It is pleasing to hear that this Government is not going ahead with the building of the new 3,000-bed Waikeria Prison. Here’s hoping this signals some kind of rethink within Corrections/Justice. While Labour’s policy is to reduce the prison population by 30%, at this stage the Department of Corrections and the Ministry of Justice believe there is no option but to build a new prison, hence the communications black out over this issue. A more progressive alternative may have been proposed by the time this is printed. In June 2018 the Government announced that it will build a new 500-bed prison at Waikeria. Plus, there will be a 100-bed mental health facility built there also. Ed.

Since 2000, the New Zealand practice has been to build new prisons and during that time the prison population has risen nearly 100%. It rose 23% between March 2014 and September 2017 alone (Kim Workman, “Downsizing Prisons In NZ - A Discussion Paper”). We now have nearly 11,000 in prison. And since 2004 the crime rate has been dropping!!!!! (https://www.top.org.nz/criminal_justice_policy_the_background_evidence)!!!!!  It has become our 21st Century version of State housing.

High levels of incarceration do not relate to high levels of crime. They are produced by the combined impact of a broad range of law enforcement, sentencing and corrections policies. But ultimately, it stems from a substantial shift in the balance of approaches to public safety. In the 1970s, most criminologists and sociologists linked crime to social problems. They believed that it grew out of poverty, inequality and lack of opportunity.

But the mainstream political rhetoric changed and encouraged a heightened sense of individual responsibility for crime. From this perspective, people turned to crime not because of lack of opportunity or obstacles such as race or class discrimination but because they made “bad choices”. Rather than preventing or addressing crime through job creation, mental health and substance abuse treatment and other social interventions, far too often arrest and incarceration became the preferred options.

Americanisation Of NZ’s Justice & Prison Policies

In the United States, this trend got underway with President Nixon and the War on Drugs (colour blind innuendo for war on blacks) in the 1970s; was later assimilated into the neo-liberal position of Ronald Reagan; not challenged at all by Bill Clinton and then heavily consolidated by the second Bush Administration as part of the War on Terror. From about 2000, New Zealand followed this mass incarceration route unquestioningly. Our Corrections/Justice policies during this millennium have a starkly American feel to them.

Quotes from some American authorities on the subject are very revealing and beg the question… what is different here? James Kilgore: “Mass incarceration is one of this country’s key strategies for addressing problems of poverty, inequality, unemployment, racial conflict, citizenship, sexuality and gender as well as crime…During the past three decades, the urge to punish and incapacitate the most vulnerable sections of the population has replaced the desire to nurture and develop” (James Kilgore, “Understanding Mass Incarceration. A People’s Guide To The Key Civil Rights Struggle Of Our Time”, The New Press, New York, 2015, p.1).

Michelle Alexander: “We could choose to be a nation that extends care and compassion and concern to those who are locked up and locked out or headed for prison before they are old enough to vote. We could seek for them the same opportunities we seek for our own children, we could treat them as one of us. We could do that. Or we could choose to be a nation that shames, blames its most vulnerable, affixes badges of dishonour on them at young ages and then relegates them to a permanent second-class status for life. That is the path we have chosen and it leads to a familiar place” (Michelle Alexander, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration In The Age Of Colour Blindness”, The New Press, 2010).

James Forman: “Blacks are only 12% of the US population but they make up 55% of the prison population” (James Forman, “Locking Up Our Own: Crime And Punishment In Black America”, Farrar Strauss and Giroux). Angela Y Davis: “The people who continually vote for new prisons and tacitly assert to a proliferating network of prisons and jails (different terms for Federal and state institutions) have been tricked into believing in the magic of imprisonment. But prisons do not disappear problems - they disappear human beings. The practice of disappearing vast numbers of people from poor, immigrant and racially marginalised communities has become big business” (Angela Y Davis, “Are Prisons Obsolete?”, Penguin Random House, 2003).

Profitable Prison Privatisation

And this last point that Davis makes is echoed and developed strongly by Kilgore: “Once mass incarceration took off, prison expansion continued to gain support because it represented a new source of profits and a livelihood for many people… each step of prison and jail expansion represents a new flow of revenue - first for the financiers who provide loans for these massive construction projects, then for the architects, engineers and construction firms involved in the building phase, and then later the companies who supply goods and services to the prison population”.

“Everything from food to toilet paper to prisoner phone calls is an entrepreneurial activity. As the prison system expanded more and more people from prison guards to bureaucrats relied on an ever-increasing prison population for their jobs…. largely because of the profit possibilities and economic benefits for certain people, many people refer to the prison system as the prison-industrial complex, a system that benefits small groups of people at the expense of the majority” (Kilgore, p.20).

Unsurprisingly these key commercial drivers are all very present in the New Zealand situation. While Serco* (British outsourcing company involved in multiple operations globally calling itself “a provider of public services”) has been partly dispatched as a private prison manager after some unfortunate incidents which came to public attention, there are plenty more private interests behind the scenes.

*In 2015 the National government stripped Serco of the contract to run Auckland’s Mount Eden Prison but it retains a 25-year contract to run Wiri Prison in south Auckland. Serco was runner up in the 2015 Roger Award For The Worst Transnational Corporation Operating In Aotearoa/New Zealand. The Judges’ Report is online at http://canterbury.cyberplace.org.nz/community/CAFCA/pdf/roger-award-2015-judges-report.pdf. Ed.

There are all the same businesses involved in construction projects, comparable suppliers, many for-profit companies e.g. Care New Zealand involved in both drug and alcohol units within prisons and post-prison rehabilitation and even unions are benefitting in membership fees from the sudden influx of so many new Corrections staff.

The Electronic Monitoring Industry

Perhaps the most insidious presence is 3M, a massive global private security operation that provides electronic monitoring (EM) – an increasingly important aspect of corrections policy both here and in the United States. They earn the bulk of their profits through what we could term home incarceration. Unfortunately, our new Government is committed to EM, seeing it as a way to reduce prison numbers and representing it as part of the solution, rather than part of the problem.

Like so many electronic devices, it has got away on us. There needs to be clearer thinking about what EM is and what it is not. EM is not a substitute for incarceration but simply represents an increased level of control over those being managed in the community by Corrections. As critics point out, it is another form of incarceration, so it should be used in lieu of traditional incarceration. It should not be seen as a cheap alternative because, increasingly, it is used as an add-on, so it adds to Corrections’ costs. It is not a kinder alternative; at present, it merely perpetuates the punishment paradigm. And yes, it is part of the increasing surveillance network that we are subjected to.

Pernicious Rightwing Ideology

In the United States, the most frequent target of such activity are poor people of colour. Data collection processes flow directly into “crime fighting” and strategies known as “predictive” policing. Geographical hotspots are targeted and the Police profile individuals who are in that area according to criteria determined by algorithms. This could be called high-tech racial profiling (does anyone feel a sequel to “The Wire” TV series coming on?).

Targeted groups have the direct eye of the State on their daily physical movements and patterns of association. Do we want that here? New Zealand agencies have so far been very cavalier about surveillance of citizens and their rights in relation to this. And New Zealand has fallen right in behind America in so much of Corrections/Justice policy. We’ll need to be much more on our guard than we have been to avoid this type of surveillance because it is driven by the powerful three headed monster of national security, carceral control and profit making.

Furthermore, there is very little indigenous or international empirical research into EM as it is a sentencing trend which has grown under the radar and fast. Those in custody have minimal stipulated entitlements unlike those in jail. For those on EM in New Zealand, entitlements to employment, training and rehabilitation are by no means supported by the EM orders. There is minimal rehabilitation, minimal support and minimal supervision of what is actually happening. The impact on, and workload of, those family members living with someone on EM - something akin to an unpaid part-time prison officer - has also been ignored in this rush to embrace the bracelet. Some call this the privatisation of incarceration.  

EM could be operated differently. In the case of electronic bail any time spent on EM should be calculated and deducted from the subsequent sentence. And its application in situations where people have not been criminally charged is totally inappropriate and should be abolished. Its application in cases of domestic violence where the victim and the perpetrator are still living together is nothing short of crazy. We could follow some European practices around EM. In Denmark, the last six months of sentence can be served on EM. In Germany all data collected must be destroyed after two months.

New Zealand will never be the United States, thank God. New Zealand has not had slavery, lynching, the Jim Crow era, the War on Drugs, the 1971 Attica Prison riot and retaliation (which left 43 people dead), the complete identification of blacks with crime, the extreme militarisation of the Police, the death penalty (well, not for 60 years, anyway. Ed.) Nixon, Reagan, Bush or Trump, 9/11 or the Patriot Act 2001. So why do we have mass incarceration, mass electronic monitoring and trends within the Corrections system which so reflect that of Uncle Sam?

Because we have bowed to the lobbying of powerful corporate interests rather than consider evidence-based research, because we have allowed myths about the magic of prison to proliferate and dominate, because we have not cared enough for our less advantaged, because we have allowed the pernicious Rightwing ideology about individual choice rather than individual circumstance being the root of criminal behaviour, to prevail. There are other factors that arguably contribute to an internal retributive Corrections culture.

During the last year, Corrections hired hundreds of new staff, the majority of whom were prison officers. Many of these jobs were tied to getting permanent residence (PR) in New Zealand i.e. if you apply for PR and do two years working in the Corrections system, you’ll be in (https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/crime/94004223/influx-of-uk-recruits-arrive-to-work-in-new-zealand-prisons). The problem is that many of those employed are ex-South African and British police, security and defence personnel. Their ability to understand or empathise with our marginalised prison population would be minimal and their potential for increasing tensions within the system, very real.

Let’s Focus On Causes Of Crime

Let’s return to some form of evidence-based practice. As has been known for so long, if you invest the big money into health, housing, employment and education you create a much better society and avoid the terrible pay out for failure later on. As a Salvation Army research participant asked: “Instead of the Government investing $90,000 a year to keep us in prison, why don’t they invest it in keeping us out?” (“Reoffending And Reintegration In Aotearoa New Zealand”, Salvation Army Social Policy and Parliamentary Unit, December 2016). Let’s have drug and alcohol courts to separate those offences from more serious crime and divert those involved with suitable rehabilitation.

Let’s provide education/support around all car issues, as so many young boys who end up in custody get there as a result of accumulated car offences, subsequent unpaid fines and breaches of EM or probation orders. The Howard League for Penal Reform is already involved in this type of support. But most of all let’s move on from the United States derived neo-liberal paradigm of punishing “bad choices” which creates criminals rather than cures them.