In the 1980s, my father spent a small lag in Waikeria, the New Zealand prison that a small number of inmates brought to the ground in a week-long inferno that ended on Sunday. In his telling, conditions are more or less the same as when he left three decades ago, meaning his job as a social worker today is like stepping back in time. He says the buildings are still “old”, decrepit, and bordering on inhumane”, to borrow the ombudsman’s description, the supply of clothing and bedding is inconsistent – a recipe for the spread of infections – and “cabin fever” is more common than “yard time”. In Dad’s short time on the other side “the yard” was roughly the size of two tennis courts with only one toilet and one shower for around 30 or so inmates.
In the intervening decades reactionary sentencing policy, population growth, and poor planning means overcrowding is even worse. In 2004, to cite one of the more damning examples, Rotorua police made two teenage girls sleep on the floor of an interrogation room because a bottleneck at Waikeria meant the only option for remand prisoners were the police station cells or court house lock up. Corrections minister Kelvin Davis recognises as much, announcing in 2018 a new 600-bed prison to replace the ageing and at-capacity facilities at Waikeria. When the new facility is operational it will become the seventh prison built in New Zealand since 2005, an indictment on successive governments as crime rates drop while the prison population climbs.
Under these conditions – overcrowding that compounds year on year – is it any wonder “the Waikeria 16” set fire to their prison to protest inhumane conditions? Of course not. In most cases it might seem overwrought to claim that the corrections system treats its inmates “like animals”, but in Waikeria – known as the Waikeria reformatory farm on its opening in 1910 – it’s closer to a concrete description than an analogy. In other countries, Bentham and Focault’s “panopticon” captures the aim and architecture of the contemporary prison, but in New Zealand (without wanting to exhaust the description) the “cattle station” is equally apt.
Waikeria, after all, is built only 5kms from Ōrākau pā - the colonial battle site where 300 Māori resisters fought a settler army more than five times their number in an attempt to prevent the invading Crown from “clearing” the Waikato for the dairy blocks than enclose modern Waikeria from all sides.
This certainly isn’t the history the Waikeria 16 were summoning when they took to the prison roof to protest their conditions. But it is essential to understand why conditions were as bad as they were. Prisons exist to punish. They exist to punish prisoners (obviously), but they also exist to punish iwi who were in opposition to the Crown’s military campaign to acquire sovereignty in the 19th century. It isn’t a mistake that the Waikato-Tainui confederation, the Crown’s chief antagonist in the New Zealand wars, hosts more prisons on their ancestral land than any other iwi.
And this is the heart of the matter. Prisons that exist to punish are prisons that are built to fail. Davis acknowledges as much, approving a 100-bed mental health unit alongside the new Waikeria. Davis, when in parliamentary opposition, wrote that “our corrections system is the closest we get to building a bonfire and unquestioningly throwing taxpayer cash into it, to keep it burning indefinitely”. But where was that Kelvin Davis over the last four years as corrections minister? Where was that Kelvin Davis when community groups were warning a “riot” at Waikeria was “inevitable”?
In my experience you’re never more aware of your own freedom than at the prison gates. On the outside we can largely do as we please, living our lives as we see fit. But on the inside someone else’s decisions regulate your every moment – from when you eat to when you wash, from who you speak to when you can leave. The prison’s effect is perpetual tension. Some conditions can relieve this tension. Regular activities and, more importantly, dedicated rehabilitation. But some conditions can exacerbate this tension. Overcrowding, poor quality clothing and bedding, and – in Waikeria’s case, as claimed by prisoners – dirty, brownish water.
In these conditions protest becomes your only option, especially when you know the official channels – the complaints to prison management, the correction’s inspectorate, and the ombudsman and Human Rights Commission – are as overrun as the cells.
For prison reformists and liberals the solution is to build a newer, flashier prison. That might solve one or two immediate problems. It would certainly help alleviate “overcrowding”. But the problem isn’t insufficient prison beds. It’s that we continue to fill them with low and mid-level offenders and people whose rehabilitation and, if need be, punishment is best made outside of incarceration. The problem isn’t bad prisons – the problem is that we have them at all.