People Against Prisons Aotearoa

3 posts tagged prison violence

Why New Zealand prisons are in crisis and what you can do about it

New Zealand’s prisons are in crisis. Plain and simple. There have never been more people in prison at any point and it is only expected to get worse. Late last year, for the first time, the prison population hit a whopping 10,000 and is expected to remain above 10,000 for the foreseeable future.

This means that the government is planning to spend billions of dollars on imprisoning thousands more people than it did even four years ago. It is planning a $1 billion spending spree to pay for a new prison at Waikeria and massive expansions elsewhere. Meanwhile, it is housing more prisoners in double-bunked cells, where there are two or more people in a cell overnight. Data released to No Pride in Prisons shows that a quarter of all cells are now double-bunked. Many of those cells were never built for two people and the prisons cannot cope with the huge increase in prisoner numbers.

This overcrowding crisis has had a very serious impact on people in prison. Internationally, double-bunking has been consistently shown to increase rates of misconduct, self-harm, suicide, and violence, including sexual violence. Prisoners who have contacted No Pride in Prisons confirm this. They have told us how in double-bunked cells all of your privacy disappears. You often have to eat, sleep, and defecate in the same room as another person and you are rarely, if ever, allowed moments just to yourself.

To make matters even worse, two prisoners have contacted No Pride in Prisons saying that their cell-mates raped them. Double-bunked cells put people at incredible risk of intimidation, exploitation, and violence at the hands of their cellmates. Instead of making plans to reduce and eventually end the practice of double-bunking, the Department of Corrections every couple of months increases the number of double-bunked cells in response to the booming prison population.

The overcrowding crisis is one of the core drivers of worsening conditions in New Zealand prisons. Prisoners have reported that levels of violence are increasing. In a recent survey, 46% of prisoners at Manawatu Prison told the Ombudsmen they had been assaulted while in prison. Prisoners have also reported extremely poor healthcare. Across the board, prisoners have said that they experience long waiting times to see doctors and dentists, and that the care they receive is often poor. One prisoner told No Pride in Prisons that she has waited months in pain to see a doctor. She asked to see a doctor in August 2016 and as of February 2017, she has still not seen one!

Because of the overcrowding crisis, prisoners are spending more and more time in their cells. Many prisoners are kept in their cells for upwards of 20 hours per day, and a large number spend 22-23 hours per day in their cells. Many prisoners do not get access to fresh air every day. Corrections justifies this mistreatment, in part, by saying that the extremely high prison population makes it practically impossible for all prisoners to get a decent amount of time out of their cells and time in the fresh air.

These problems did not come out of nowhere. In September 2013, the Bail Amendment Act came into effect. The Act made it much harder for many people to get bail. As a result, the remand prison population, or that part of the prison population which has either not been convicted or sentenced for any crime, has skyrocketed. Prisoners on remand made up approximately 72% of the total increase in the prison population since the Act came into effect, and the remand population alone has risen by more than 1200 people.

Given its current trajectory, we can expect that this problem is only going to get worse. If something doesn’t change now, there will be thousands more people in prison. There will be thousands more people who will have to go through the violence and mistreatment that the overcrowding crisis has produced. Urgent action is needed undo the worst of this crisis. This is a crisis caused by government policy – by the Bail Amendment Act. With enough public pressure, policy can be changed.

We must do everything in our power to get the Bail Amendment Act repealed. We need to make our voices as loud as possible. We need a huge mass of people to show that we won’t stand for the government’s policy of mass incarceration anymore. Tough on crime means tough on people and this government has locked away more people than ever before. If you believe that we need to end the overcrowding crisis as soon as possible, then join the movement calling for the end of the Bail Amendment Act. Turn up at noon on February 11 for the 10,000 Too Many hīkoi from Auckland’s Aotea Square to Mt Eden Prison. We need to urgently send the message that enough is enough and it is time to stop this injustice. 

By Ti Lamusse

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Daily Torment

A personal account of one woman’s experience of incarceration in Aotearoa.

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I was arrested on the 15th of October, 2007 in the so-called “anti-terror raids.” By 6pm that evening, I was incarcerated in Arohata Prison just north of Wellington. At the time, our situation was somewhat unusual: generally, even for serious crimes, people would be bailed (often with quite strict conditions) until trial. The state said we were terrorists and the court agreed it was too dangerous to let us out.

Today, however, changes to bail laws mean that it is much harder for people who have been arrested for a crime to get bail pending their hearing. The implications for this are significant, because people who are in jail have much less access to justice: it’s hard to talk to a lawyer, to talk with witnesses, to get documents together or simply organise your life for a long court proceeding. Once in prison, it is much harder to get out.  

Earlier on that day, my friend Emily and I had been stripped of our own clothing and given blue boilersuits. We were placed in the general holding cells downstairs in the Wellington District Court, a quite old fashioned set up with steel barred cells adjacent to each other, and with a toilet in each nominally covered by a waist-high wall.

We were taken to the prison and subjected to a full body strip search. A screw (corrections officer) watched me undress, then made me squat to my ankles to ensure that anything concealed in my anus or vagina fell out. This was just the beginning of day-to-day searches, day-to-day degradations.

We were initially placed in segregation (solitary confinement) “for our own good” where we had no contact and were only allowed out of our cells for 1 hour per day. On October 16th, I got to make my first phone call. I was in shock and despair and could hardly form words. Also done for my “own good” was a 15-minute check-up throughout the night: a screw would come shine a light in my face to wake me up.

We demanded to be moved to general population and, when we arrived, we were searched. Then, we were warmly greeted by the other prisoners who had all heard about the case on TV. At the time, all of the women in the Tizard Wing (Remand) were Māori save for one other Pākehā.

The routine was mind numbing, isolating and degrading: we were searched whenever we went anywhere. We were taken to the gym for a sad game of volleyball every morning and required to play with a flat ball. We were searched before we left the wing; we were searched when we returned.

We were searched when we went to get clothes from the prison repository. We were searched when we got back.

Our rooms were searched. We were let out into the yard for an hour in the afternoon; we were searched.

By the end of the second week, we finally got some visitors. We were searched leaving our wing. When we arrived at the visitor area, we were searched and put into orange jumpsuits (so they know who the prisoners were) with zip ties on the wrists and ankles (so we couldn’t stuff anything up them). I thought those jumpsuits only existed at Guantanamo Bay; how little did I know that they are standard prison gear in New Zealand. We were searched again when our visitors left. We would be searched again when we returned to our wing from the visiting area.

When we went to court, we were searched. Our legal documents would be read by screws before we were locked into tiny transport cages.

One day, a guard came to my cell and said, “Pack your stuff.” Everyone else had just gone to volleyball. I had no idea where I was going, but I was expecting some visitors that day so I guessed that I was being transferred to another wing. I was worried I would be separated from Emily.

We were driven to the airport and put into shackles: we were locked into a cell at Wellington Airport. We were subsequently dragged around the airport by a chain.

Eventually, we arrived at the Auckland Women’s prison at Wiri. Of course, we were searched again. The new prison has cameras in every cell so the guards can watch you all of the time. Ostensibly the camera doesn’t film the shower or toilet area but I felt exposed and vulnerable, watched in bed or at the desk all day, every day. The person in the cell next to me had an amazing voice; she was 17. They didn’t know what else to do with her so they put her in an adult prison.

Each day, we went outside for an hour. We all got searched. When we returned to the wing we got searched.

We had regular visitors by the time we got to Auckland. The bureaucratic process for getting visitors takes ages, and I was thrilled to see my mum and friends.

Within a few days of arrival, my lawyer told me that the police were trying to bring charges against 13 of us under the Terrorism Suppression Act. If they succeeded in bringing the charge (which required the consent of the solicitor-general), he said we would never get out.

After that, I remember sitting in the common area of our wing, looking out the window and starting to cry. When the other women saw me, they immediately said, “Don’t cry.” They said that it would be worse for me if I cried. The screws would send me back to segregation to “help” me.

It was horror. I thought I would be there for 14 years.

The thing about prison that most people don’t understand is that it is an institution that teaches violence. The powerful in our society say, “we want to create a safe, secure community” so people should obey some guidelines about how to behave. But the reality is that the state operates by violence and coercion. Most of that violence and coercion is the small, day-to-day degradations of strip searches or night time patrols, with guards waking you up to “make sure you’re alive”, or having to beg to use the phone or get medical treatment or just get a tiny bit more food. One day I counted I was searched seven times.

There are far more violent activities, of course, such as sexual assaults and rapes. There were stories of a prisoner who was pregnant to a guard when I was there. Prison teaches the lesson that the powerful have the right to use violence and force to get what they want, and to get you to do what they want.

I was really lucky. I got out after a month. There was a whole lot of community support and solidarity that mobilised around the case. But I will never forget what the dread of that locked door felt like, and the utter sense of powerlessness I felt at the hands of people who clearly took pleasure in making supplicant beggars of us all. 


Written by Valerie Morse

Which side are you on?

The queer community in Aotearoa is at a turning point. It is fundamentally divided. Some of us are happy with the status quo and some of us demand more. On the one side, there are those who are complacent with the astounding rates of incarceration of Māori, with the violence of police officers and with the rape of incarcerated trans women. On the other side, there are those who stand in solidarity with all the queer and trans people who have been left behind by a community more concerned with rainbow-coloured flags at Pride parades than the suffering of their people.

Pride started with a moment of rupture, where our predecessors stepped out of the shadows and rioted against police brutality. At its emergence, Pride was nothing if not political. Those proud rioters demanded an end to violently policed norms of gender and sexuality. They fought in the street against anyone who thought they had the right to tell them not to.

Shamefully, Pride has become something else. It has become a corporatised pinkwashed event where institutions like the police and corrections, which do untold violence to the most vulnerable members of the queer community, can show themselves off as so-called beacons of gay rights. Organisations like ANZ and the University of Auckland, both of which impose unfair pay and conditions on their workers, appropriate pride in a lolly scramble for pink dollars. Theirs is a hollow beacon of progress built from the co-option of our struggle.

There are some comfortable queers who say “things have really changed” and that police and prisons are better now, that the police is not the same institution that used to round up suspected homosexuals in nightclubs and throw them in jail. Unfortunately, the police and prisons are still racist, homophobic, transphobic and misogynistic institutions. According to their own 2015 report, which is likely to under-report rates of violence, New Zealand Police used force against Māori at a rate nearly eight times that of Pākehā. The New Zealand Police also used tasers against Māori and Pasifika at a rate higher than it used tasers against Pākehā.

In the last four months alone, No Pride in Prisons has been in touch with two of our incarcerated trans sisters who have been raped in custody. Corrections hasn’t done a thing to end this sexual violence. It continues to place two people in a single cell overnight, putting those incarcerated people at extraordinary risk of sexual and other violence. In fact, it plans on exposing more prisoners to violence by expanding this practice of double-bunking. Why should we pretend that Corrections is anything but a racist and rape-facilitating arm of the state? We see through the pinkwashing, we acknowledge the suffering these institutions cause - do you?

Queers in Aotearoa have a legacy of insurgency. It is our responsibility to continue this struggle and perpetuate it - to destroy those things which are destroying the lives of the most marginalised members of our community. In Aotearoa, in 2016, the prison system is destructive. Police are destructive. We bear responsibilities, as those who carry on the work begun by those radical queers who came before us and who are with us still, not to be fooled. Violence wrapped in a rainbow flag is still violence. Racism covered in glitter is still racism.

Some say that Pride is just a celebration, that it’s supposed to celebrate how far ‘we’ have come. We ask, who is this ‘we’? When we celebrate, who are we leaving behind? When we invite these institutions to the party, we are siding with the forces who have wanted us in the closet, in a cell, or dead. How ever far we may have come, it has been in spite of police and prisons. These institutions always have been and always will be the enemies of queer liberation and universal liberation.

We look around and see soaring rates of homelessness and unemployment among young trans and queer people. We see daily acts of discrimination and violence against those who do not fit into a colonial gender model. We hear of rape and other violence done to incarcerated queer and non-queer people. This is not a time to celebrate. This is a time to demand action.

Our argument is simple: you can choose to side with corrections and the police or with the marginalised; with the oppressors or the oppressed; with the status quo or with change; with the institutions that hurt people or with the people they are hurting. The Auckland Pride Board has chosen its side, so what about you?


Written by T Lamusse, S Vella and E Rākete