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.
In Solidarity With Aiden Katri, a Transgender Woman Currently Being Incarcerated by the Israeli Defense Force
PINKWASHING (NOUN):
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.
On Tuesday 29th of March 2016, Aiden Katri, a 19 year old Mizrahi trans woman was sent to an IDF men’s prison for refusing to serve in the occupational military.
My name is Aaliyah Zionov. I am a 19 year old Mizrahi trans woman and a member of No Pride In Prisons. Were it not for my family’s migration from Israel to Aotearoa, this could have been me.
The Israeli Defense Force is often cited as a clear example of an organisation which utilises pinkwashing – being increasingly accommodating of LGBT soldiers and needs not for the cause of queer liberation, but for strengthening and obscuring the true purpose of a violent occupational force. Presenting itself as a supposed bastion of queer rights, the IDF diffuses legitimate criticism and gains positive international attention as a progressive organisation whose genocidal practices are to be admired.
However, pinkwashing does not result in material improvement in queer conditions. In fact, it is often actively harmful. For example, in 2013, the IDF began to allow transgender women to openly serve on the front lines. Usually, transgender women are permitted to opt out or seek alternative forms of civil service; this change did not exist to advance transgender rights but rather served only to expand the pool from which people could be conscripted.
Katri’s current situation highlights some of the largest contradictions of pinkwashing. The fact that we as Israeli trans women now have the ‘privilege’ of serving in the IDF means that we now also have the accompanying ‘privilege’ of being imprisoned in men’s prisons if we conscientiously object. The IDF took care to emphasise that, as she did not disclose her status as a trans woman while objecting, Katri’s imprisonment was “nothing to do with her being transgender”; this is impossible.
Firstly, the fact that the IDF requires one to disclose one’s status as a member of a vulnerable or “deviant” class to the state in order to be treated with dignity, effectively “outs” them and puts them potentially in danger. This means that the “trans-friendly” status of the IDF is nothing more than a farce.
Secondly, in Katri’s words: “I struggle against my oppression – my gender oppression as a trans women and my ethnic oppression as a Mizrahi Jew, and if I turn a blind eye to an oppression of another people, this would be hypocrisy.” In other words: since her decision to conscientiously object was made as a trans woman, her imprisonment for said decision cannot be separated from her identity.
Thirdly, she was incarcerated in a men’s prison: there were immediate material consequences to her resistance as a trans woman.
Aiden Katri recognises the importance of resisting colonisation and incarceration for queer and trans liberation; for her, the hypermasculinity of Israel’s military culture is an imperial force that is also directly violent against gender non-conforming persons. Allowing trans women to participate in this culture does not liberate them, rather pressuring them to conform to toxic constructions of gender. No group can achieve true liberation through the oppression of another group.
Decolonisation is integral to the achievement of queer and trans liberation. The modern gender binary was imposed by Western colonisation upon peoples and cultures across the world; in the Israeli state, we see not only a colonised understanding of gender that neglects traditional Jewish genders but an extension of this colonisation to Palestinian queers, through the occupation of their land. The ‘right’ of Israeli trans women to participate in the IDF directly erases the right of Palestinian trans women to self-determination and indeed to survival.
Similarly, the ‘right’ of New Zealand LGBT people to work at prisons or in the New Zealand Police directly erases the rights of whakawāhine and takatāpui Māori to self-determination and sovereignty. No carceral and military system in the world can be separated from its creation and purpose as a tool of state oppression and colonial settler occupation. Queer and trans liberation can only be realised through global prison abolition, for which international solidarity is absolutely vital.
Incarcerated transgender people are often put in solitary confinement “for their safety”, which the United Nations considers torture. In Aotearoa, incarcerated transgender people are generally offered the choice to enter protective segregation, which sometimes results in complete isolation for up to 23 hours each day. In Israel, they are subject to solitary confinement by default. Statutory provisions for “choice” and for “case by case” consideration are meaningless in the context of a system which is necessarily coercive and designed to disregard the needs of queer and trans people. Many trans women of color in Aotearoa “choose” to be placed in protective segregation to minimize exposure to sexual and physical violence, and are assaulted in segregation nevertheless.
The Israeli Defense Force decides how to treat trans soldiers with regard to gender on a “case by case” basis: it retains full power to disregard any person’s gender identity or needs. The admission that they do not “really know what to do” with transgender people does not bode well for any material improvement in conditions. The modern military, as Katri recognizes, is built on patriarchal and white supremacist conceptions of gender and gender roles, and can never be safe for trans people, be they soldiers, civil servants, inmates or victims of its violence.
Aiden Katri’s objection to serving in the IDF and her subsequent imprisonment contradicts Israel’s pinkwashing narrative where it attempts to present itself as an LGBT friendly face to colonial settler occupation and apartheid. Israel’s Pinkwashing is an attempt to distract you from the violent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, the stark inequality between Israeli settlers and Palestinians, ongoing illegal settlements, and mass incarceration of Palestinians, including children under the age of 16 years old. In Katri’s statement, she described witnessing some of the daily violence in the lives of Palestinians:
6,072 Palestinian security detainees and prisoners were held in Israeli prisons, 342 of them from the Gaza Strip. An additional 873 Palestinians were held in Israeli Prison Service facilities for being in Israel illegally, 27 of them from Gaza
In the Auckland Pride Parade 2014, the Israeli Embassy was given a platform to pinkwash Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. But we see with their treatment of trans conscientious objectors, this narrative quickly falls apart. As queer and trans people committed to the liberation of all people, we need to stand with those who are most marginalised and support the resistance against military occupation, genocide, colonisation and apartheid. We can do this by standing with Aiden Katri and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement in Aotearoa and internationally until there is justice for Palestine.
No Pride in Prisons stands in solidarity with the people of Palestine and in full support with Aiden Katri’s decision to conscientiously object to participation in the IDF. There are no statistics on the sexual assault of trans women in the IDF. However, given that 1 in 8 women and 1 in 5 gay men have reported being sexually assaulted and given that, where data exists, transgender women are assaulted at a far higher rate than cis women and gay men, it is not unreasonable to assume that Katri would have been placed in an unsafe situation even if she had not conscientiously objected.
Katri was put in a position where she had two choices: to be at risk of sexual assault and participate in a violent imperialist occupation, or to be at risk of sexual assault in a men’s prison because she refused to participate. No Pride in Prisons recognises that many trans women are placed in similarly impossible situations in Israel, Aotearoa and around the world, and maintains that the advancement of transgender rights therefore cannot happen without the global abolition of prisons and of military forces.
Written by A. Zionov, with assistance from K. Foster and MZ for No Pride in Prisons
There was only one Auckland Pride 2016 and it started on Karangahape Road
On Saturday February 20, hundreds of members of the Auckland queer and trans community erupted onto Ponsonby Road to disrupt an event celebrating institutional and corporate pinkwashing. These dissenting members of the queer and trans community embodied the meaning of Pride. Their rallying, marching, chanting, shouting, and barricading was the only true Pride that night. The other event was co-opted by exploitative corporations and institutions as an advertising opportunity and a public relations stunt.
Auckland Pride 2016 began on Karangahape Road with a cry of “Fuck Pride!”. Those in attendance were proud to reject the corporations and institutions shimmering with glitter on the adjacent street. Pride disrupted traffic as it moved along Karangahape Road towards the gentrified centre of Ponsonby. It flowed towards the barricades protecting banks, universities, and other institutions as they marched with rainbows integrated into their logos and slogans. It broke those barricades with what Pride was always supposed to be and, for some, continues to be: queer anger, from struggling queers. It was spontaneous, uncontrollable, loud, and fundamentally political.
Those hundreds of community members brought the officially endorsed pinkwashing event to a grinding halt for at least an hour. Once that event started back up again with a diverted route, the protesters conducted rolling blockades with the intent of shutting it down. They were the ones displaying pride: enough pride to reject corporatisation and institutional violence.
Those attending the corporate event, like the queer community more generally, were divided. On the one hand, there were those who, realising the purpose of the protest, supported the protesters and cheered them on. The vast majority of attendees, on the other hand, hurled verbal abuse, juice bottles, and sometimes fists at the protesters. They loudly informed the blockaders that they were a disgrace to the community. But the blockaders were not part of the same community as those who booed them from the sidelines. Whereas the blockaders were from a community of marginalised peoples, the booers represented a community that condones institutional violence.
And so there was an event that unquestioningly accepted the oppressive behaviours of police, prisons and corporate pinkwashers, and there was an event that demanded something more of the queer and trans community. But there was only one Pride. It was in the spirit of Pride’s legacy: the spirit of queer struggle, passion, and the rejection of oppressive power. Pride clashed with the officially endorsed corporate event flowing through a wealthy, gentrified suburb. It clashed with exploitative corporations and institutions bedazzled in their superficial support for ‘gay rights.’
So how exactly are these violent institutions and exploitative corporations attempting to pinkwash their behaviour? First, let’s take the example of ANZ, who introduced ‘GayTMs’ for the first time during last year’s Pride. Prior to and during the rollout of the GayTMs, ANZ workers were conducting ongoing strikes against their employer’s attempt to enforce casualised contracts and unlivable wages. Similarly, the University of Auckland marched in this year’s corporate event, hoping we would forget that it does not pay a living wage to all its employees, or guarantee secure contracts. Just like police and Corrections, they tried to excuse their behaviour by co-opting a queer cause without taking on queer issues. These queer issues include the fact that there are queer and transgender workers who are not being paid a living wage by ANZ or UoA. They include the fact that queer and transgender people are being abused by police and corrections officers.
The Auckland Pride Board, which organised the corporate event, is prepared to excuse this behaviour. No Pride in Prisons is not. If we stay silent, we are effectively condoning the actions of institutions like Corrections who would attempt to use a queer event to invite us to forget their consistent human rights abuses. If we accept things as they are, or ask nicely for things to change, nothing will change. Nothing will change as long as privileged members of the community cosy up to those who would use them as a shield from necessary attack. Silence is the enemy of emancipation.
As we now know, there are members of the queer and trans community who are no longer willing to stay silent. No Pride in Prisons activists were willing to put their bodies on the line in order to send a message: “Violence wrapped in a rainbow flag is still violence. Racism covered in glitter is still racism.” They were not willing to accept that those who, on a daily basis, sexually assault prisoners in the form of intrusive and unnecessary strip searches should be allowed to march in the corporate event, while trans women stuck cages are hidden from view.
This rejection of the status quo maintains the spirit of Pride and continues the work of those rioting trans women of colour who demanded freedom of gender identity and sexuality, and an end to sexual violence. However, No Pride in Prisons’ actions do not only re-call a not-too-distant past; they also call-forth a future. The future called-forth is a future in which the indigenous people of this country aren’t being incarcerated at a rate five times that of the colonisers. It is a future in which incarceration is no longer the solution to social issues, and it is a future in which the violent forces of cisheteronormativity do not reign supreme. And so the real Pride event was put on by those calling forth a future without the violence of police and prisons. Theirs was the only Pride 2016.
