What Is The Prison Abolition Movement

The Online Justice Trend Lacking Coherence And Support

It's always dicey for a non-lawyer like me to have really strident opinions about the justice system. You can make a bit of an arse of yourself when the inevitable legal boffins come in with their precedents and practicalities. 

In that way it is a bit like when non-economists start talking about something somewhat complex like fractional reserve banking - there are things you can end up embarrassingly misinterpreting as global conspiracy if you see it through the lens of ‘a little bit of knowledge’. 

This is true generally, but part of being a member of a society also means agreeing to its laws, as they affect you regardless and you can't simply opt-out of them. 

As the general public we're also the people who would be victims of these crimes. It is therefore only fair we're allowed to be opinionated about said laws, and about how punishments are levied by the State. 

Should someone be punished for murdering another person is a simple question to answer, but how someone should be punished for murder is more complex. 

That ‘how’ separates the justice systems of the entire world from each other and is influenced by many factors, none more than the culture of your country.  

No one has the perfect solution, even tiny isolated nations like ours have issues, so there is room for level headed debate. 

Part of this debate growing in popularity online is a branch of legal activism which seeks to shake up both the question and the answer by up-ending the entire justice system and replacing it with… that varies. 

This is the Prison Abolition movement, distinctive from traditional prison reform in that it proposes an end to all prison sentences and the closure of every prison. 

It would be easy to dismiss the movement as mere sophomoric anarchism but it has become more prevalent over the past few years, particularly online, so is worthy of scrutiny. 

Last Year, Te Pati Maori came out as the first party to announce their aim to abolish prisons - by 2040.

What do they seek to replace it with? That is frustratingly unclear. 

They have spoken of a tikanga-based approach and community detention, but historically it was tikanga to settle Utu - the need to balance imbalances in natural justice - with an eye for an eye and even a life for a life. 

It is unlikely Te Pati Maori are proposing the return of the death penalty, but they haven't ruled it out and this is not helped by a consistent lack of policy documentation or position papers.

The Green Party has not followed suit in proposing complete abolition, but local prison abolition group People Against Prisons Aotearoa have held events where Green Party Justice spokesperson Tamatha Paul has spoken in support of non-carceral alternatives. 

This sounds a bit spicy, but Paul has advocated for essentially just traditional prison reforms at these kinds of events and in Parliament. 

She and her party are not proposing anything particularly different to the diversity of sentencing options they have always supported, something that may disappoint those hoping the Greens were eyeing up a more radical solution a la Te Pati Maori but will comfort other more moderate supporters. 

No party is promising the status quo. They can all see there is a growing sense amongst New Zealanders that our current justice system is not working. 

So is the solution pursuing a non-carceral nation and is anyone really committed to it if indeed it is? 

I'm not convinced, but it might be helpful to give the movement its background and some global examples, for and against it, before continuing to question whether it's even a united movement at all. 

What is the prison abolition movement? 

"Prisons do not disappear social problems, they disappear human beings" - Angela Y. Davis. 

Prison Abolition as an academic concept sprang out of 1970’s American campus activism, initially as a response to the persistent issues of prison rioting and from increasing numbers of political activists ending up incarcerated and seeking to address the problems they saw. 

These academics include Harvard's Tommy Shelbie and UCSC's Angela Y. Davis. 

Research into the causes of prison rioting found that basic issues such as adequate food and withholding medicines fuelled rioting far more than political activism or gang warfare. 

Academics could also point to the Stanford Prison experiment as an example of how control and power can lead to abuse and dehumanisation.  

The prisons appeared to do more harm than good. 

At a human level this makes sense - we've all been hangry, imagine an entire prison full of hangry convicts. 

Likewise US prisons had, and have, bizarre and cruel limits on medical treatments such as delaying medicines, and not addressing outbreaks of poisonous insects within prisons or the inevitable poisonings that come from this. 

The United States is far from the gold standard for justice, they lead the world in incarceration but remain a violent and deeply racially divided society.

Movements like ones around prisoners’ rights can point to endless examples of the US penal system's failures, and its prevalence in the States during a time of rising incarceration seems appropriate. 

This is also an issue for the argument in favour of Prison Abolition - America IS a violent and deeply racially divided society. More so than most. 

It has birthed more serial killers than any other country by a large margin and its fractured federalist set-up inevitably creates good and bad examples of justice as it does with all forms of governance. 

Human rights need to be adhered to, something the US have repeatedly failed at, but surely there are people who are too dangerous and unrepentant for non-carceral alternatives.  

One example of such a person is Randall Woodfield, also known as the I-5 Killer.  

Woodfield, unlike many violent offenders, was born into a stable, close-knit, and loving family. His childhood was one of privilege - he was a star athlete in a low crime neighbourhood where he was lauded everywhere he went. 

On the outside Woodfield was that All-American Boy stereotype, a very popular kid with preternatural athletic prowess, but inside him lay something very sinister. He was an expert at appearing wholesome, but harboured violent predatory urges from his earliest days. 

The first sign of the vile man he was to become occurred when he was only 11 years old, when he was arrested for flashing local women. 

We now know that this kind of sexual offending can escalate if not addressed early, but Woodfield's was. His family were rightly concerned and sent young Randall to a therapist, hoping to correct whatever was troubling him. 

Sadly this appears to have had no effect on the youth, and he continued to commit non-violent sexual offences while continuing to excel socially and in sports. 

The townsfolk who had not experienced his darkside found it impossible to picture such a well-raised and charismatic boy to be harbouring such inner menace. 

His crimes escalated to breaking-and-entering and intimidating women in their homes as a teenager, but he was adept at manipulating police and judges, so his growing rapsheet was always offset against his other achievements and a new (very calculated) born-again Christian persona. 

Woodfield had a promising future, one every early crime was weighed against. He was given dozens of non-carceral interventions by loved ones and the justice system. None worked.  

By the time Woodfield was arrested for the final time as a 30 year old man, he was believed to have killed as many as eighteen people along with dozens of other deeply disturbing sexually motivated assaults.  

Dangerous predators like Woodfield highlight the risk of a non-carceral world. Today, even as a 73 year old man and after spending decades in confinement, he is too great a threat to be allowed to return to the free-world. 

He is a rare and distinctly American monster - the high school football star and faux evangelical turned serial killer - but locally we do have our own criminals that would pose too great a risk to just release into the public.

Would any recidivism prevention programme work on someone as unrepentantly repugnant as Woodfield? They didn't before, so why would they now. 

He has shown no remorse or insight into his crimes before or since, and remains a textbook example of an apex predator. This is a person where his incarceration is not to teach a lesson or dissuade from recidivism, it's to keep him indefinitely confined so he can't hurt anyone else. 

Would many lives have been saved if this man was simply locked up from an early age and the key thrown away?

Closer to home, we have the case of David Tamihere.

Tamihere's conviction for double murder has been questioned as it was largely based on circumstantial evidence and the testimony of a prison snitch - a practice that has long been criticised by legal experts. 

Even if David was the victim of a miscarriage of justice, he had already been found guilty of the manslaughter death of a teenager in Auckland and a separate break-in and violent (and prolonged) sexual assault of a different woman. How such a violent repeat criminal was somehow granted bail, it was during this bail when the double murders occurred, speaks to flaws in our own justice system.   

Tamihere shows how dangerous ignoring or justifying away sexually-driven predators can be, and how guilty we have been of this as a nation.  

But there are also limits to locking up everyone who you think might be capable of crimes in the future. 

The largest risk, one avoided by no nation that has gone down this dark path, is that the arrests and indefinite detentions don't stop at the Woodfield's and the Tamihere's of the world. 

Inevitably, when given such powers, the State starts rounding up its critics and watchdogs as well. 

We may not always agree with our judiciary, but a politicised one is far more dangerous.  

The story of El Salvador arresting its way out of being the murder capital of the world shows that a society which seeks to incarcerate its way out of its sins runs its own massive risks. 

Self-described “El Dictador más cool del mundo mundial”, ‘the coolest Dictator in the world', El Salvadorian dictator Nayib Bukele has achieved a remarkable turnaround in the deeply troubled nation, all at a worrying price. It has been a real life Faustian pact, one that will not be undone easily.

Bukele started life in politics as a centre-left mayor, albeit one with a penchant for dictatorial solutions - solutions which appealed to the deeply troubled nation far more than they would locally. 

For decades El Salvador was one of the murder capitals of the world. It is surrounded by nations deeply involved in narcotics production and trafficking, it has a bloodsoaked history of military coups and CIA backed and opposed revolutions. Unsurprisingly, it has amongst the highest levels of gang membership of any country.  

To his credit, Nayib Bukele has sought to address this terrible history by making people feel safe walking the streets for the first time in generations. 

To his shame, he has done so by doing away with basic human rights and ignoring any principles of justice and due process. 

Since coming into power in 2019, the El Salvadorian dictator has arrested as many as eighty thousand people in a country of six million. All in only five years. 

By contrast, New Zealand has only nine thousand prisoners and a population of only one million less. To reach such an absurd prison population we would need to arrest almost the entire population of Palmerston North. 

Bukele has achieved this feat by implementing a brutal Marshall law (which he has extended twenty two times) allowing indefinite detention of anyone suspected of being even associated with a gang (including journalists and political rivals), and stacking the judiciary with loyalists and judges too scared to question their leader. 

Throw in his removal of term limits and he's hit all the classic dictatorship notes. Sadly dictatorships aren't uncommon in the Americas, and this one has its fans. 

Violent crime has plummeted, El Salvador is now only behind Canada in official murder rate across the Americas, but human rights and the ability to openly disagree with the State have disappeared.

Early in his war on gangs, Bukele was accused of bribing gang leaders, giving them preferential treatment if they avoid public bloodshed and, importantly, support his party during national elections. 

This has been proven by leaked documents which show his war against gangs at least partially began by working WITH gangs. We have a bit of experience with this in NZ, but not at the direct level’s engagement Bukele was undertaking. 

This truce fell apart when intentional reports of his cosy relations became public locally and he was forced to distance himself from his own ministers who he had tasked with undertaking these deals. 

El Salvador has been a success in two metrics - those being reducing the murder rate and reducing violent gang activity - while being an utter failure in every other. 

For many El Salvadorians that is enough, they have a recent history far darker than our own. 

Bukele has also found support in other nations with severe gang violence issues, he was even a speaker at the US Conservative Political Action Conference [CPAC] this year. 

It is also very telling to me that Bukele's mass incarceration would not save the nation from an El Salvadorian Randall Woodfield, as this kind of predator is expert at hiding in plain sight - not amongst gangsters and the politically active. 

This kind of hardline mindset doesn't actually cure all ills. So while there is an appetite for this kind of ‘take-all-prisoners’ approach in places like the US, it wouldn't actually stop all violent crime.  

During the most dangerous periods in our national history, we were significantly safer than either El Salvador or the United States during their safest. 

We are world leaders in safety, historically and currently. We are also a disappointment, a failure in our own ways. 

The growing sense amongst New Zealanders that our current justice system is not working that I wrote about earlier is fair and justified. 

We have spent decades downplaying and justifying sexually motivated crimes, to our great shame. New Zealand is regularly found to be lacking in addressing this type of serious and often repeated offending. 

We too regularly fall for the sob-stories, the 'he has a bright future’ narratives, the 'he is good at sports’ bullshit, of our own Randall Woodfield's. 

Too many promising cricketers and successful young photographers have gotten away with horrific sexual crimes in our nation. For these people, prison abolition has already occurred. 

They are free, having faced no punishment other than some bad publicity - publicity that our justice system does its best to criminalise through our ludicrous name suppression laws. 

Law and order must always be a balance - Lady Liberty with her scale and blindfold. 

I'm not convinced we have the right balance just yet, but I don't believe prison abolition achieves this balance either. 

Which leads me to my final question. 

Does Anyone Actually Want Prison Abolition In NZ?

Even the group I mentioned previously, People Against Prisons Aotearoa [PAPA], are vague on the issue of whether they are seeking full abolition of incarceration. 

They are largely classical prison reformers, and spend the majority of their time advocating for prisoner rights, not dismantling every prison brick-by-brick. 

When asked about what prison abolition would mean for Brenton Tarant, their spokesperson Emmy Rakete explained that their solution is “the abolitionist plan for ideologically-committed terrorists is secure detention coupled with intensive re-education until they aren't ideologically-committed terrorists any more.”

Their written position is the abolition of prisons and an entirely non-carceral justice system, but even they acknowledge that there are times when incarceration is needed (albeit temporarily).    

While the leadership of PAPA seem to be focused on o line trolling, the majority of their activism is focused on genuine prisoner rights reforms rather than freeing murderers into your neighbourhood. 

It would make for a juicier angle if they did want this, and their views appear dangerously naive, but the reality is that their supporters are much more moderate. 

The NZ Prison Abolition movement exists only as a troll army and for grandstanding, with the genuine people like Paul trying to steer it towards more practical solutions. It is not a cohesive movement at all. 

A world where people like Randall Woodfield, or the monster who committed the Christchurch mosque massacre, don't exist would be a much better one. But that is a fantasy. 

Sentencing can be reformed and restorative justice has been known to help both victim and victimiser, they certainly have their place, but carceral options need to be on the table. 

That has been achieved thus far without going full El Salvador. I trust us as a society to ensure nothing like that happens here, even if we seek to increase our prison population slightly after seeing it shrink during the last government. 

This is the non-legalese, non-academic reality of Prison Abolition - it's not practical and it poses too high a risk, one that would be disproportionately shouldered by women. 

Locking people up and throwing away the key is old fashioned, and not always just, but Prison Abolition is not an alternative. Sometimes old fashioned works. 

As the anti-hero/superhero character Rorshach in the good graphic novel, and terrible live action film, said of being incarcerated with criminals he himself helped lock-up:

“None of you seem to understand. I'm not locked in here with you. You're locked in here with ME!” 

It is clear that a nation with no prisons would be a nation where everywhere is a prison. 

Fortunately, only a fringe minority are proposing this - and even that may be overstating their commitment to it. 

The New Zealand prison abolition movement, in our uniquely kiwi ‘yeah nah’ confused way of being, is confused as to whether they want to abolish prisons at all. 

Likewise, even our most forceful local victims rights activists aren't heralding Bukele or inviting him over to speak at local functions. 

They know he's too extreme for kiwi tastes, his dictatorial methods and mass incarceration programme are far too spicy for our palates. 

We're a mild curry nation. By this I mean, at our heart, we are a cautious nation that doesn't have a taste for reckless solutions. 

I believe that is to our credit, and I also believe this ensures absolute prison abolition will never gain traction in New Zealand. 

We have things to improve, but I also believe we will get a better balance than other nations - we normally do. 

She'll be right.