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
As a necessary part of imprisonment, incarcerated people are deprived of their bodily autonomy, unable to move between spaces at will or to deny invasive strip searches. For incarcerated people who have been harassed or assaulted by prison staff, this inability to move freely means that they are locked up in spaces where the people victimising them have more control over their bodies than they do. This is unacceptable, and in the short term it is of the utmost importance that prison staff who have assaulted prisoners are removed from prison facilities.
According to the Prison Operations Manual, the initial response of a staff member to an incarcerated person’s complaint is to “immediately attempt to resolve the issue informally before the prisoner lodges a formal complaint.”[1] In other words, it is the staff member’s responsibility to make the complaint go away so that no formal complaint is laid. If the incarcerated person’s complaint is not “resolved” by the original officer, that person then has to fill out a form detailing their complaint.[2] If the person is one of the 71% of incarcerated people who cannot read and write to a level required to survive in “modern” society,[3] the original officer is then required to assist them with a written complaint.[4] That means that the officer would continue to maintain a degree of power over the incarcerated person and potentially influence the written form of the complaint.
From there, the incarcerated person must go through a lengthy process of interviews and attempted resolutions before they can be advised of their right to lay a complaint with an external, independent agency.[5] According to the Inspector of Corrections’ website, “inspectors will generally not investigate any complaint which has not been through the complaint process where the complaint originated.”[6] This means that before an external agency will even look at a complaint, an incarcerated person has to go through all the barriers Corrections puts in place to an independent investigation.
In practice, this makes it very difficult for incarcerated people to have their complaints dealt with impartially by an independent authority. Although a better complaint process will by no means undo all of the heinous everyday practices that incarcerated people experience, it may hold to account those individual staff members who engage in particularly harmful acts. This would require changes to current complaints process. These changes must include easier and safer mechanisms for prisoners to report assault to an independent authority. As it currently stands, the Department of Corrections’ policy around prisoner complaints erects as many barriers as possible to holding staff accountable for their actions. It is in the interests of ongoing prisoner safety that No Pride in Prisons demands better and more transparent processes for complaints against staff, which are actioned by an independent authority.
[1] Department of Corrections, “PC.01.01 Initial Notification of Prisoner Complaint,” Department of Corrections, 20 June 2016. http://www.corrections.govt.nz/resources/policy_and_legislation/Prison-Operations-Manual/Prisoner-complaints.html.
[2] Department of Corrections, “PC.01.02 Internal Complaint,” Department of Corrections, 20 June 2016. http://www.corrections.govt.nz/resources/policy_and_legislation/Prison-Operations-Manual/Prisoner-complaints.html.
[3] Jill Bowman, “Assessing the Literacy and Numeracy of Prisoners,” Practice: The Corrections Journal 2, no. 1 (2014): 39.
[4] Department of Corrections, “PC.01.02 Internal Complaint,” Department of Corrections, 20 June 2016. http://www.corrections.govt.nz/resources/policy_and_legislation/Prison-Operations-Manual/Prisoner-complaints.html.