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

Undeniably, the intention of many of those working for the Departments of Corrections and Justice is to “ensure that offenders receive the help they need to turn their lives around.”[1] The very name ‘Department of Corrections’ suggests that its purpose should be towards the ‘correction’ of socially harmful behaviour. If the role of Corrections is to ‘correct,’ then how can sentencing a person to incarceration for life be justified? Such a sentence is an admission, from the outset, that the Department of Corrections, and the Criminal Injustice System broadly, has failed to ‘correct’ and plans to continue to fail for the rest of that person’s life.

Life sentences are enforceable for the crimes of murder, manslaughter, and Class A drug dealing, although almost all instances of life sentences are handed down for murder.[2] This is despite evidence that suggests that people convicted of murder are some of the least likely to reoffend.[3] Further, the effect of life imprisonment on incarcerated people is dire. The United Nations Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice issued a report on life sentences in 1994, finding that life imprisonment “can lead to common deleterious sociological effects: isolation, desocialization, loss of personal responsibility, identity crisis and a general dependency on the penal institution.”[4] The report describes all long-term imprisonment as “a slow process of social deformation,”[5] which destroys the ability of incarcerated people to function as members of communities. Rather than ‘correction,’ life imprisonment causes “prisonization” – the adaptation of human beings to conditions of incarceration.[6] Far from rehabilitating people and reintroducing them to society ready to heal the social harm they have perpetrated, life sentences break people and condemn them indefinitely to life in prison institutions.

There is no justice in locking someone away for a lifetime. Justice is achieved by transforming that person, and the social conditions that led them to do harm, as demonstrated in demands 10, 26, and 47. No Pride in Prisons is committed to the belief that people and society are capable of fundamental change and that justice requires a commitment to helping people, and society, to change. With this in mind, No Pride in Prisons demands the immediate repeal of all life sentences.

[1] Department of Corrections, “Who We Are,” Department of Corrections, 4 June 2016. http://www.corrections.govt.nz/about_us/who_we_are.html.

[2] Statistics New Zealand, “Adults Convicted in Court by Sentence Type – Most Serious Offence Calendar Year,” Statistics New Zealand, 2 July 2016. http://nzdotstat.stats.govt.nz/wbos/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=TABLECODE7353.

[3] Marieke Liem, “Homicide Offender Recidivism: A review of the literature,” Aggression and Violent Behavior 18, no. 1 (2012).

[4] United Nations Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice, Life Imprisonment,(Vienna: United Nations, 2014), 6.

[5] Ibid., 7.

[6] Ibid.