People Against Prisons Aotearoa

9 posts tagged prison abolition

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 you should oppose the prison construction at Waikeria

The government has only one response to the booming prison population: more prison beds. Over the next few years, it plans to expand prison capacity by 1,800. The main way it will try to do this is by building a whole new prison on the same site as the existing Waikeria Prison. That prison would be the largest in New Zealand, housing more than 1,500 people.

The government’s response is absolutely futile. It impotently locks away people who have committed crimes, unwilling to address the social problems which cause crime itself. Instead of dealing with the fundamental inequalities, it abandons thousands of people to a prison system that is riddled with violence. Prisons subject very vulnerable people to an environment that makes them more mentally unwell, more likely to attempt suicide, and more likely to be sexually assaulted. Increasing the prison capacity increases the total number of people who will become victims of the violence of prisons.

Building more prisons also costs billions of dollars. Those are billions of dollars that could be spent on education, housing and healthcare. Instead of building more prisons, the government could be spending money on healthcare services for people who struggle with mental illness and drug problems. It could be addressing the drivers of crime, especially entrenched poverty and unemployment.

To make matters worse, the land that the new prison would stand on was stolen from the Ngāti Maniapoto hapu Ngāti Kaputuhi. In 1910, the Governor-General stole by proclamation the land known as the “Tokanui Block”. This land included Ngāti Kaputuhi’s marae Waiaruhe. As Te Runanga o Ngati Maniapoto notes, “Kaputuhi have been displaced from their lands for well over 100 years while corporate shysters enrich themselves by the cultural genocide of Ngati Maniapoto hapu.” We support the right of Ngāti Maniapoto and Ngāti Kaputuhi to mana motuhake over their rohe. We oppose the construction of the new prison at Waikeria, and support returning the land that it sits on.

If the government’s only solution to the overcrowding crisis is to build capacity, we suggest another solution. Instead of building more prisons in response to increasing numbers of prisoners, we should be reducing the number of prisons. As we have argued elsewhere, the overcrowding crisis is caused by a change of policy that meant more people on remand ended up in prison. We can significantly reduce the number of people in prison by demanding the repeal of this policy.

Rather than building another prison at Waikeria, the land should be returned to Ngāti Maniapoto. Rather than increasing the prison population, we must do everything we can to reduce it. Action is needed now to make this happen. In the coming months and years, the movement to stop the Waikeria prison expansion will require your involvement. That starts with the 10,000 Too Many hīkoi on the 11th of February at Aotea Square in Auckland. Your action is needed now to stop the government from spending billions of dollars on new prisons. We have to stop this prison construction project now. Not one more cell!


By Ti Lamusse and Emilie Rākete

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One easy way to reduce the prison population

New Zealand’s prison population hit a record 10,000 for the first time in November 2016. New Zealand has never had more people in prison than it does today. This booming prison population, and the overcrowding crisis it has caused, did not happen by accident. It did not happen because of increasing crime rates.[1] It did not happen because cops are catching more “bad guys”. It happened because the government just decided to imprison more people.

On September 4, 2013, the Bail Amendment Act came into effect. The purpose of this law is simple: to lock up more people on remand. Remand is the period of time between being charged with something and being sentenced. The majority of people imprisoned on remand have not been found guilty of anything and may never be found guilty. The law made it much harder to get bail, which has led to many more people being remanded in prison.

According to data I’ve collated between December 2013 and December 2016, the remand population has skyrocketed since the Bail Amendment Act came into effect. Before the new law, the prison population was actually falling for the first time in decades. Since the law came into effect, the prison muster has increased by about 1,700 people, an increase of 20.6%. This has been almost entirely due to an increase in the remand population. The number of people in prison on remand alone has risen by more than 1,200, a 78.4% increase.

These law changes haven’t affected all parts of the prison population equally. The changes have disproportionately impacted women and Māori prisoners. The women’s prison population has increased at twice the rate of the men’s prison population. The number of women on remand has more than doubled, now 112.4% higher than it was before the Act came into effect.

While both Māori and Pākeha prison populations have increased substantially over the past three years, the Māori prison population has grown about one and a half times faster than the Pākeha prison population. There are approximately 900 more Māori in prison since this law came into effect, increasing by about 22%. The majority of the increase in the prison population has been Māori, and Māori now make up a larger percentage of the total prison population than three years ago.

More people are now being imprisoned for poverty-related offences of dishonesty, which includes solo mums who are convicted of ‘benefit fraud’ just for trying to put food on the table for their kids.[2] While the Bail Amendment Act isn’t the sole cause of New Zealand’s astounding imprisonment rate, as we were already locking up a ridiculous number of people before it, it has contributed to a massive increase in the prison population. This has led to more poor people, women and Māori in prison than ever before, making this law a racist, sexist law that serves the interests of the rich.

The Bail Amendment Act needs to be repealed immediately. Although there are many drivers behind New Zealand’s booming prison population, including harsh parole and racist drug laws, the repeal of the Bail Amendment Act is the first step toward undoing the worst of the violence of prison overcrowding and mass incarceration. This government policy will not be changed on its own. It requires a groundswell of people who are willing to say that they’re not going to put up with this any more. You can be a part of this movement. Join us at noon on February 11 at Aotea Square for the 10,000 Too Many hīkoi. We will be demanding the immediate repeal of the Bail Amendment Act and an end to the injustices it has produced. Make your voice heard now. Stand up for justice and demand the repeal of the Bail Amendment Act.


By Ti Lamusse

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[1] Crime rates are lower than they were three years ago.

[2] As the Child Poverty Action Group notes, ‘benefit fraud’ is a broad category that is used to criminalise solo mothers, regardless of whether they intended to commit ‘fraud’ or if the ‘fraud’ occurred because of bureaucratic incompetency.

Learning the Political Lessons of Homosexual Law Reform

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In 1858, the English Laws Act was enacted by the occupying, British colonial forces in Aotearoa. This made male homosexuality illegal in Aotearoa by way of the imposition of English law as it stood in 1840. Sex between men, regardless of consent, was made punishable by death. The severity of the punishment changed over time, ranging from flogging to imprisonment, as social attitudes to both punishment and homosexuality shifted. By the time the movement for Homosexual Law Reform (HLR) emerged, the punishment was 5 years imprisonment for anyone who “committed an indecent act on another male, or allowed another male to do an indecent act on him”. 


The campaign for the decriminalisation of gay sexualities attracted people from various walks of life, bringing with them often conflicting interests. One of the few points of political unity among the gay community was the decriminalisation of what a white, heteropatriarchal, and colonial society deemed “indecent acts.” Gay conservatives through to socialists pushed for reform. This often led to bitter divisions over what kind of action to take. Regardless, the campaign was successful.

We owe a lot to this huge step in the decriminalisation of queer sexualities. We owe it to every activist who was arrested, to every gay person who lost their life or some of it to the prison, and ultimately to every person who campaigned against the law. We are in their debt, not just for this key step in queer and trans liberation, but also for the strength and lessons it provides us now. The success of the push for HLR shows us, 30 years on, that even though the demand that queer and trans people should live free from oppression is consistently resisted, it is not a demand that we should be afraid to make.

In its early days, the central tendency of the movement and campaign was working in secrecy, out of a desire “not to upset… parliamentarians”. However, as soon as homophobic forces became aware of the increasingly organised movement for decriminalisation, a counter-campaign of petitions was mobilised, along with meetings telling gay people to “get back in the sewers”. Visibility then became a necessary precondition of reform, and so visibility was thrust upon the movement. It seemed the only options were to be harassed in silence or, as the slogan goes, to stand up and fight back. Marches, paste-ups, stalls and leafleting by gay and lesbian organisations were a common feature of politics in 1985 – the year before the passing of the Bill.

Loudness, pride and ultimately what can only be considered intrusive rudeness constituted a large part of the dynamic of the protests. Gay conservatives were rendered “anxious” as meetings of homophobes would be disrupted by people demanding to speak and be heard. Streets would be taken over by dancing queens and anti-homophobic speeches. There was, as is to be expected, backlash in media – as indeed there has always been.

There are some  people who live on the periphery of what is acceptable in society. That is to say, these people are marginalised, and their very claim to humanity is made suspect through things like the comparison of homosexuality to a disease. When this marginalisation is the case, any move, legislative or otherwise, to improve the conditions of their lives will be contested. The very act of gay people daring to speak out about the violence done to them under the English Laws Act and Crimes Act invited hatred and bigotry. So they spoke louder. Our task must always be to uplift those whose uplifting seems impossible under our current circumstances – to break boundaries.

HLR and the campaign that achieved it teaches us something important. It offers us a lesson about the current state of queer and trans politics. The lesson is this: we need to continue to shout from the margins and we need to continue to shout when people are being silenced. Responding to the state’s violence, enacted in large part through the criminal injustice system, should be an aspect of our community’s legacy that we choose to continue.We should feel compelled, in fact, to respond to state power because it is against our community. We have to choose a response and this response can be one of two things: leaving our most vulnerable to suffer in silence, or to fight with and for our most vulnerable.

If the fight for HLR teaches us anything, it is that silence is not peace. Silence is the condition for violence going unnoticed, unopposed, and therefore unstopped.


Written by J Smith

No Pride in Prisons was formed following the 2015 Auckland Pride Parade to boycott the inclusion of violent and racist institutions – namely the police marching in uniform, and the corporatisation of Pride. This short documentary by Accompany collective discusses the formation, kaupapa, and actions held by NPIP.

Most of the documentary centres around the Fuck Pride Rally, organised in response to the Pride Board’s decision to include uniformed police and corrections officers in Auckland’s 2016 Parade, despite months of negotiation with NPIP.

(Source: youtube.com)

Check out this Waatea 5th Estate panel that NPIP member Sophie was on

The State of Incarceration in Aotearoa

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*This is the second part of a two-part series of speeches delivered at No Pride in Prisons FUCK PRIDE rally on February 20, 2016.

The prison system in Aotearoa is a tool of the racist settler colonial state. This is demonstrated by the extremely disproportionate rates of incarceration of Māori. Māori are only 15% of the general population but approximately 51% of the prison population. For Māori women, this marginalisation is even starker. Māori women are 58% of the women’s prison population and I have heard, at least anecdotally, that sometimes in Christchurch women’s prison up to 90% of the prisoners are Māori.

A 2009 Ministry of Justice report found that Māori are more likely to be apprehended, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned than non-Māori for the same crimes. At every stage in the criminal injustice system, Māori are structurally discriminated against.

In terms of the rates of incarceration of trans women, international studies have shown that trans women, particularly trans women of colour, are similarly disproportionately criminalised. Although there are no comparable studies in Aotearoa, we can assume that there are similar rates of incarceration, given higher rates of homelessness, unemployment, victimisation and social marginalisation experienced by trans people here.

I am briefly going to outline three areas which either directly lead to violence or are violent in and of themselves. First, as you would have seen in the news, New Zealand recently hit a record for the number of people it locks away in cages. According to the International Centre for Prison Studies, New Zealand prisons are at 106.1% of official capacity. This is a crisis and should very much concern you. Beyond the fact that New Zealand is choosing to criminalise more and more people, overcrowding for incarcerated people leads to increased rates of suicide, violent attacks, murder, physical and mental illnesses as well as disciplinary infractions. The most vulnerable subset of the prison population is also most likely to bear the brunt of this crisis.

One of the specific ways that Corrections has tried to address the overcrowding crisis is by introducing a policy of double-bunking. Whereas before 2009, prisoners were almost always housed in single cells overnight, a surge in the prison population in 2011 meant that prisoners, in many prisons, can now be kept overnight, two to a cell. Of course, prison officers are not constantly surveilling these cells overnight, providing potential for someone to assault a cellmate.

Last year, No Pride in Prisons got word of a trans woman who had been raped at Wiri prison, south of Auckland. The woman had been taken from protective segregation, against her will, and placed in the general population. Within minutes, she was severely assaulted and needed medical treatment. Instead of leaving her overnight in a hospital or medical bay, the officers decided to place her in a ‘double-bunked’ cell. She was then allegedly raped overnight by her cellmate. Instances like these are not possible without the overcrowding crisis in NZ prisons and the National Government’s policy of double-bunking. This government and the Department of Corrections is directly responsible for the rape of this woman.

Second, international studies have shown that transgender women are thirteen times more likely to be sexually assaulted in a men’s prison than the general population. However, I’m about to demonstrate that every single prisoner in the NZ prison system has been, by law, required to be sexually assaulted upon entering prison. This assault is in the form of a strip search.

As required by law, a strip search in NZ can include opening the mouth of the prisoner, lifting and “rubbing” their hair, forcing the person to spread their legs and squat naked. The officer also has full authority to “lift or raise”, or more accurately fondle, “fat, genitalia, and breasts”. By default, male guards conduct strip searches in men’s prisons, and women guards in women’s prisons. For trans women in men’s prisons, this means they are usually searched by male guards.

Under the Act, every prisoner undergoes a strip search when they enter and leave the prison. There are a wide set of other instances in which they can be searched too. Assuming that very few of these people would have given consent to have their body invaded by someone in a position of authority if they weren’t incarcerated, this is a clear instance of sexual assault, and something which needs to be ended immediately. Today. Because there are people in the Pride Parade who have sexually assaulted prisoners.

I’d just like to make one further comment before I conclude. Sexual and other violence occurs against criminalised populations at every stage of the criminal injustice system. We have received information that a Māori trans woman, was raped on two occasions in a police holding cells, once in Hamilton when she was a minor and later in Whangarei. There were cameras in the cells and the police could have intervened at any stage. After the first time in Hamilton, the woman said and I quote “I wanted to complain but they weren‘t interested”.

And so I say to all of you here today who defied the homonormative outcries of disgust that anyone would protest a Pride parade: Thank you. Thank you for you have sent a message to the queer community that this kind of violence is not acceptable. Your actions today will send a message that we as a community of marginalised peoples demand a new world, a world beyond the structures of racist imperialist cisheteropatriarchal capitalism and a world beyond prisons.


Written by T Lamusse

Gay Cops are Still Cops

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Over the past couple of weeks, No Pride in Prisons has placed increasing pressure on the Pride Board, and the Auckland queer community more generally, to ban uniformed police officers from the pride parade. As we now know, the Pride Board chose to disregard legitimate concerns with that institution being included. A common response to these concerns, from uncritical members of the community, has been: “What about the gay cops? Aren’t they a part of our community? Who are you to ban members of the community?”

To that, we ask: What is the queer community? The decision as to whether police can march in a pride parade is the kind of decision which determines what kind of community we are. Are we a community of marginalised peoples? Are we a community which cares about other marginalised peoples? Or, are we more concerned with consolidating the privileges of the most privileged within our ‘community’?

Cops have no place in any queer community made up of marginalised peoples. This is because it is the role of the police to uphold the privileges of the powerful, and maintain the marginalisation of the oppressed. How do they do this? As an institution, the New Zealand Police has admitted that it has an ‘unconscious bias’ against Māori. This is played out in the New Zealand Police apprehending and charging Māori at a rate that far surpasses that of Pākehā for the same crimes.

Police target and oppress other and overlapping marginalised peoples as well. You may have seen police harassing homeless people or people they suspect of being sex workers. No Pride in Prisons has received reports from trans women who have been violently assaulted by police and arrested for the supposed crime of “walking while trans”. The police’s targeting and criminalisation of certain groups is part of what makes and maintains their marginalisation. Community is required so that those on the margins can continue to survive. In other words, the police’s actions make the community necessary. As a result, cops are not and never will be part of a community of marginalised peoples.

You may be thinking: “not all cops are bad! I’m sure the vast majority of them aren’t racists!” We are sure that not all cops think that they are actively racist as individuals. All cops, however, work for an institution which has been proven time and time again to be racist and oppressive. Cops put on a uniform every day. That uniform is a symbol of the side that they have chosen, and that side engages in racist and oppressive violence on a mass scale. An individual cop may not think that their actions are discriminatory in any way (‘they are just doing their jobs!’), however, when you add up all the individual actions of individual cops, they amount to an institution that maintains racist colonial cisheteropatriarchal capitalism.

It is for this reason that it is offensive and complicitly oppressive to allow uniformed police to march in any pride parade. In doing so, the queer community becomes a group of historically marginalised peoples taking the side of an oppressive institution which targets marginalised peoples. Those ‘other’ marginalised peoples are also a part of our community: Māori queers, homeless queers, queer sex workers, only to name a few. In allowing the police to march with us, we are siding with an institution which oppresses our people.

“But you’re banning gay cops, who are part of the community!”. To this, we say: if banning representation of police and Corrections is to be understood as unfairly excluding members of our community, what of the queers suffering in custody right now? What of the trans women who have been beaten or raped by uniformed members of these organisations? What of the Māori who are targeted at every stage of the criminal justice system, which includes Māori queers? Is Pride not for them?

So, which side are you on? You can either stand with the marginalised, or with the oppressors; those subject to violence, or the violent. Gay cops, although they are gay, are still cops. If you stand with them, you’re standing with the oppressors.


Written by S Morgan, T Lamusse, and E Rākete

No Pride in Prisons is holding a “Fuck Pride” rally in protest to the inclusion of uniformed police and corrections officers in the 2016 pride parade. For more information, click here.