NZ's prisons a 'colonial eyesore' that should be abolished, expert says

Tuesday, 11 June 2019

The Budget included a $98 million investment to break the Māori re-offending cycle.

New Zealand should release anyone imprisoned on drug charges on a path to abolishing prisons entirely, a visiting academic says.

Professor Onwubiko Agozino, who is visiting the University of Auckland from the US, described New Zealand's prisons as a 'colonial eyesore'.

He is calling for a prison-free society - which he said should be achievable given prisons did not exist in Aotearoa before Europeans arrived.

Now, Māori make up 51 per cent of the prison population but 16 per cent of the general population. Agozino said that meant penal reform was often seen as a 'Māori issue'.

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But while Māori were over-represented in prison statistics, Pākehā made up 31 per cent of prisoners. 'That's still huge,' he said.

Prisons needed to be seen as everyone's problem, he said, as Pākehā also suffered in the prison system and would benefit from adopting indigenous forms of justice.

Before the advent of prisons in New Zealand, the Māori justice system placed emphasis on restoring relationships between the person who was harmed and the person who had caused harm, he said.

Professor Onwubiko Agozino is a visiting lecturer at the University of Auckland.

If nations managed to exist for thousands of years without prisons, there was no reason modern society could not function without them, Agozino said.

In the society he envisaged, no-one would go to prison for non-violent offences, drugs would be legalised and anyone currently incarcerated for drug offences would be released.

This would go a long way to stop the problem of reoffending and people being recruited into more violent crimes through associations built up behind bars, he said.

In extreme cases where offenders needed to be incarcerated for public safety, this would be done on an individual basis and would not rely on the existence of public prisons.

Punishment should not be the 'first and last resort' of a criminal justice system, and social order should not be built on denying people their freedom, Agozino said.

Instead, education, rehabilitation and forgiveness should be the cornerstones of justice.

Agozino's stance chimed with a report released on Sunday calling for urgent transformation of the criminal justice system.

The report, He Waka Roimata or A Vessel of Tears, identified major problems including the 'crisis' of Māori over-representation in prisons, a focus on punishment over prevention and rehabilitation, and the high imprisonment and reoffending rates.

The Government has committed to reducing the prison population by 30 per cent over the next 15 years. That was something, Agozino said, but it didn't go far enough.

'Raise the target to 100 per cent of the prison population and even if you miss that target it's still good. If you aim for 30 you might only get 10.'

New Zealand could slash its prison population overnight by freeing the 11 per cent of prisoners behind bars for drug offences, he said.

Agozino teaches Sociology and Africana Studies at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in the US, and is in Auckland as a Faculty of Arts Seelye Visiting Fellow.

Professor Agozino will be giving a public lecture, Decolonization Paradigm and Liberation Criminology, on Tuesday 11 June at the University of Auckland.