When will the Caged Birds Sing?

By: Aphra

24 July 2021

The Foreground

According to the Department of Corrections as of June 2021, the New Zealand prison population has dropped to just below 8500, (170 per 100,000) of whom a staggering 3000 are on remand, and 70% are aged between 25 and 50 – arguably a person’s most economically productive years, both personally and socially.

However, whilst overall numbers are dropping in line with the Labour government’s election commitment, prisoner discontent is high, as evidenced by the disturbances at Waikeria, and the use of directed segregation orders (isolation) has not reduced (1). But most importantly, within the overall picture of a still poorly performing prison system, there is a damning set of statistics stemming directly from the “lock ’em up” culture embedded under National governments, which has had a well-documented adverse impact on Māori incarceration and reoffending rates.

Although the overall number of prisoners has reduced, the proportion of prisoners who are Māori and Pasifika has not. Māori are 15% of the total population of Aotearoa New Zealand and as of June 2021 they make up 53.1% of the overall prison population. (Pasifika are 7.4% of the total NZ population and 11.5% of prisoners. Europeans are 70% of the population and 30% of prisoners) (2).

Maori incarceration statistics go from awful to appalling when the rate of Mana Wāhine in New Zealand’s prisons is considered. Currently at 68%, it is the highest per capita incarceration rate of indigenous women in the world (3). Of the 530 female inmates currently, a staggering 45% (239) are on remand (2,4).

Labour’s flagship strategy for organisational change, Hōkai Rangi, was launched in 2019. It aims to focus specifically on wāhine Māori, partly because their incarceration rate is a national disgrace, and because previous strategies for dealing with offenders had been designed to reflect the largely male prison population and have ignored women. (What else is new?)

It is a long-term strategy aiming to reduce the number of Māori in prison from 53% to 15% – to match the overall Māori population. Or in the case of wāhine, from 68% to 15%. The five-year goal is a reduction of 10%. That 2% a year reduction would take until 2046 to even out the skewed incarceration rates of wāhine, which is far too long. 

The strategy includes Māori mental health and trauma support, improved rehabilitation services for those in high security, housing transition support, employment services, and increased engagement with whānau, hapū, and iwi.  Importantly, it emphasises the need for Corrections staff to treat prisoners with dignity and respect – to uphold their mana. 

Often under-stated in its significance, is the extension of neo-liberalism’s contract culture into the public sector, not just in the use of private contractors, but in a bureaucratic and managerial absorption of, or deference to a private sector ethos in the delivery of services.

This may in part explain why, despite an Ombudsman report from 2004 condemning the practice, and the handcuffing of prisoners who are in labour being viewed by lawyers as illegal and a human rights violation, it was revealed that some women prisoners were being shackled while receiving medical care, and some pregnant women were shackled during hospital visits, and even while giving birth – with prison officers present. 

After an outcry, Corrections stated it would no longer shackle pregnant prisoners past 30 weeks pregnancy and while they are in hospital after birth (5). 

Following a story broken by Radio New Zealand in November 2020 – about two wāhine, Mihi Bassett and Karma Cripps, who were gassed in their cells and subjected to a range of humiliations – Auckland Women’s Prison was deemed by Manukau District Court Judge, David McNaughton, to have treated inmates in a “degrading,” “cruel” and “inhumane” manner in a “concerted effort to break their spirit.” So much for respecting dignity and mana.

Also depressingly well-known is the reason for New Zealand’s grossly disproportionate incarceration figures – the strong race and class bias within the wider criminal justice system (CJS), in all branches and at all levels, which results in harsher outcomes for Māori. 

Total police apprehensions over the past 10 years are roughly the same for Pākehā as Māori – 875,000 versus 868,000 – but if that figure is adjusted to the wider population, apprehensions of Māori are almost three times higher than they should be. Māori are prosecuted and convicted at a higher rate than anyone else, and after being released from prison, more Māori inmates will get another conviction, compared to Pākehā. 40% of Māori men over the age of 15 have either been imprisoned or had a community sentence. Māori who are caught with cannabis are more likely to be convicted and sent to jail while Pakeha are likely to receive a pre-charge warning, or get diversion.

An estimated 70% of Māori prisoners have gang connections which are often formed or consolidated within prison. All those who are hyper-ventilating about gangs at the moment might care to ponder the fact that the longer people are in prison, and the younger they are when they first enter, the more likely they are to form gang affiliations.

The gross disproportionality in police apprehension figures, in prosecutions, convictions, sentencing, and reconviction rates, is not due solely to a racial bias in the CJS. There is a host of risk factors linked to adult criminality. The range of identified adverse childhood and adolescent social and environmental factors (6) flows from a base of socio-economic disadvantage which is inextricably linked to institutional racism and the intergenerational adverse impacts of colonisation. 

Consequently, they all impact Māori harder than Pākehā, and in a vicious circle, they are all exacerbated by the adverse impacts on families and wider communities of imprisonment, especially long-term imprisonment, and especially imprisonment of wāhine. 

That makes the remand figure for women as reprehensible as it is incomprehensible. 

We need to identify and address the underlying causes of a skewed prison population. Māori are not just more likely than Pākehā to be apprehended by police, charged, found guilty, and given longer custodial sentences – they are more likely to be poor, to be unemployed or be under-employed, to live in sub-standard housing, to have adverse physical and mental health, and maternity outcomes. All of these things are connected, and they ALL need changing.

The Background

Over the past three decades, the New Zealand prison population rose to the point where until recently, we had one of the highest per capita incarceration rates in the OECD – second only to Incarceration Central, the USA. At its peak in February 2020, there were 10,250 prisoners in New Zealand, (210 per 100,000) (7).

This expansion in incarceration was fuelled by a variety of factors such as legislation which increased the number of prisoners held on remand, changes to policing, decreased opportunities for parole, and an increased reporting of some crimes.

Two key pieces of legislation passed by National governments – the Sentencing and Parole Reform Act 2010 and Bail Amendment Act of 2013 – contributed massively to the steep rise in incarceration rates. ACT and the law and order lobby had pushed for the infamous Three Strikes legislation – manifestly unjust provisions which many argue put discretion in the hands of judges who are not exempt from the race, class, and sex biases which exist throughout wider society (8). 

Allied to these moves was the expansion of what Angela Davis calls the “prison-industrial complex”, and inroads by the private sector into what had been public provision. Always on the hunt for new markets, the increase in the numbers of prisoners was both a lure to the private sector, and a reason for corporations to support public policies which serve to keep prisoner numbers high. 

In 1999, the National government contracted out Auckland Central Remand prison to Australasian Correctional Management (9). In 2005, a Labour government, opposed to privatisation, shifted it back into public control. In 2010, despite a large number of submissions to the Law and Order Committee, in opposition to privatisation, the National government passed the Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons) Amendment Act. As with all pushes for privatisation, there was high-blown government rhetoric about the greater efficiency, effectiveness, and economy of private sector provision.

A tender for the running of Mt Eden prison in Auckland was granted to the British conglomerate, Serco, and with the construction of a new private prison at Wiri, privatisation was being lauded by the National government for its ability to deliver economic and innovative rehabilitation, education, and employment prison programmes. 

This all seemed to set the seal on New Zealand’s version of the USA’s prison-industrial complex. While the US government had backed off from the use of private prisons entirely at Federal level by 2016, and a series of scandals saw Serco lose its contract to run Mount Eden, the National government was still committed to private sector involvement. Serco still runs New Zealand’s largest high security men’s prison at Wiri, and the government engaged in a public-private partnership to build and maintain a new 1500 bed wing at Waikeria Prison, run by Corrections.

Already nine months into its second term and with an overall majority, Labour is yet to repeal the offending legislation. They wanted to repeal in the last term but were blocked from doing so by their law and order aligned coalition partner, New Zealand First. ACT party leader, David Seymour, has promised to bring back the repealed legislation if he is in government, despite evidence pointing to it being as useless as it is retributive, and in flagrant denial of the part it plays in the disproportionate incarceration of Māori, and especially of wāhine.

Notes:

1. In the Wiri prison, still run by Serco, solitary confinement jumped by 40% between the 2019 and 2020 financial years. This has been blamed on a steep increase in claimed greater violence directed at staff, or as punishment for other forms of misconduct. DSOs expire after 14 days and need sign-off by the chief executive of Corrections and a Visiting Justice – a judge or specially appointed legal officer used in prisons – to be extended. There is no easily available data on an ethnicity or age profile of those subjected to them.
2. Corrections NZ website.
3. High imprisonment of indigenous people is also a feature of Australia and Canada.
4. The figure for men on remand is only slightly less alarming at 36% and there is no readily available data by age or ethnicity of remand prisoners. 
5. In an interview, Corrections chief executive Jeremy Lightfoot ​was quoted as saying the previous policy, which allowed the handcuffing of pregnant and post-partum women, “didn’t do the best job for responding to the needs of women”. 
6. These include family instability, experience of harsh punishment, socially isolated young mothers, family violence and conflict, neurological and psychological developmental disorders, inadequate educational opportunities.
7. A report for Corrections based on 2015 statistics showed NZ at the time had one of the highest imprisonment rates in the developed world;  the highest proportion (53%) of offenders in prison for interpersonal offences; the highest proportion of sexual offenders in prison (25%); the second highest rate of incarcerated sexual offenders per capita (38 per 100,000 people); the fifth highest number of offenders incarcerated for violence offences per capita (24 per 100,000 people). A high proportion of sexual offenders were serving long sentences (63% of sexual offenders in prison had sentences of five years or more), which the researcher felt might explain why they form a relatively high proportion of the total. What the researcher did not do, was to interrogate those figures by ethnicity or social class.
8. In 2020, ACT leader, David Seymour, in one of the most egregious examples of law and order tub-thumping even from a party renowned for it, warned that if elected, Labour would repeal the law, thus decanting hundreds of violent offenders into unsuspecting communities. This scurrilous claim was even repeated by some feminists who should have known better.
9. Australia has the greatest number of privately owned prisons in the world.

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