GUEST BLOG: Jin An – Serco: New Zealand’s real Minister of Police

New Zealand has a dirty little secret: we have one of the highest levels of imprisonment in the developed world. For the first time, Maori imprisonment makes up more than 50% (54% to be exact); we have a system that is fundamentally racist against Maori (the general Maori population is 15%): if the result is continuous and similar year after year, it is hard to argue that prisons are ‘working’. Instead we have a system that turns tens of thousands of Maori into “criminals”: a label that suddenly closes all doors in society. This has led to criticism by the United Nations, the international media, and was recently argued by the Waitangi Tribunal to be a breach of the Treaty.

Leaving aside moral arguments for such a system to continue, why do we allow a huge portion of community to go into prison and cost the tax payer $100,000 per year per prisoner? Who does that $100,000 per year go to? Serco. Who does our Government decide to wrap up this tragedy and wholesale it to? Serco.

Who is Serco? According to Wikipedia: 

Serco Group plc is a British outsourcing company based in Hook, Hampshire. It operates public and private transport and traffic control, aviation, military weapons, detention centres, call centres, prisons and schools on behalf of its customers.

Serco runs the detention centres that hold refugees around the Australian border, and we know the world-wide condemnations of those centres. After Serco took over there was an increase in attacks on both the refugees living in the centres and the guards: sound familiar? Serco also lobbied both the New Zealand and New South Wales Government to take up pop-up prisons last year. These prisons, normally destined for war-time conditions, were deemed potential saviours once our prisons started to burst full. Instead of taking up war-time detention units, Bill English decided to announce a new $1.2 billion dollar prison.

There are ways to reduce imprisonment rates without an increase in crime. It’s just that our government has a contractual incentive not to do so. It just signed a new 25-year contract with Serco after some heavy lobbying and it makes our economy look good on paper because this system provides a lot of financial transactions: just look how much is getting spent housing the guards! But what kind of an economy is that? What kind of GDP depends on imprisoning its own population?

Having studied criminal policy, worked as a prosecutor, and served as a justice policy advisor, I can tell you with absolute confidence that all the research concludes that prisons do not reduce crime. Prisons do not reduce crime. Prisons. Do not. Reduce. Crime. But what some of the research does show is that they make people feel good; make people feel more safe. More prisons offer the illusion of greater safety.

So what can we do to reduce our prison population? For starters, we can just stop putting people in prisons like what they did in Finland, which instead diverted corrections funds into rehabilitation, counselling, employment training and education. Finland reduced its prison population without increasing crime. We can also decide to not make certain activities a crime anymore such as possession and cultivation of cannabis. Portugal found that the crime didn’t increase after they decriminalised all drugs in 2001. Americans introduced 2000 drug courts that have reduced reoffending rates better than prisons. They have been using such Courts for 20 years now: we are still toying with a pilot and it has the fraction of the cost of prison: $35k per person compared to $100k annually.

Crime was also going down while our prison population has been increasing: this was because we made it easier to end up in prison by changing the bail and parole laws. We made a decision to send more people into prison regardless of crime rates. We also have a very lengthy clean slate regime: if you get a conviction for cannabis you must disclose that for 7 years to potential employers. How would that sit with a 19-year-old that has made one mistake?  What does this do to his life direction? Many of the states in America adopted ‘ban the box’ regimes referring to employer questioning of low-level convictions; others made it so employers were only allowed to ask for the criminal record at the end of the whole process.

So, there are so many things that we can do to reduce imprisonment rates. But it is imperative that we fix the grossly over-represented Maori prison rate that is a stain on our conscience. We cannot leave this racist system to continue. We need to stop telling ourselves that everything is fine when it clearly is not.

Jin An is a Labour party candidate for Upper Harbour