Prison abolition is a Māori issue: the whakapapa of prisons in Aotearoa
This article was originally published in the June 2017 issue of MANA Magazine.
On November the 5th 1881, the New Zealand government dispatched 1600 uniformed Armed Constables to seize Parihaka. Peaceful resistance was met with military force. In the aftermath of Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kakahu’s campaign of peaceful resistance, hundreds of Māori were arrested and sentenced to penal slavery in the South Island. This act by the Armed Constabulary represents the pinnacle of colonialism — the literal removal of Māori from their homeland at gunpoint. Yet a few years after the atrocities at Parihaka, the Armed Constabulary became the New Zealand Police in 1886. The military organisation responsible for taking land from Māori by force became responsible for patrolling communities and locking up those who caused trouble. As our friend and comrade Sina Brown-Davis of the Pacific Panther Network has said, the Armed Constabulary merely ‘took off their colonial uniforms and put on their police uniforms.’
Since then, the New Zealand government has poured billions of dollars into rebranding the prison system. The Department of Corrections was formed in 1995 to “improve public safety and assist in the rehabilitation and reintegration of offenders,” and it continues every year to make a show of setting goals to reduce reoffending. However, a consideration of the actual, every-day functioning of the prison system demonstrates that the fundamental aim behind prisons remains the same — to make inconvenient people go away. In the present day, Māori make up more than half of all prisoners, despite making up a mere 15% of the general population. Our communities are those most affected by incarceration. Our people are those most likely to die in prison. And despite decades of lip-service in the form of “acknowledging colonialism” and “confronting racism,” the prison system continues to do the same things it did one hundred and thirty six years ago.
Firstly, it serves to obscure the devastating, ongoing effects of colonial capitalism on Māori and working-class communities. Māori land and resources were placed in the hands of colonisers looking to expand their profit margins, forcing us to labour under a capitalist system to stay alive. We were forced into the factories, into the lumberyards, onto the farms — into the harshest and most dangerous industries. With haukainga in the hands of settler capitalists, the only alternative to backbreaking wage labour for Māori was death by starvation. This labour produces huge profits for the capitalists, but for dispossessed Māori the only thing it produces is misery. Far removed from the principles of communal ownership in tikanga Māori, we were plunged into conditions of deprivation and poverty which persist to this day. All of the social problems faced by Māori today trace their whakapapa back to this initial violence. Traditional whānau structures have been torn apart by long hours of labour isolated from loved ones, leading to abuse and neglect. The misery of alienating, backbreaking labour breeds addiction and health issues among working class Māori. That very same poverty then prevents people from getting the support they need.
These problems are ongoing and real, and they lead to very real social harm in our communities. We point to their whakapapa not to excuse that social harm, but to point out how futile and disingenuous it is to deal with them using police and prisons. This is not just a flaw in some of the Department of Corrections’ operating procedures. The fundamental principle behind policing and imprisonment, which target individual people committing individual offenses, is that the causes of social harm are a person’s individual failings. In reality, people do not actually exist outside of their complex relationships to the people, politics, and economic conditions around them. We commit injustice if we attempt to judge why someone has done something harmful, and what we can do about it, without considering these factors.
The introduction of ‘tikanga-based programmes’ in New Zealand prisons has done little to address the problems caused by a history of colonisation. These programmes serve largely as a token gesture to ensure that the Department of Corrections can maintain decent public relations with Māori communities. It is important to note that tikanga Māori approaches to harm are fundamentally at odds with a system based on incarceration. As such, the incorporation of ‘tikanga Māori’ within the prison system is effectively meaningless. For utu to be restored on an individual and community level after harm has been done, the perpetrator must continue to be a part of the community they have harmed. The first thing the prison does is rip a person away from their community, to be marked for the rest of their lives with the consequences of what they did.
The prison system and the police force exist specifically to ignore the everyday misery of their targets, and blunder past the real — that is, structural and social — causes of harmful behaviour. It is no wonder, then, that the colonial New Zealand government continues to pour billions of dollars into maintaining and expanding them. This enables the government to present an image of New Zealand as a peaceful and smooth-running capitalist settler colony. If the political structure is running smoothly, then anybody who is unhappy about it must be the problem.
Secondly, prisons serve to suppress resistance to the colonial capitalist system. When the New Zealand government believed Tūhoe activists were planning a guerilla war in 2007, brutal police violence was used against the community of Ruatoki and dozens of political organisers across these islands. Just like in 1881, the New Zealand government secures its hold over Aotearoa in the present by crushing Māori between the pincers of poverty and prison. The purpose of this is to maintain the New Zealand government’s sovereignty by ensuring that Māori remain disenfranchised, alienated from one another, and unable to effectively struggle for mana motuhake. We need only watch the grainy film taken of the Takaparawhā land occupation to know that the criminalisation of protest in this country is a tool of racist violence. The isolated conditions of the prison system, which tear people away from their homes and communities, also tear people away from the hope that they can build a better world. Prisons are extremely useful tools for the New Zealand government to reduce the size of mass movements that threaten it, and to scare people away from the fight for their own liberation by threat of imprisonment. Once again, Corrections wants to send the message that people’s discontent with colonial capitalism somehow has nothing to do with the reality of living and suffering under colonial capitalism. In the eyes of the Department of Corrections, discontentment is a threat to “public safety” and reflects an individual’s personal failings. We can no longer accept that this is true.
Putting people in prison cannot undo almost two centuries of repression, dispossession, and colonisation. In many cases, it actively perpetuates these conditions and makes their devastating symptoms even worse. To truly do right by our communities, we must work towards abolishing the prison system entirely, along with the structures that brought it into existence. In its place, we must build new and better ways to deal with problems in our communities. When social harm occurs, we need to take it seriously enough to focus on treating the fundamental cause of that harm — the poverty imposed by capitalism and colonialism — rather than simply throwing the person who has done harm into a prison cell. We can look to tikanga Māori, in which social harm is resolved by healing the relationships hurt by an individual’s harmful behaviour, as a guide. To make this happen, we must understand that ripping Māori away from their communities and throwing them into cells is categorically incompatible with tikanga and therefore incompatible with mana motuhake. The journey towards Māori liberation begins with organised struggle against the forces that oppress and suppress it.
People Against Prisons Aotearoa is an organisation dedicated to fighting for the unqualified end of prisons in Aotearoa. This struggle occurs not in isolation, but as part of the struggle for universal liberation. Colonialism, capitalism, and mass incarceration are all part of the same tukutuku of oppression. It is only by tearing it apart, by any means necessary, that the mahi of weaving a new world — a world based on true justice and equal access to the things we all need to live — can begin. And it will.
nā Huriana Kopeke-Te Aho, Sophie Morgan, Dani Pickering, Emilie Rākete raua ko Aaliyah Zionov
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