed Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi’s non-violent resistance to land alienation in 1880, hundreds of peaceful Māori protesters were arrested, detained, and incarcerated.[34] These prisoners, many with their families following them, were forcibly relocated throughout Te Waipounamu where they were forced into indentured servitude.[35] For the New Zealand government, at de facto war with many iwi at that time, the prison provided an effective repressive technology – communities, stripped of members by criminalisation and mass incarceration, lose their ability to resist colonisation. Police, courts, and prisons serve the same purpose in the present.
It would be impossible to decolonise Aotearoa without abolishing prisons, but it would also be impossible to abolish prisons without decolonising Aotearoa. The present system of mass incarceration emerged from the genocide and alienation of Māori from their land – it is a specifically colonial technology, and only anti-capitalist decolonial revolution can undo it. In writing these demands, we have always concerned ourselves with the fulfilment of tino rangatiratanga and the overthrow of the colonial New Zealand government as necessary aspects of our abolitionist programme.
No Pride in Prisons see these demands as a starting point for future action. This document is not only an exploration of how unsustainable the CIS really is, but a call for desperately needed revolutionary action. Pick these demands up and use them. They give No Pride in Prisons, our whānau, and our comrades a concrete place to start with our politics.
As Moana Jackson has observed, “whakapapa is a never-ending series of beginnings.”[36] In this spirit, we hope this document is another beginning of the end of the prison, the Criminal Injustice System, and the economic and social system that destroys so many lives.
Ti Lamusse, Sophie Morgan, and Emilie Rākete
Auckland, August 2016
[1] Statistics New Zealand, “Annual Sentenced Prisoner Throughput for the Latest Calendar Years (ANZSOC),” Statistics New Zealand, 13 May 2016. http://nzdotstat.stats.govt.nz/wbos/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=TABLECODE7321.
[2] Susan St John et al., The Complexities of ‘Relationship’ in the Welfare System and the Consequences for Children, (Auckland: Child Poverty Action Group, 2014).
[3] Throughout these abolitionist demands, we refer to ‘criminalised populations’ or ‘criminalised people.’ The reason for this is to acknowledge that everyone, simply by going about their daily life, will break the law at least once in their lifetimes. However, only some people, and some actions, will be recognised by authorities as ‘criminal.’
[4] JustSpeak, Unlocking Prisons: How We Can Improve New Zealand’s Prison System, (Wellington: JustSpeak, 2014).
[5] Department of Corrections, Over-representation of Māori in the Criminal Justice System: An Exploratory Report, (Wellington: Department of Corrections, 2007).
[6] National Health Committee, Health in Justice: Kia Piki te Ora, Kia Tika! – Improving the Health of Prisoners and Their Families and Whānau: He Whakapiki i te Ora o Ngā Mauhere me ō Rātou Whānau, (Wellington: Ministry of Health, 2010).
[7] Lucy Warhurst, “Neurologically Disabled Overrepresented in Prison,” Newshub, 12 May 2016. http://www.newshub.co.nz/nznews/neurologically-disabled-overrepresented-in-prison-2016051219#axzz4FrXBSTC0.
[8] “Annual Apprehensions for the Latest Calendar Years (ANZSOC),” Statistics New Zealand, 3 April 2016. http://nzdotstat.stats.govt.nz/wbos/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=TABLECODE7407.
[9] Department of Corrections, Over-representation of Māori in the Criminal Justice System: An Exploratory Report, (Wellington: Department of Corrections, 2007).
[10] “Adults Convicted in Court by Sentence Type – Most Serious Offence Calendar Year,” Statistics New Zealand, 02 July 2016. http://nzdotstat.stats.govt.nz/wbos/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=TABLECODE7353
[11] Ibid.
[12] Department of Corrections, “Prison Facts and Statistics - June 2016,” Department of Corrections, 30 June 2016. http://www.corrections.govt.nz/resources/research_and_statistics/quarterly_prison_statistics/prison_stats_june_2016.html.
[13] Valerie Morse, “Daily Torment,” No Pride in Prisons, 19 March 2016. http://noprideinprisons.org.nz/post/141287387190/daily-torment.
[14] JustSpeak, “Mental Health Treatment and Services in NZ Prisons are Inadequate,” JustSpeak, 17 September 2013. http://justspeak.org.nz/mental-health-treatment-and-services-in-nz-prisons-are-inadequate/.
[15] Isaac Davison, “Prison Cells Could be ‘Double-bunked’ to Cope with Increase in Prisoners,” NZ Herald, 17 February 2016. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11591116.
[16] Valerie Morse, “Daily Torment,” No Pride in Prisons, 19 March 2016. http://noprideinprisons.org.nz/post/141287387190/daily-torment.
[17] Department of Corrections, Inmate Employment Policy, (Wellington: Department of Corrections, 2001), 14.
[18]Electoral Act 1993 s 80(1)(d).
[19] Isaac Davison, “Prison Cells Could be ‘Double-bunked’ to Cope with Increase in Prisoners,” NZ Herald, 17 February 2016. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11591116.
[20] Marika Hill, “Prison Assaults ‘Nearly Double’,” Stuff, 6 November 2011. http://www.stuff.co.nz/sunday-news/latest-edition/5915707/Prison-assaults-nearly-double.
[21] Valerie Jenness et al., Violence in California Correctional Facilities: An Empirical Examination of Sexual Assault, (California: Center for Evidence-Based Corrections, 2007), 3.
[22] Devon Indig, Craig Gear and Kay Wilhelm, Comorbid Substance Use Disorders and Mental Health Disorders Among New Zealand Prisoners, (Wellington: Department of Corrections, 2016), vii.
[23] Ibid., 67
[24] Department of Corrections, Trends in the Offender Population 2014/15, (Wellington: Department of Corrections, 2015), 15.
[25] No Pride in Prisons, “Corrections Responsible for High Rates of Suicide in Prisons,” Scoop, 14 March 2016. http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO1603/S00213/corrections-responsible-for-high-rates-of-suicide-in-prisons.htm
[26] Devon Indig, Craig Gear and Kay Wilhelm, Comorbid Substance Use Disorders and Mental Health Disorders Among New Zealand Prisoners, (Wellington: Department of Corrections, 2016).
[27] Helen Brasting, “Mental Health Treatment and Services in NZ Prisons are Inadequate,” JustSpeak, 17 September, 2013. http://justspeak.org.nz/mental-health-treatment-and-services-in-nz-prisons-are-inadequate/.
[28] Tracey McIntosh, “Marginalisation: A Case Study: Confinement,” in Māori and Social Issues eds. Tracey McIntosh and Malcolm Mulholland, (Wellington: Huia, 2011), 439.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Suraya Dewing, “Women Among Men: Human Rights Jurisprudence and Pre-Operative Male-to-Female Transgender Imprisonment,” (Master’s Thesis, University of Auckland, 2013).
[31] Jason Lydon et al. Coming Out of Concrete Closets: A Report on Black & Pink’s National LGBTQ Prisoner Survey, (United States: Black & Pink, 2015).
[32] For those involved in queer and trans communities, you may also note the entirely intentional pun.
[33] Maree Cassaidy and Linda Lim, The Rights of Transgender People in Prisons Research Paper Prepared for the Equal Justice Project Symposium University of Auckland – 11 May 2016, (Auckland: Equal Justice Project, 2016), 11.
[34] Waitangi Tribunal, The Taranaki Report: Kaupapa Tuatahi (Wai 143, 1996), 226.
[35] Ibid., 231.
[36] Ani Mikaere, Colonising Myths - Māori Realities: He Rukuruku Whakaaro, (Wellington: Huia, 2011): 341, paraphrasing Moana Jackson, speaking at the Mā te Rango te Waka Rere: Exploring a Kaupapa Māori Organisational Framework Conference, Te Wānanga o Raukawa, Ōtaki, 3-4 November 2006.