GUEST BLOG: Alex Birchall – Not Māori Prisons, No Prisons! A Response to Duncan Garner

“Aspirations might be similar, but culture, the makeup of the whanau, hui, beliefs, language, marae, it’s all very different to the dog-eat-dog individualistic capitalist Pākehā model.” Were those the words of an indigenist Māori thinker? No; in fact, they were the words of television presenter and relatively liberal-centrist yarn-spinner Duncan Garner on the subject of building a new prison run on kaupapa Māori, or Māori values. Rachel Smalley, another presenter, also agrees. It is an idea that the political wing of the Iwi Leaders Group, the Māori Party, was the first to advance, closely followed by the Labour Party (although this has been subsequently retracted by leader Andrew Little). After all, Māori are drastically overrepresented in crime and imprisonment statistics; something like 55-56% when they constitute around 15% of New Zealand’s population. The disproportionality is only increasing, despite the fact that the Māori Party, which we would expect to be a strong lobby group on this matter, has lent its support to the current government for nine years. But it has been insisted by Kelvin Davis that the new prison won’t just be for Māori prisoners; it’ll be for everybody. A lot of ‘progressive’ minded people seem to be charmed by this idea. But some, including Garner and Smalley, write as if Māori prisons were only for Māori prisoners. Regardless, having a Māori prison would at any rate allow the culturalist vision of social policy to be tested. But there are still some questions that remain unanswered. What would a ‘kaupapa Māori prison’ actually change about a prison? Indeed, what does ‘kaupapa Māori’ mean to the proponents of this idea?

It has become fashionable in some quarters of the Left to, in the way Duncan Garner has, contrast an apparently universally applied ‘individualistic’ culture of European or Anglo-Saxon peoples with a ‘communal’ culture of indigenous peoples (Māori and Pasifika in this country). This binary applies no matter whether real Anglo-Saxon or Māori people actually behave differently or not, so much so that people now describe that penchant for individualism or collectivism as if it were an essence inherent to a particular group. This discourse serves a very simple – and really rather patronising – function. It implies that Anglo-Saxon culture is inherently opposed to reciprocity, family and inner spirituality, whilst Māori culture is presented as free from the corrupting individualism and materialism.

If this sounds familiar, it is because such a formulation almost exactly maps onto the colonial stereotype of Māori as a wholly different, rural, spiritualist, naturalistic ‘Other’. What has changed from colonial times is the valence of this characterisation. Māori culture today is purified of any real ‘bad’ elements whilst Pākehā culture embodies only bad elements. Not only does this way of thinking revive Romantic notions of the ‘noble savage’, or ‘natives’ as ‘closer to nature’, it universalises the current experience of Māori regardless of expressive they are of this ethos or whether they are materially alienated from the wider society. In other words, Duncan Garner obscures the concrete, material status of different groups of both Māori and Anglo-Saxon people by reducing each to a ‘cultural’ identity whereby Pākehā equals rapacious capitalist and Māori equals nativist non-capitalist. Needless to say, this strange, mystifying talk does very little for Māori or for anyone in prison, yet it is this imaginary antagonism that is behind the debate, indeed, the very idea, of a ‘Māori prison’.  

It is also clear that, like the binary culture formation, ‘kaupapa Māori’ is also a politically contested term. No Pride in Prisons, an activist group quick to oppose the new prison idea, disagrees with the Māori Party and Labour, alleging that prisons and kaupapa Māori are incompatible. Indeed, No Pride in Prisons have the upper hand on this over the politicians. Emilie Rākete, the group’s press spokesperson, correctly claims that prisons did not exist in traditional Māori societies and that from a historical point of view, prisons are in fact not compatible with any tikanga, or customs, of justice. What is important to remember in this debate that prisons are directly related to the often irreparable psychosocial and material damages done to their denizens; the effects of which reproduce across generations. If this intergenerational harm principle is caused by the structural character of the prison itself, it is not clear what a Māori-values prison can do about it. I myself am not convinced in the slightest that the politicians’ conception of “Māori values” (which they seem to have trouble elaborating on in public discussion), when applied to the prison, will result in anything truly that different from the existing corrections systems.

The Māori Party and Labour/Kelvin Davis have a clearly different idea of kaupapa Māori as they believe it can be subsumed into the prison system. In a Māori prison, Duncan Garner has been told, prisoners would learn their language, customs, and pēpeha (origins), and be able to meet their whanau. This might be good, Garner says, because prisoners often have no role models other than gangs and abusive parents. However, plenty of questions arise just from Garner’s description. What of those who are alienated from any family or have no family left (one in five Māori report zero tribal affiliation, and many other affiliates themselves have little connection to the tribal structure)? How would this help address the long-lasting social harms and stigmas that come from having been an inmate, even for a very short time? How would they be able to meet and having meaningful relationships with whanau from inside a prison? Why would prisoners want to meet whanau if they were abusive, as Garner alludes to? Garner & co. also fail to address the actual fact of the matter – and this is the big smackdown against the idea of the Māori prison even having an effect – that the Department of Corrections have already been administering programmes ostensibly based on kaupapa Māori, like the Tirohanga initiative, since 1997. Kaupapa Māori programmes from within prison have essentially reached their 20th anniversary. The consequence of such programmes is the depoliticising of prisons by recoding an entrenched social deficit into a cultural one. The implication is that prisoners are lacking in ‘culture’. As Rākete says, “teaching waiata to prisoners does nothing whatsoever to address the real causes of imprisonment.”

What are those “real causes”? Crime occurs for a multiplicity of reasons, but the overwhelming majority of prisoners in New Zealand stem from conditions of socioeconomic poverty, ontological insecurity, and psychosocial torment. It is a truism to say that crime causes harm and harm is bad, but it does not necessarily follow that such harm must be punished by being locked in a cell with other people who have done harm. Even the most threatening, violent, drug-addicted individuals deserve a chance. These groups are socially and economically alienated, and if any prisoner had an OK life before they went into prison, the chances are that afterward they will be just as lost and rejected as the rest. There is a consensus in criminological research that handing down official sentences actually increases recidivism. It is rehabilitation and human service provision that actually works best for prisoners – this is a fact that has simply proven unsavoury for politicians of all currently relevant parties, who often like to boast about how ‘tough on crime’ they are – this includes Labour, as this more and more appears to be the main line it is taking to the election.

We cannot wax lyrical on the problem here. Māori have suffered from a project of colonial domination that entrenched an imperial government and set about expropriating land, natural resources, and precious landscapes in order to repurpose their materials into goods to be circulated in a profit-motored capitalist economy. To that end, Māori overpopulate the lower rungs of class society because that is where they started, and we know that capitalist society, being anti-meritocratic, entrenches the overarching majority in their social positions of origin. There is a correlation, and very often an exact causal link, between the antecedents of this material situation, racism, and lack of opportunity, and a Māori person (often man) being sent to prison.

Duncan Garner thought he was being progressive ‘for once’ on a ‘Māori issue’, but in fact, he has lent support to one of the worst ideas for Māori that have been dreamt up in the world of politics. To be frank, the solution proposed by the Māori Party and Labour is a coup de grace for any prospective plans or commitments of theirs to ending the plight of Māori prisoners. It is an affirmation that the prison is a natural site of justice and a reinforcement of the ethic of vengeful punishment that scours societies all over the world. New Zealand’s incarceration rate, like Canada’s, Australia’s, and the United States’, is just embarrassing, and to top it all off wastes billions of dollars of taxpayer money every year. The Māori Party, who have supported the current government for nine years; the government that passed the Bail Amendment Act and has run the corrections budget broke from the new influx of prisoners, have presided over a worsening of this problem. Neither them nor Labour can be trusted to do anything on this issue. There is little political will or discussion for non-prison rehabilitation. Bill English was admittedly right when, before he became Prime Minister, he said prisons are a “moral and fiscal failure”, but it seems those were just empty words; since he became Prime Minister he has done absolutely nothing to alleviate the situation. He has done nothing, and Māori families tormented by the spectre of the prison stand to gain nothing, from idle cultural politicking. It is past time to start to think about and eventually realise a country, perhaps a world, without prisons.