And they can’t hire the ex-prison slaves because their conviction records make them ineligible to be hired by professional fire squads.
One of my colleagues spent part of his prison term fighting fires, and almost died because they were sent into an area where the fire was supposedly out. But no, they could not hire him when he was released on parole in 1994, even though he had the skills required.
California law finally changed in 2020. Except for those convicted of violent felonies or sexual assault, the inmate firefighters are eligible to go through additional training to join fire crews as employees. They also have their records expunged and can skip parole.
But yes, the fact that we still rely on “inmate labor” is appalling.
I just finished the final season of Jessica Jones on Netflix and overall I feel fairly ambivalent about it. I think the first season was by far the show’s strongest and I felt like the show lost some of its heart (namely through the way we see the corruption of Trish and especially Malcolm), but overall I felt like it held to some of its core themes, and I certainly didn’t hate it. However, what this season got me thinking about, and what I think becomes a clear problematic which repeats throughout many of Netflix’s Marvel originals shows is the way the vigilante role of the superpowered heroes is represented and played out: heroes demonstrate repetitively the failing of America’s criminal justice system, and yet ultimately reify the validity of these structures in very frustrating ways. Definitely spoilers below.
Before continuing, I do want to emphasize two things: first, this is intended to be an intervention on an incredibly prevalent problem, not a complete dismissal of the shows themselves. Considering how much of the Marvel Cinematic Universe centers on the stories of white men (frequently rich or middle-class, and exclusively canonized as heterosexual despite fan counter-readings), it is important to acknowledge the significance of Netflix shows centering their stories on women, people of color, and people with disabilities, as well as the way they, to some extent, address the social inequalities that marginalized communities and individuals experience. Secondly, I also do not want to suggest that all of the Marvel Netflix-originals have the same kinds of potentials; The Punisher, for example, does not, to me, hold the same possibilities as Luke Cage, and I’m not even looking at Iron Fist because I haven’t watched it and don’t intend to.
Let me first start by briefly discussing the concept of the prison industrial complex and prison abolition. If you are unfamiliar with the concept or the activism I highly suggest reading The Nation’s article “What Is Prison Abolition?” and looking at Critical Resistance, which was co-founded by Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis. Taken from the website’s about, “the prison industrial complex (PIC) is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems.” What prison abolition is about “is a political vision with the goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment.” There are a number of excellent scholars/theorists/activists who discuss prison abolition, but here I’m going to be citing and discussing “Prison Reform or Prison Abolition?” (the introduction to Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete?) and Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, and Dean Spade’s “Building an Abolitionist Trans and Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got.”
Let me start tracing this argument through Jessica Jones by drawing out a few of the examples which initially brought this criticism to the forefront of my mind while watching this final season:
Corrupt Cops & the Need for Jury Evidence: while the show demonstrates the limitations of policing and the criminal justice system, it simultaneously acknowledges corrupt cops who are abusing their power and the inability of police to lock up a villain because they don’t have enough evidence or the ability to get said evidence. By showing these together, there is a suggestion that the two issues at once separate from each other and equally problematic. We do not see police officers acting without warrants, assaulting/shooting suspects (although in one scene, an officer threatens to shoot Jessica when she is smashing a gazebo and digging beneath the foundation to recover a body neither the officer nor the homeowners realize is hidden there up until Trish begins filming her), or acting outside of the law to collect evidence; instead, the show’s hero does many of these things in contexts which suggest she is correct to do so (again, the antagonist she is facing up against is a psycopathic serial killer who tries to kill her multiple times). The corrupt cop in this season is removed from the central action; his corruption allows Jessica to do what she “needs” to do (destroy evidence which will allow the villain to be incarcerated, to keep her sister out of prison), and is represented as being separate from the police force as an institution. There is even a way in which his actions are presented as being potentially justifiable: he kills drug dealers to steal from them. We are told this is wrong because they are kids and still have “time to change,” implying that if they were adults, their murders would be perhaps justified (and one officer even comments that “one of those kids” hit her in the head with a bike lock, suggesting that their age doesn’t matter); we are also told it is wrong because his motive is the theft, not “justice.” This again implies that things might be different if he was murdering drug dealers for dealing drugs, and again obscures the systemic inequalities which produce crime, as well as the way the PIC contributes to and benefits from these inequalities.
“Supers” and Prisons: acknowledged but never fully addressed is the significance of “supers” as an unprotected category. When Trish is arrested, Detective Costa informs her that the NYPD doesn’t have jurisdiction and that powered peoples are, apparently, not afforded due process of law. When Jessica is initially reluctant to tell the police that the masked vigilante is Trish and hopes to stop Trish herself, Jessica comments that no one really knows what happens on the Raft because no one from the Raft is able to contact the outside world. Given the context that Luke Cage’s powers came from illegal experimentation conducted on him while he was incarcerated, it seems possible if not probable that experimentation/medical torture is being conducted on those incarcerated on the Raft, and it becomes all the more insidious that Luke shows up to explain to Jessica that he himself had to send his brother to the Raft, and convince her to do the same. Essentially by addressing some of the extreme human rights abuses involved in incarceration in the real world through the metaphor of fictitious superpowered people being denied the (facade of) protections that are extended to suspected criminals, the argument being made is that even incarceration at its worst is a necessary and viable solution to crime.
The problematic of “diverse” cops: this is less centered in the narrative and subsequently has lower stakes than the other two examples I discuss above, but by representing a “diverse” police force, we are given the illusion that police forces “are” “diverse”, and that this means something. Costa, who is shown having “personal problems” in the form of going through the adoption process with his husband, who is worried about how much Costa is working and whether or not he will be more present as a parent, obscures the reality of homophobia in the PIC.
Davis argues that “the prison is considered so ‘natural’ that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it” (10) and the consequence of this is that “the U.S. population in general is less than five percent of the world’s total, whereas more than twenty percent of the world’s combined prison population can be claimed by the United States” (11). She goes on to raise the question “why were people so quick to assume that locking away an increasingly large proportion of the U.S. population would help those who live in the free world feel safer and more secure?” (14). Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, The Punisher, and Daredevil, address, to varying degrees and varying success, some of the problems of the PIC: they acknowledge police corruption, wrongful incarceration, the effects of financial inequalities on criminal justice outcomes (namely in the power of the rich to avoid punishment), illegal treatment of prisoners (through experimentation/medical torture), the effects of trauma and poverty on the creation of the “criminal”, and the lasting effects of incarceration. However, the solutions suggested through these shows, at best emphasize alternative models of policing/surveillance (in the case of Jessica Jones, private investigator and serial trespasser, an increased kind of policing/surveillance) and reforming systems rather than abolishing them. The problem with this, as Davis points out, is that “frameworks that rely exclusively on reforms help to produce the stultifying idea that nothing lies beyond the prison” (20). Furthermore, the shows, for the most part, do not even call of for reforms or imagine reform as a real possibility anyways; they suggest empathy but maintain that prison or death are the only ways to stop “real” criminals. The prison is almost always the naturalsolution in these shows; the only question is who belongs in them and how they should get there. Worse, the only show which consistently deviates from the naturalness of incarceration is The Punisher, which suggests the better alternative to prisons might be revenge killings.
In discussing “the hero mindset,” Bassichis, Lee, and Spade discuss, essentially, the pitfalls of neoliberalism and argue that “stories of mass struggle become stories of individuals overcoming great odds,” and give the example of narratives which center Rosa Parks as “sparking” the Montgomery Bus Boycott through a solitary (“lonely”) act while obscuring the reality that she was an experienced civil rights activist acting in part of a series of civil disobediences (26). This is a general problematic of the superhero (and especially “vigilante” hero) genre, and it becomes particularly relevant in shows such as Luke CageandJessica Jones which are addressing systemic issues like racism, the prison industrial complex, and sexual assault/abuse in important (if imperfect ways). Superheroes, especially vigilante heroes, predominantly work alone; when they do team up it’s typically only with one or two others (Jessica working with Trish), short-lived (The Defenders), or both (Jessica sometimes working with Luke, Malcolm, and/or Erik). What’s important, is that they arevigilantes, working outside of structures or movements; while operating outside structures can have the potential to suggest alternatives solutions to the structures (ie the way that prison abolition looks to find solutions outside of policing/prisons), it also centers the solution (and problem) on individuals in ways which obscure the realities of broader structures. Even in these limited “team-ups” there is little to no potential for meaningful coalition between individual heroes and organizations/activist communities to address the broader inequalities which are being addressed/acknowledged.
This plays out in the third season of Jessica Jones in the way that it centers on a binary logic which runs: prisons or vigilante-justice through murder. The audience is told that the police don’t cut it, they can’t always know who’s a “good” person or a “bad” person, and because of that “good” people are vulnerable and “bad” people walk free. The initial antagonist is a psychopathic serial killer making it easy to subscribe to this model. While it is perhaps better that the solution isn’t for Jones to kill him (again, this is the solution suggested in The Punisher), the problem is not only a reification of the prison, but that in order for this solution to be realized, Jones must take on a heightened policing role, following him, illegally searching his house, and chasing down leads the police overlooked. As Bassichis, Lee, and Spade point out, “the violence of imprisoning millions of poor people and people of color, for example, can’t be adequately explained by finding one nasty racist individual, but instead requires looking at a whole web of institutions, policies, and practices that make it “normal” and “necessary” to warehouse, displace, discard, and annihilate poor people and people of color” (23). The binary is further traced through Trish Walker, who herself becomes a (vigilante) murderer; she is partially excused (morally/as a character) of the murders, because her first two kills are assaults that go to far because she flashes to her mother’s murderer, and the third is her mother’s murderer. Furthermore, her role as a vigilante is contextualized through her own experiences of powerlessness as the victim of abuse. However, even as Trish represents a more morally ambiguous case for the need for prisons, the solution (prison) never addresses the issues we are told shaped her actions, nor any potential for other outcomes.
more people would be for prison abolition if they just tried to send mail to an inmate even once
for almost a year now i’ve been trying to send a copy of the literary magazine i edit to an inmate who requested one. his prison prohibits any written materials that so much as mention drugs, weapons, criminal activity, or malicious violence of any sort. i’ve been poring over what’s available of the 95 volumes my magazine has printed over the years, and of those found 3 that might pass inspection. the first two were sent back undelivered two months after i sent them because one had a short story that alluded to a playground fight, and the other a poem that used the word “fist” in a nonviolent context. The third was returned for the stated reason that its contents depicted the use of firearms. i reread the entire issue, there’s not a single gun mentioned in all its 120 pages.
while going back and forth with this guy trying to figure out how to get a copy of the magazine in his hands, two of my letters bounced back for unspecified reasons. i learned that inmates are not given their correspondents’ original letters, but scanned copies, often poorly reproduced and sometimes illegible. these people aren’t even granted the ink their loved ones used to pen their messages, or to hold in their hands the paper their loved ones held, if they’re able to receive their words at all.
“it was like that the last day we left the schools. all song. so many songs of the erstwhile schoolchildren freed and the generations crescendoing to meet us.
there was a time when no one would have ever thought there could be school abolition. except the sneaky privatization schemes that sought to destroy the students while keeping the buildings as monuments to how deep their theft could go.
it was the mothers who said it first. how total prison was. how the problem was not only their children being pushed out of school and into camps, but how the children drinking private school kool-aid were pipelined to more colorful camps. matriculating with programmed responses, like drones to kill the willing once they were made.
and the midlife crisis set who protested all the barbed wire put on their years as if learning was temporary. and what did they know?
ultimately it was the natural consequence of all our industrious work to make the air unbreathable, the water undrinkable, and the people uncritically unthinkable. at some point we needed all the different ages to solve all the problems we had excel-sheeted and databased into our lives.
so we abolished schools and prisons the same day. and the people came home singing and welcomed with song. what a noise. what a noise for every age.”
A reflection on the Vaughn Prison Rebellion from Kim Wilson, who has two sons at Vaughn:
“… At a time when the federal government has targeted vulnerable groups of people in this country, the #VaughnRebellion should be seen as a signal that solidarity includes solidarity with incarcerated people.
The men of Vaughn are demanding better treatment, education, correct status sheets, and effective rehabilitation. They are telling society that they will not be disappeared and forgotten. They are saying, unequivocally, that they matter, and that they will not be denied their humanity even if it risks them more time or their lives.
…
Abuse thrives on silence. I don’t believe that we can afford to ignore the #VaughnRebellion as some outlier event in an otherwise model prison (though prison officials and politicians will try to push this line—hard). We don’t know who was involved in the #VaughnRebellion, but I stand in support with them and with everyone else at Vaughn that is subject to abuse. There are many inside that are legitimately afraid to speak up. There are also those outside who feel as though they can’t speak up because they worry that they will be banned from the prison. This is a legitimate concern, and I worry that I’ll be banned from seeing my sons for writing about the #VaughnRebellion.
This is how power and control work.
This is how abuse works. In the struggle for justice, I can’t allow fear to stop me.”
In this new essay, Sujani Reddy argues that those of us who want prison abolition must consider a call, simultaneously, to deschool society. To resist within and against education institutions, she calls for an approach of ‘the undercommons’: “We found ways to be in the institution but not of it, to not subordinate ourselves to its forms of recognition but instead to employ its resources in ways that were not legible or reducible to its designs or demands. We were not poster children; we were poachers.”
Since the passing of the Sentencing and Parole Reform Act 2010, which introduced a “three strikes” law into our criminal justice system, the New Zealand government has headed deeper into “tough on crime” approaches to policy. “Tough on crime” is the idea that using harsh sentencing practices and incarcerating more people will reduce the occurrence of crime. However, tough on crime policy is only leading to stagnating crime rates and an overall increase in the prison population.
“Tough on crime” is being pursued in New Zealand because the majority of our government genuinely believe that harsher punishments will prevent people from commiting crime. It is an enticing idea because it taps into our real desires to make our communities safer. When we see crime, we want something to be done about it, so it seems like common sense to just double down on what we’re already doing. In practice, all it does is expose and intensify the deep-seated issues within the criminal justice system in the first place. Evidence suggests that sending people to prison makes them more likely to commit more crime, not less.
The three strikes law, for example, could be compared to capital punishment, or torture. To believe these approaches will solve social problems, we have to believe we can scare people into behaving in acceptable ways. However, there is no reason to believe that more ferocious forms of punishment are any more deterrent than non-punitive interventions. There are ways that we can stop violence which don’t rely on brutal punishment, that don’t tear people out of communities and permanently wound both. Prisons do not stop crime from happening, prisons breed violence.
Imprisoning more people, for longer sentences, bolsters the need for expensive government departments which house and deal with prisoners. When “three strikes” was introduced, the government anticipated that the change in the law would lead to a rise of 400 prisoners over the next four years. The reality exceeded the expectation: within two years, the prison population rose by over 800 people.
This immediately put immense pressure on the capacity of New Zealand prisons, creating an ongoing crisis of overpopulation. This crisis has been used by Corrections to justify double bunking, where two or more people share a cell. Double-bunking completely erodes prisoners’ right to privacy and puts people at risk of intimidation, exploitation, and violence. Internationally, it has been consistently shown to increase rates of misconduct, self-harm, and suicide.
New Zealand prisons are at a breaking point. The forthcoming addition of 600 prison beds to Waikeria Prison has been marketed as a ‘mini prison expansion’. In reality, there is nothing “small-scale” about it: it is the same size as a moderate sized prison in New Zealand. This expansion has been justified as a emergency response to the overcrowding crisis, but its construction won’t be completed for another four years. This prison is being built as a band-aid solution because the government doesn’t have the political will to repeal “tough on crime” policies and let people out.
New Zealand’s prison population has grown 364% in the past 30 years. The rate of incarcerated women in New Zealand has grown 150% since 2002. In 1989, Māori women made up 1% of the female prison population. Today, they constitute 64%! This indicates that “tough on crime” sentencing is having a direct and disproportionate effect on Maori, particularly Māori women.
The Department of Corrections is now the largest government department. What could that money be doing for our communities instead?
“Tough on crime” is not about reducing the rate of crime. It is about locking people away. It is about branding people as permanently not worthy of our attention, care, or humanity. It is about avoiding the question of why crime happens and why people do it. It is about finding an excuse to not invest in social programmes, rehabilitation, and education.
When we take the “tough on crime” approach, we ruin the lives of thousands of people, and their families, just to make an example out of them. If we really wanted to get rid of crime, we would make sure that everyone is healthy, well-fed, educated, and equipped to be healthy members of their community.
As Paul Gluckman argues, “prisons are extremely expensive training grounds for further offending, building offenders criminal careers by teaching them criminal skills, damaging their employment, accommodation and family prospects, and compounding mental health and substance issues”.
Rather than throwing away dollars and lives, we should be thinking about getting our justice system right. We should begin with the repeal of the “three strikes” laws and all other “tough on crime” policies.
Tough on Crime rationalises that those who are more likely to be imprisoned would be only people who commit serious offences, and therefore ‘deserve’ punishment.
This not only obscures the fact that the people who commit crime are more likely to be victims themselves. It also obscures the fact that sentencing practices target Māori and Pacific people disproportionately.
Part of our work is advocacy for people who are presently incarcerated. This week, one of these people was unexpectedly released late on Friday. Corrections had lost all of her belongings.
They released her from the prison without a single possession. Another ex-prisoner gave her a shirt. She had no shoes. She had no possible way of getting to her bail address.
She had to spend the night on the street, alone, trying to find someone who would take her there. Corrections left her alone, penniless and vulnerable to violence.
After escaping someone who made promises to her but then violently took advantage of her, she found a way to contact PAPA organisers. Within a few hours she had clothing, shoes, a phone, and a temporary safe place to sleep.
This is the human wreckage incarceration in Aotearoa leaves behind it. This is the level of atrocious physical, emotional, and sexual violence so carelessly facilitated by Corrections.
I took this woman, my friend, to McDonalds and sat there quietly eating some fries. She looked at me and said “I hate being set up to fail.” We hate it too. If you’re with us, join us in stopping this from ever happening again: papa.org.nz/join-us/
The New Zealand Police’s latest publicity stunt, in which it has slapped a rainbow on a police car to “celebrate” diversity, is a slap in the face to every marginalised person who has ever been mistreated by the cops. As the comments in the cops’ patronising #WeCareEnough hashtag show, our community is insulted that the NZ Police believes we will mistake a coat of paint for any kind of real progress towards ending police brutality, racism, and violence.
We can’t help but be reminded of last year’s eye-wateringly insensitive stunt for Māori Language Week, in which “pirihimana” was written on the side of police cars along with a koru pattern. Police officers got to pat themselves on the back for celebrating Te Reo Māori while continuing to do their job of tearing apart Māori communities.
For the young Māori racially profiled by the police every day, picked from the streets of their papakāinga and dragged through a racist and colonial criminal justice system, a temporary paintjob on one police car means less than nothing. The families of the people killed every year by police in reckless, unnecessary car chases wouldn’t sleep easier knowing that it was a rainbow car which killed them. When a jackboot is ground into your neck, as we see almost routinely on Aotearoa’s streets, no amount of rhinestones will distract from the injustice.
At every proud moment in our history when brave people have stood up against evil, the cops were right there, standing with that evil. It was the cops who burned and destroyed Parihaka. It was the cops who dragged Pacific Islanders from their homes at dawn. It was the cops who took to the streets in defence of South African apartheid. Every bone was broken and every drop of blood was spilled, not because there weren’t enough rainbows on their cars, but because violence is the basic function of the Police.
We are not enemies of the Police because of appearances or because of symbolism. We are enemies of the Police because the Police are enemies of the people.
The Police can keep their rainbow cars and their carefully massaged PR. #WeCareEnough to be out here doing the real work to protect and strengthen Aotearoa’s LGBTQ community. We are among those beginning the hard work of healing the damage inflicted every day by the Police. If you care enough too, please join us.
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
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.
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!
New Zealand’s prison population hit a record 10,000 for the first time in November2016. 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 Actcame 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
[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.
The Indiana Department of Corrections is taking cruel and racist actions in a number of their prisons.
A New Afrikan prisoner was recently transferred from New Castle (because of their intolerance of his political organizing) to Pendleton, where Internal Affairs are seeking revenge on him for past political organizing. He is being threatened with state court for alleged weapons possession, while many members of the Aryan Brotherhood have recently been caught with upwards of 5 knives each and been only lightly penalized by comparison.
Another prisoner at New Castle dared to organize against the for-profit prison’s lack of transitional programming and transfer-to-population opportunities. For this, he was transferred back to the Secure Housing Unit, where he’s now indefinitely locked up in solitary confinement.
These men are clearly being targeted and excessively punished by a chauvinist administration which allows racist groups to form and thrive within their walls while snuffing out any and all sparks of radical organizing.
New Castle’s mailroom is another venue for racism and subjugation; it’s standard procedure for them to throw away or deny prisoners access to anything of an explicitly political/revolutionary nature, as well as anything related to black liberation and/or black empowerment. This blatantly racist repression will not be tolerated!
Additionally, Pendleton recently implemented a ludicrous new policy regarding the books prisoners are allowed to receive: they’re currently accepting publications from only three bookstores, two of which are religious (one Christian, one Islamic). This is obviously a move to stifle political action, as radical reading materials are invaluable in fostering connections between prisoners and enabling political organizing in an isolating environment.
Today, Monday, September 8th, join us in protest: call in to the DOC office to demand that they abolish the stifling of radical politics/black empowerment through mailroom censorship, and allow inmates to receive books from any publisher they choose.
more people would be for prison abolition if they just tried to send mail to an inmate even once
for almost a year now i’ve been trying to send a copy of the literary magazine i edit to an inmate who requested one. his prison prohibits any written materials that so much as mention drugs, weapons, criminal activity, or malicious violence of any sort, even in a creative literary context. i’ve been poring over what’s available of the 95 volumes my magazine has printed over the years, and of those found 3 that might pass inspection. the first two were sent back undelivered two months after i sent them because one had a short story that alluded to a playground fight, and the other a poem that used the word “fist” in a nonviolent context. The third was returned for the stated reason that its contents depicted the use of firearms. i reread the entire issue, there’s not a single gun mentioned in all its 120 pages.
while going back and forth with this guy trying to figure out how to get a copy of the magazine in his hands, two of my letters bounced back for unspecified reasons. i learned that inmates are not given their correspondents’ original letters, but scanned copies, often poorly reproduced and sometimes illegible. these people aren’t even granted the ink their loved ones used to pen their messages, or to hold in their hands the paper their loved ones held, if they’re able to receive their words at all.
[ID: image 1: a photograph of a German Shepard and a deer inside a police car, both sticking their heads out the back seat window. Gold letters on the side of the car under the window read “Stay Gay”
Image 2: a drawing of the dog and deer, in purple, with a red heart around them and Stay Gay written slanted along the bottom of the heart in yellow.]
[click image for full size] [alt text description attached to image]
You ever just look something and immediantly have OCs and a detailed backstory for each of them?
