Labour – between a hard rock and a Megaprison – the one question media isn’t answering yet

Before I start, can we pause & rejoice in the pure immaturity of us NZers as a culture?

While we grapple with decades of get-tough-on-crime bullshit with an exploding prison population, National are trying to lengthen sentences for synthetic cannabis when the actual solution is to legalise actual cannabis.

How we’ve managed to get so arse around backwards on crime and punishment is a painful journey into media and political manipulation that has birthed a mutant Corrections Department that’s making money out of incarceration and whose violent culture is so all encompassing that people come out more damaged than they went in.

Labour are desperately grappling with our insane incarceration rates in a justice system acknowledged as racist.

The ever brilliant Jarrod Gilbert makes devastating the reality of white justice in NZ…

If Maori were imprisoned at the same rate as non-Maori, then the combined total prison population would reduce from 9400 to fewer than 4900. In this scenario, the country has no prison crisis and we’re closing rather than building prisons. New Zealand’s imprisonment ratio drops from 204 to 105 and we slide from being 7th in the OECD to 20th, smugly behind Australia, the UK and Canada. In other words, if Maori crime and conviction rates are the same as non-Maori, the effect is utterly transformative.

Looking at the data in this way, the impact Maori have on New Zealand’s overall incarceration rate becomes clearer and more concerning. That this impact stems from within just 15 per cent of the population hints at the significance of the problem, which further analysis of the data plays out.

The Maori imprisonment ratio works out to 609 per 100,000, meaning Maori are nearly six times more likely to be imprisoned than non-Maori. If the entire population were to be imprisoned at the same rate as Maori, New Zealand’s prison muster would skyrocket toward 30,000. The numbers seem dystopian, yet they very much reflect the realities of many Maori families and neighbourhoods.

…“if the entire population were to be imprisoned at the same rate as Māori, NZs prison muster would skyrocket toward 30, 000”, that really sinks home the inequality in front of us.

Combine poverty and a mental health system that is no longer functional and we have a disease that is only growing in toxicity.

Add to this a mainstream media addicted to reporting the most grisly of crimes for news porn ratings and politicians who want to whip up our collective anger at innocent people and we have a perfect storm of spite implemented as social policy.

Some New Zealander’s would not be happy until they see prisoners shackled together breaking rocks along the side of the road singing Old Man River. Their anger is manipulated by politicians and fed by a media desperate to outrage and disgust.

If TVNZ and Mediaworks could get away with calling the ‘Beast of Blenheim’ the ‘Vampire Death Monster from Hell’, they would.

So what is Labour to do? We have this abomination of a Megaprison looming and a lynch mob culture that screams when the Sensible Sentencing Trust enrages it with victim porn. We have media who refuse to report responsibly on crime because it leads when it bleeds and a get-tough-on-crime Opposition who will leap upon any crime committed by a parolee with the passion of Trump on a twitter rampage.

In his courageous assessment of the damage our addiction to tough in crime rhetoric has fostered, Andrew Little has dealt a devastating blow to the political and media landscape who have helped create this.

He also unwittingly mentions Labour’s new way forward.

Little says this…

“One of the major challenges is to turn around public attitudes – to say that what we have been doing for the last 30 years in criminal justice reform actually isn’t working. Our violent criminal offending is going up.”

…30 years you say? And what happened 30 years ago?

The beginning of the neoliberal experiment in NZ.

We have walked away from community obligations to focus on the individual. It should surprise no one that when we closed community values to advance individual ones that the onus for crime and punishment fell from the collective to a price paid only by the individual.

Labour need to start asking, ‘who benefits from locking up more and more NZers’ because it isn’t the community who benefit. The community increasingly have to deal with men and women more damaged when they come out than when they went in.

The one question media isn’t answering yet is ‘who benefits from this Megaprison’?

The last prison built was a Public Private Partnership for Serco where ACC had a 30% stakehold meaning a Government Department was reliant on incarceration for a revenue stream…

SecureFuture Wiri Limited Serco Group Pty Limited and/or InfraRed Infrastructure III Partnership (United Kingdom) (40%), Accident Compensation Corporation (30%) and John Laing Investments Limited, United Kingdom (30%) received approval for the acquisition of a leasehold interest in 19.8 hectares of land located at 20 Hautu Drive, Manukau, Auckland (being the site of the new Wiri Prison) and an overseas investment in significant business assets, being the Applicant’s acquisition of property in New Zealand used in carrying on business in New Zealand for consideration exceeding $100m.

The vendor was Her Majesty the Queen New Zealand (100%) i.e. the Government; consideration was confidential. The OIO states: “The sensitive land has been set aside by the Department of Corrections for the construction of the new Wiri Prison. The Department has entered a public private partnership with the Applicant to design, build and operate the new prison”. ACC’s involvement in the prison was questioned by the Labour Party. As reported by Scoop (12/9/12) under the heading “Undisclosed ACC sum sunk into prison privatisation gamble”:

“ACC’s involvement as one of the five members of the consortium that has won the contract to build a private prison in Wiri is completely inappropriate, Labour’s Justice spokesperson Charles Chauvel says. ACC was created to ensure that New Zealanders could access affordable rehabilitation services. To see it investing in a private prison project which is opposed by most New Zealanders is, quite simply, bizarre. It also raises questions around the safety of the investment. Serco is already operating Mt Eden Prison on a contract basis. It is repeatedly failing to meet its performance targets.

“There is no reason to think that the Wiri operation will be any more successful, given the sausage factory imperatives of the private prison business model. National has consistently refused to make the terms of the Wiri prison contract public, despite taxpayer money being involved. It is reputed to be of a 25 to 30 year duration, and to be worth some $1 billion. Judith Collins, asked in the House today whether she or her predecessor, Nick Smith, had been consulted about the decision by ACC to invest in building and operating a private prison, and whether she had concerns about the investment, admitted Dr Smith had been briefed about the investment. It is a shame that he did not invite ACC to reflect on whether it was an appropriate destination for investment of the Corporation’s funds. It is even more of a shame that Judith Collins has failed to send a similar signal since she became the Minister,” Charles Chauvel said”.

…you can immediately see where the problem here is, if the Government make money from locking NZers up, the incentive is to lock more of them up!

Corrections won’t name who the PPP to build this Megaprison atrocity will be until April 2018, so we won’t find out who stands to make the money out of this monstrocity until after the Government have been asked to sign off, which is highly dubious in the first place.

Neoliberal cultural mythology alongside the commercialisation of incarceration  has incentivised reasons to stop asking hard questions.

The reality is that the media have used sensationalist crime laden headlines for ratings purpose for such a long time (despite crime rates dropping) that the electorate are ripe for manipulation when it comes to get tough on criminals crap. That’s why the Sensible Sentencing Trust has so much power, the anger whipped up at crime robs us of real solutions towards rehabilitation, the hate warps social policy and hardens our hearts.

Look at empty response to children being locked up in prisons because CYFS don’t have the resources…

Holding girl in police cell for days unacceptable – Labour
Bad weather was part of an “exceptional combination of circumstances” that led to a teenager being held in police cells for four days because Child, Youth and Family could not find a bed for her, Social Development Minister Anne Tolley says.

Labour has said what happened to the West Auckland teenaged girl was extraordinary and unacceptable.

The teenager was “terrified” listening to other prisoners scream through the night, and tried not to eat or drink so she did not have to use the toilet in front of anyone.

…look at the consequences of 3 strike law as we start to jail our first prisoners for life which means these damaged human beings become people with nothing to lose inside prison…

Two murderers face becoming NZ’s first criminals jailed for life without parole
Two murderers face becoming New Zealand’s first criminals jailed for the rest of their lives after an historic appeal of the three strikes law.

The lawyers of Shane Pierre Harrison and Justin Vance Turner had successfully argued such a tough sentence was unfair in the men’s cases, even though criminals with first strike convictions who later committed murders could be jailed for life without parole.

However, the Crown has appealed their sentences, claiming the High Court judges were wrong to fail to jail the two killers for life without parole.

..look at the arrogant blind faith belief that our unjust justice system is pure by denying wrongful convictions…

Commission to investigate miscarriages of justice backed by Labour
At least 20 people are behind bars after being wrongfully convicted of serious crimes and an independent body is needed to investigate such cases, politicians have been told.

A Criminal Cases Review Commission is operating in the United Kingdom and the establishment of one here has Labour’s support.

However, National has rejected the idea as unnecessary, and in the absence of a commission volunteers have started the NZ Public Interest Project (NZPIP).

…these abuses of justice occur because the NZ public want them to occur. We don’t care about prisoner rights, look at the glee many NZers felt when the National Party removed prisoner rights to vote. We are a nation who can’t have a mature discussion about punishment because most of those in jail are Maori and the garden variety bigotry that infects most parts of NZ society secretly believe they deserve it. Far easier to ignore the inequality of NZ society and how that drives crime or a biased judicial system that imprisons Maori more harshly than non Maori, those questions would make us uncomfortable around the BBQ and our laid back anti-intellectualism prefers to not have to think about that.

We are a country with all the political maturity of a can of coke.

We allow this to happen because the abuse of justice is aimed at people we don’t like or don’t know or don’t have any connection with. It is of course human nature to want to take vengeance on anyone who harms our kin or loved ones and seeing innocent people hurt gets us angry, but that anger doesn’t lead to good social policy when it is whipped up by a media who want ratings and politicians who want easy votes.

This Megaprison is the product of this madness and we have no one else to blame but ourselves.