People Against Prisons Aotearoa

3 posts tagged people against prisons aotearoa

Prison abolition is a Māori issue: the whakapapa of prisons in Aotearoa


This article was originally published in the June 2017 issue of MANA Magazine.

On November the 5th 1881, the New Zealand government dispatched 1600 uniformed Armed Constables to seize Parihaka. Peaceful resistance was met with military force. In the aftermath of Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahu’s campaign of peaceful resistance, hundreds of Māori were arrested and sentenced to penal slavery in the South Island. This act by the Armed Constabulary represents the pinnacle of colonialism — the literal removal of Māori from their homeland at gunpoint. Yet a few years after the atrocities at Parihaka, the Armed Constabulary became the New Zealand Police in 1886. The military organisation responsible for taking land from Māori by force became responsible for patrolling communities and locking up those who caused trouble. As our friend and comrade Sina Brown-Davis has said, the Armed Constabulary merely ‘took off their colonial uniforms and put on their police uniforms.’

Since then, the New Zealand government has poured billions of dollars into rebranding the prison system. The Department of Corrections was formed in 1995 to “improve public safety and assist in the rehabilitation and reintegration of offenders,” and it continues every year to make a show of setting goals to reduce reoffending. However, a consideration of the actual, every-day functioning of the prison system demonstrates that the fundamental aim behind prisons remains the same — to make inconvenient people go away. In the present day, Māori make up more than half of all prisoners, despite making up a mere 15% of the general population. Our communities are those most affected by incarceration. Our people are those most likely to die in prison. And despite decades of lip-service in the form of “acknowledging colonialism” and “confronting racism,” the prison system continues to do the same things it did one hundred and thirty six years ago.

Firstly, it serves to obscure the devastating, ongoing effects of colonial capitalism on Māori and working-class communities. Māori land and resources were placed in the hands of colonisers looking to expand their profit margins, forcing us to labour under a capitalist system to stay alive. We were forced into the factories, into the lumberyards, onto the farms — into the harshest and most dangerous industries. With haukainga in the hands of settler capitalists, the only alternative to backbreaking wage labour for Māori was death by starvation. This labour produces huge profits for the capitalists, but for dispossessed Māori the only thing it produces is misery. Far removed from the principles of communal ownership in tikanga Māori, we were plunged into conditions of deprivation and poverty which persist to this day. All of the social problems faced by Māori today trace their whakapapa back to this initial violence. Traditional whānau structures have been torn apart by long hours of labour isolated from loved ones, leading to abuse and neglect. The misery of alienating, backbreaking labour breeds addiction and health issues among working class Māori. That very same poverty then prevents people from getting the support they need.

These problems are ongoing and real, and they lead to very real social harm in our communities. We point to their whakapapa not to excuse that social harm, but to point out how futile and disingenuous it is to deal with them using police and prisons. This is not just a flaw in some of the Department of Corrections’ operating procedures. The fundamental principle behind policing and imprisonment, which target individual people committing individual offenses, is that the causes of social harm are a person’s individual failings. In reality, people do not actually exist outside of their complex relationships to the people, politics, and economic conditions around them. We commit injustice if we attempt to judge why someone has done something harmful, and what we can do about it, without considering these factors.

The introduction of ‘tikanga-based programmes’ in New Zealand prisons has done little to address the problems caused by a history of colonisation. These programmes serve largely as a token gesture to ensure that the Department of Corrections can maintain decent public relations with Māori communities. It is important to note that tikanga Māori approaches to harm are fundamentally at odds with a system based on incarceration. As such, the incorporation of ‘tikanga Māori’ within the prison system is effectively meaningless. For utu to be restored on an individual and community level after harm has been done, the perpetrator must continue to be a part of the community they have harmed. The first thing the prison does is rip a person away from their community, to be marked for the rest of their lives with the consequences of what they did.

The prison system and the police force exist specifically to ignore the everyday misery of their targets, and blunder past the real — that is, structural and social — causes of harmful behaviour. It is no wonder, then, that the colonial New Zealand government continues to pour billions of dollars into maintaining and expanding them. This enables the government to present an image of New Zealand as a peaceful and smooth-running capitalist settler colony. If the political structure is running smoothly, then anybody who is unhappy about it must be the problem.

Secondly, prisons serve to suppress resistance to the colonial capitalist system. When the New Zealand government believed Tūhoe activists were planning a guerilla war in 2007, brutal police violence was used against the community of Ruatoki and dozens of political organisers across these islands. Just like in 1881, the New Zealand government secures its hold over Aotearoa in the present by crushing Māori between the pincers of poverty and prison. The purpose of this is to maintain the New Zealand government’s sovereignty by ensuring that Māori remain disenfranchised, alienated from one another, and unable to effectively struggle for mana motuhake. We need only watch the grainy film taken of the Takaparawhā land occupation to know that the criminalisation of protest in this country is a tool of racist violence. The isolated conditions of the prison system, which tear people away from their homes and communities, also tear people away from the hope that they can build a better world. Prisons are extremely useful tools for the New Zealand government to reduce the size of mass movements that threaten it, and to scare people away from the fight for their own liberation by threat of imprisonment. Once again, Corrections wants to send the message that people’s discontent with colonial capitalism somehow has nothing to do with the reality of living and suffering under colonial capitalism. In the eyes of the Department of Corrections, discontentment is a threat to “public safety” and reflects an individual’s personal failings. We can no longer accept that this is true.

Putting people in prison cannot undo almost two centuries of repression, dispossession, and colonisation. In many cases, it actively perpetuates these conditions and makes their devastating symptoms even worse. To truly do right by our communities, we must work towards abolishing the prison system entirely, along with the structures that brought it into existence. In its place, we must build new and better ways to deal with problems in our communities. When social harm occurs, we need to take it seriously enough to focus on treating the fundamental cause of that harm — the poverty imposed by capitalism and colonialism — rather than simply throwing the person who has done harm into a prison cell. We can look to tikanga Māori, in which social harm is resolved by healing the relationships hurt by an individual’s harmful behaviour, as a guide. To make this happen, we must understand that ripping Māori away from their communities and throwing them into cells is categorically incompatible with tikanga and therefore incompatible with mana motuhake. The journey towards Māori liberation begins with organised struggle against the forces that oppress and suppress it.

People Against Prisons Aotearoa is an organisation dedicated to fighting for the unqualified end of prisons in Aotearoa. This struggle occurs not in isolation, but as part of the struggle for universal liberation. Colonialism, capitalism, and mass incarceration are all part of the same tukutuku of oppression. It is only by tearing it apart, by any means necessary, that the mahi of weaving a new world — a world based on true justice and equal access to the things we all need to live — can begin. And it will.

nā Huriana Kopeke-Te Aho, Sophie Morgan, Dani Pickering, Emilie Rākete raua ko Aaliyah Zionov

End Solitary Confinement!

Around every 43 minutes, a person is sent to solitary confinement in a New Zealand prison. This means they are locked away from meaningful human contact for 22 to 24 hours per day. In solitary, you are alone in an extremely monotonous physical environment, with almost nothing to do to pass the time. It is not guaranteed that you’ll get natural light or anything other than a thin mattress on a concrete slab. Your control over basic, everyday decisions is taken away. It is at the discretion of Corrections staff how often you get to use the toilet, take a shower, or get fresh air.

Although New Zealand prisons don’t have any specific cells or methods of punishment called “solitary confinement”, international observers have noted that the use of segregation and isolation in New Zealand prisons amounts to just that. No matter what name they might use, its basic character is the same. Corrections will generally justify using solitary confinement in one of four different ways. It either decides that a prisoner is at risk of self-harm, a risk to the safety of the prison or another prisoner, likely to be harmed by another prisoner, or in need of punishment.

In reality, people who are exposed to these horrible conditions, especially for long periods of time, sometimes come out of them with irreparable mental and physical damage. Rather than promoting wellness and good order in the prison, it promotes absolute misery. International evidence suggests that solitary confinement can cause migraine headaches, profound fatigue, heart palpitations, insomnia, back and other joint pain, deterioration of eyesight, poor appetite, weight loss, diarrhoea, lethargy, weakness, tremulousness (shaking), and the aggravation of pre-existing medical problems.

It also has serious psychological effects. Solitary can induce depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and psychosis, and make them worse where they already existed. Even for people with no history of mental illness, it can cause permanent damage that they will carry with them long after they leave.  

The evidence also overwhelmingly suggests that solitary actually increases the risk that prisoners will hurt themselves. In the last decade, at least 6 people have taken their own lives while in a solitary confinement cell in a New Zealand prison. Where Corrections sends people to solitary to “manage” their mental health, it’s been found that they come out of it more suicidal than they were before.

There is also evidence to suggest that solitary makes people more likely to hurt others. Because Corrections’ staff often exercise total control over prisoners in solitary, many find it very difficult to reintegrate. Once released from isolation, either back into the general prison population or into society, many prisoners are found to avoid social situations or be prone to violent outbursts. In 2013, a riot broke out in Spring Hill Corrections Facility after prisoners had been locked up for up to 26 hours at a time. Far from providing calm and control in the prison, solitary confinement clearly makes it profoundly more unhealthy, unsafe, and miserable for everyone involved.

No matter how you look at it, removing people against their will from human contact, and other basic human needs, is deeply degrading and dehumanising. In fact, a basic part of being a person is having meaningful interactions with others. We gain our sense of self, who we are and our place in the world from our interactions with other people. When our ability to interact with other people is taken away, we do not only lose a source of comfort and community. We also lose our ability to understand ourselves. It is no wonder that researchers find, again and again, that some isolated prisoners have trouble telling the difference “between reality and their own thoughts, or found reality so painful that they created their own fantasy world.” That means solitary confinement is literally dehumanising. It denies the basic human need to be with others.

These profound psychological and physical effects get worse with each passing day a prisoner is kept in solitary. In New Zealand, around 8% of solitary confinement stays last longer than 15 days, the internationally agreed maximum length. When used for such a prolonged amount of time, the suffering is so immense that, according to international observers, it effectively amounts to torture.

At any given time, more than 300 people are in solitary confinement in New Zealand prisons. On average, Corrections puts people in solitary about 12,000 times per year, and the numbers only keep rising. According to information given to us, the use of solitary confinement is growing even faster than the overall prison population. In December 2009,  about 2.11% of the prison population was in solitary. By March 2017, it had increased to 3.38% of the prison population. New Zealand now has one of the highest rates of solitary confinement in the world.

On every level, by any name, the evidence suggests that being in solitary confinement is a miserable, monotonous, and deeply harmful practice. It not only dehumanises and demeans people, but it does so while failing to do anything Corrections says it does. It completely undermines the well-being of prisoners while they’re inside, and makes them more likely to use violence once they are released. It is deeply disturbing that Corrections not only continues to use this horrible practice, but uses it more and more every year.

It’s time to end solitary confinement in New Zealand prisons once and for all. In the coming months, People Against Prisons Aotearoa will be organising a steady stream of actions, events, and publications geared towards this issue. We’ll be launching our campaign on Saturday 14 October, at the Ellen Melville Hall at 6pm. We hope to see you there.


By Aaliyah Zionov and Ti Lamusse

Why we changed our name to People Against Prisons Aotearoa

On the 1st of September 2017, No Pride in Prisons (NPIP) changed its name to People Against Prisons Aotearoa (PAPA). We made this decision to better reflect the fundamental purpose of the organisation. It marks the next step in our commitment to building the prison abolitionist movement in Aotearoa.

No Pride in Prisons started organising in 2015, when it was announced that Auckland Pride had invited uniformed Police and Corrections Officers to march in the Pride Parade. Several of our founding members decided to protest this decision by interrupting the parade. We could not allow the Auckland Pride Board to turn a blind eye to the fact that police and prisons are deeply violent, inhumane institutions. Our aim was to contest the claims by the New Zealand and Department of Corrections that they were now “queer-friendly.” We showed that they can never be “queer-friendly.”

Our original name, No Pride in Prisons, reflected our initial focus on combatting pinkwashing, which we defined as “the promotion of mainstream ‘gay rights’ by corporate or political entities as a veil to excuse or hide unethical practices, particularly where those practices ignore basic human and workers’ rights.” Our protest at Pride forced open a conversation about how queer and trans people were being treated by organisations that outwardly claimed to support them.

We also brought attention to the way pinkwashing weakens the left. The appropriation of queer and trans struggles by oppressive institutions and corporations sends the message that queer and trans people are okay with their exploitative practices. This can undermine the bonds of solidarity between queer and trans people and people fighting these exploitative practices.

In 2016, three hundred people brought the Pride Parade to a halt for an hour and a half. They were voicing their anger at the Police and the Department of Corrections using Pride as a PR stunt for the second year in a row. This action demonstrated the power of collective action, forcing the queer community to reevaluate our relation to these violent institutions. Forcing the Police and Corrections out of the Pride parade publicly reasserted the humanity of prisoners.

Although we were, at first, most known for our protests at Pride Parades, we do much more as an organisation. In 2016, we began to run social programmes and advocate for prisoners on a day to day basis. We also began to put direct pressure on Corrections when they were not meeting prisoners’ basic needs. In November last year, four No Pride in Prisons organisers were arrested for occupying a Corrections office to demand that a trans prisoner be moved out of solitary confinement.

Our day-to-day work was always grounded in the understanding that the best way to support prisoners is to free them from the system that causes their suffering in the first place. We understand that prisons are inherently violent, degrading, and racist institutions. As long as prisons continue to exist in Aotearoa, there will always be more people to help and more cases of abuse.

However, it became increasingly clear to us that, in order to achieve our long term goal of abolishing prisons entirely, it no longer made sense to focus just on queer and trans prisoners. Although queer and trans people certainly experience some of the worst excesses of the prison system’s violence, such violence is also experienced by people from many other walks of life. The queer and trans community cannot abolish prisons just by ourselves or just for ourselves. We came to the conclusion that the prison abolitionist movement we want to see in Aotearoa must include as many people as possible. In particular, it is essential that this movement involves as many currently and formerly incarcerated people as possible, most of whom are not queer or trans.

In February 2017, we opened up our membership to anyone who agreed with our kaupapa, and began to consciously reorient ourselves towards working for all prisoners. This began with our 10,000 Too Many march to Mt Eden Prison, in response to the news that New Zealand’s prison population had just reached 10,000 people for the first time. This record represents a new era in New Zealand’s epidemic of mass incarceration.

The march received huge support from people of many different backgrounds, confirming to us that everyone has a reason to oppose the violence of prisons. Further, it confirmed that there was an urgent need for a mass-based organisation to fight it.

As an organisation no longer exclusive to queer and trans members, and with pinkwashing no longer an emphasis in our organising, the name No Pride in Prisons became increasingly confusing and inappropriate. Many of the previously and currently incarcerated people we reached out to, who were not queer or trans, were hesitant about our name. Removed from its original context, the “Pride” reference does not hold, and the name is (understandably) often taken to mean something like “prisoners should be ashamed.” That the people we recognise as absolutely essential to our movement were sometimes put off by our name was a sign that it was becoming an obstacle to our organising. In the interests of clarity, and of better reflecting our new direction, we began discussing a name change. We arrived at People Against Prisons Aotearoa (PAPA).

As an acronym, PAPA serves as a reminder of this organisation’s commitment to the struggle for mana motuhake. The prison system in Aotearoa has been used to enforce and maintain the racist oppression of Māori. Papatūānuku, the most ancient ancestress of all humans, is a guarding and nurturing force in all our lives. We bear her in mind while we go about the revolutionary task of dismantling the prison system.

Our new name, People Against Prisons Aotearoa, better reflects our ultimate goal of seeing the unqualified abolition of prisons in Aotearoa. We are people against prisons, and we are people for each and every prisoner. We are more committed to this now than ever before.