#nz prisons

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"One night, to create a little diversion in the wearing monotony of those long evening hours, when I heard my neighbour’s shutter click, I placed myself up against the door where I was out of sight from the spy-hole.

‘Where are you, Baxter?’ shouted the warder and, hastily unlocking the door, he threw it open, appearing in the doorway in great agitation.

He was plainly relieved at the sight of me. ‘What do you mean, standing where I can’t see you? don’t you know you’re not allowed to do that?’

‘Is that another regulation?’ I asked. ‘I thought at least I had the freedom of the cell.’

‘You’ll get something you won’t like,’ he said, and slammed the door.

Those regulations! As every prisoner had to obey them it seemed only reasonable that there should be a copy in every cell. Far from it. We were not even allowed to read the copy pasted up in the hall. I tried to, but was driven away every time by the warder in charge.

‘No loitering in the passages.’

Finally, but starting every time where I had left off the time before, I managed to commit most of the printed form to memory.

I don’t know why there should be this objection to the prisoners knowing the regulations. Possibly because the warders are afraid of being held too strictly to them themselves.

That first night, when I started to go to bed, I found I had struck one of the worst things in my prison experience. No sheets, no pillowcase; only blankets, hard and brittle with age and much baking, and foul smelling beyond belief. The pillow was a greasy, filthy bit of ticking, filled with small hard pellets of what appeared to be metal of some sort. I never found out what they were. The blankets were too old and hard to have much warmth in them. They were baked to destroy germs and lice, but the knowledge that the dirt and the odour were hygienic did not help me much that first night. In time I seemed to get accustomed to them. Or perhaps it was that I never struck anything quite so bad as those first ones. Often during the night – and during all the nights I passed in prison – the silence was broken by horrible, long-drawn howls, expressive of pent-up misery, bitterness, hate. The warders rushed about, trying to locate the culprit. But they seldom succeeded. Such sounds echoing and re-echoing as they did were exceedingly difficult to trace to their source." - Archibald Baxter, We Will Not Cease (2nd ed., Christchurch, NZ: The Caxton Press, 1968) reprinted in Peter Brock, ed., 'These Strange Criminals': An Anthology of Prison Memoirs By Conscientious Objectors from the Great War to the Cold War. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. p. 106.

[mihotose]

[bookofmac]

I binged all the new Aussie Guy Montgomery's Guy Mont Spelling Bee and oh GOD

[1995lahaine]

fuckin weird day. found out my mentor/boss/a true hero in the legal profession passed away while looking at matisse’s snail.

[peopleagainstprisonsaotearoa]

our justice system is broken.

it has been for a long time. yet, this election, as always, our media and politicians have been feeding a moral panic around crime. this moral panic has been used to justify ‘tough on crime’ policies like increased policing, harsher prison sentences, and youth boot camps.

policies like these have never succeeded. they fail to reduce crime and social harm. they breach Te Tiriti o Waitangi and make marginalisation and inequality worse.

we're launching Care Not Cages, a campaign to oppose tough on crime policies and to transform our criminal justice system into one that centres (re)habilitation, restoration, transformation and prevention and honours Te Tiriti.

this campaign challenges the government to adopt all 12 recommendations of the Turuki Turuki! report, which you can read here.

register for the online launch on Zoom, Monday 10 July at 11AM NZST, here.

speakers include:

Emmy Rākete

Julia Whaipooti

Aphiphany Forward-Taua

Awatea Mita

we'll talk about the campaign, its goals, and what you can do to support it! there'll be time for questions as well. if you're interested in prison abolition or reform in aotearoa, we'd love to have you.

[sapphia]

love how everyone on this website is like "the justice system's broken!" but they mean like, the US justice system. which is not a system that half of the userbase here actually live under

[flutterbyfairy]

i know i keep posting about bills NZers need to submit on but i promise these are the last two for now (also you can submit even if you're not from aotearoa nz!!)

1. Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill

this bill will enable youth court to sentence teenagers 14 - 17 to "military style academies"/bootcamps. these have been used in the past and failed, and were talked about during the abuse in state and faith based care report as places where people experienced horrible abuse. the bill involves allowing staff at the bootcamps to use force against the teenagers if they are attempting to escape or harming themself or others. here's an article from vic uni with various studies showing why bootcamps are bad. submissions are due 9th january.

2. Social Security Amendment Bill

this bill is focused on making benefits harder to access, requiring more work of beneficiaries to stay on their benefits, and allowing sanctions when a beneficiary hasn't "met their obligations" - which includes missing meetings with MSD/WINZ. they will say if you have a valid reason to miss a meeting you won't be sanctioned, but you have to tell them immediately and their phone lines are so busy that often it won't even let you join the queue to wait to speak to someone, and when it does it's often a several hour wait. the primary benefit sanctions will be applied on is jobseeker (though it can also be applied to those on other benefits!) but parents, people caring for elderly or disabled family members, and people who are disabled, terminally ill, ect. are on this benefit. for all these and more reasons, so many people struggle to meet the requirements of constantly applying for jobs, doing work readiness seminars, and going to meetings that WINZ gives you very little notice of. unemployment is high right now because of this governments actions, there aren't enough jobs for all those unemployment to gain employment, and yet they want to punish everyone on jobseeker benefit (which again, often includes people who can't work due to illness!). submissions are due 10th of january.

[tetohe]

To add to this for the question asker, we have a group in our country working towards prison abolition. They're called People Against Prisons Aotearoa, and they've got more information about it on their website (papa.org.nz)

Also for any other NZers, submissions on the boot camp bill are still open, so take a moment to speak up against them, all the stuff the question asker said is just what's happened during the pilot trial. It's gonna get worse for these kids. Submit here, more info from PAPA's insta here.

So in my home country there's a Fucked. Up. juvenile prison camp system/program being trialed (again. It apparently wasn't catastrophically useless and bad enough last time) and it's going terribly. Out of 10 teenagers forced into this program three months ago, one is dead, one escaped during the first one's funeral, one is already reoffending before the program is even over, and the cops were looking for two more (just found them! Carjacking people while armed with a machete.)

So I would really love to hear about prison abolition because whatever the fuck that was is not working at all, for anyone.

God, that's really fucking awful. I wish I could say I was surprised to hear about it, but I know too much about prison systems for that. Most of my work is with adults, and they break my heart bad enough.

You're absolutely right, though, that the system we have isn't making anything better, and it's almost certainly making it worse. You gotta think to yourself, we wouldn't let these kids sign a contract or make major financial decisions on their own. Kids are legally treated like property, at least here in the US where we don't have a children's bill of rights. How can you hold someone accountable for a crime when they're not allowed any sort of legal agency in their life otherwise?

A prison abolitionist approach to juvenile crime, I think, starts with the Convention on the Rights of the Child or a similar bill of rights, which must be approached in a way that doesn't lead to unnecessary or discriminatory child removal. Giving kids agency over their care means giving them the right to say who they want to live with and under what circumstances.

It involves financially investing in care networks for kids, including providing for families so that poverty doesn't become a reason a child can't stay with family. It involves a robust foster care system with a primary goal of reunification, not adoption. It involves mandatory public schooling with funding for adequate student-to-teacher ratios, nurses, and social workers who can identify and do early intervention when behavioral issues arise. It involves providing educational and career opportunities to low-income neighborhoods to make gangs a less enticing option. It means stricter gun restrictions, because a kid with anger and impulse issues is far less dangerous than a kid with anger, impulse issues, and a gun.

Basically, we need the resources and political will to look at the circumstances that are bringing youth offenders into the situations where the offenses occur, do root cause analysis, and place systemic interventions in place to reduce or prevent those circumstances from reoccurring. It's a huge project, but it has to start with allowing agency and human rights to children.

[violetsandshrikes]

kiwis get up on their high horse a lot about being a “better” western nation and a lot of the time need to be brought back down to earth

one thing that i finds really shocks and horrified people though is learning that aotearoa nz basically sold/trafficked kids in the 70s/80s. young women who were pregnant would “disappear” and come back “normal” again - they were basically forced to put their child up for adoption, and then these kids would be adopted out to families in predominantly other western countries. there are multiple groups dedicated to people trying to find family members who were lost this way, because there are practically no records.

i know this very intimately because this is how i lost an uncle and an aunt. one ended up in australia, one in texas. one with 90%+ burn scarring, one serving life in prison. both incredibly traumatised and abused. this is a very common story from that era.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"[Once in solitary confinement] you start thinking about what to do now. A false sense of energy and hope seizes hold of you. Wasn't it my friend Laurie who devised about fifty different things you can do in a cell to keep your mind occupied? I can only remember two of them. [I could do] exercises. ... but it doesn't keep you going for long. Oh then, there's the Bible. Why not make up your mind to start reading it from beginning to end? Or make a study of one book? The book of Job? The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. But Job wasn't in solitary confinement. Good God, he wasn't even in prison, the lucky soandso.

You start reading, but you find you can't concentrate. Your mind wanders away to the people outside. I suppose the V.J. [Visiting Judge, who ordered punishments like solitary confinement] is looking forward to sitting down to a nice lunch. Meat and white bread and pastry, I'll bet. I hope it ties knots in his guts. Jesus Maria. How did you ever let yourself get in this position? And you make a resolution then. Never again. If it ever looks that you might get arrested, rather shoot your way out. They took you away, the police did, and locked you up. And now the screws have done it again. Take him away and lock him up. Theme song of all authority for 1,900 years. And getting worse now. Take the derelict away and lock him up.

Outside, in the world which you left behind you ages ago, there are people actually walking about the streets wondering what they'll have for lunch, worrying about some silly business problem, thinking what a time they're going to have that night with some girl. Girls, my God. While you squat here, like some bloody animal in the half-dark.

Or in the country. Actually in the country near birds and trees. Grumbling about having to milk cows. It's almost unbelievable. They ought to throw their arms round the cows' necks and hug them for the privilege of being free to milk them. Of being free to touch them. Of being free.

I'm so tied to my farm, writes one cow-cocky in the paper, that the only difference between it and a concentration camp is the height of the boundary fence.

You damn fool, you crazy bastard, you lying hound. You can go out and eat grass, can't you? You can drink the milk, you can get down on your knees and suck the cow's teats? You can do anything, you fool, you're FREE.

Try sitting in a cell in semi-darkness reading the Book of Job on an empty stomach. Try praying to God for the minutes to go, just a little quicker. Try having the smell of your own pisspot in your nostrils night and day. Try waiting through interminable hours for night to come so as you can steal a little enjoyment from a smoke as thin as the lead in a lead pencil; hoping to God a screw won't pass by and smell you out. Try being a derelict in solitary confinement. Try getting into such a degraded state that a bit of cheese, shoved under the door by a friendly cleaner, seems like one of the miracles of Christ. Try those things just once. Then get down on your knees again, but instead of sucking teats, thank God you're alive and on the right side of the walls."

- Ian Hamilton, Till Human Voices Wake Us. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1983 (first published by private subscription, 1953). p. 65-66.

[I've read a lot of prison memoirs this year, with many more to come. This may be one of the best. Hamilton was a conscientious objector in New Zealand-Aotearoa during World War 2, a pessimistic socialist humanist, a playwright, and sheep farmer. This may be one of the best, just raw but well-directed anger, utter contempt for polite New Zealand settler society and for what he viewed as a growing bureaucratization and dehumanization of society. I thought this bitter anger directed at people who use metaphors of imprisonment lightly to describe minor incovencies.]

[genericpuff]

I got bored so I looked around on ACON3D to see if I could find any of the models LO uses and yes I did find most of them but omg the courthouse set they used for the end of the trial arc is 60 us dollars??? which would be 100 dollars in NZ currency. it's called "Fantasy Supreme Court and Prison Set" if you want to look it up for yourself. the modern court sets she used earlier in the arc in comparison are around 11 - 20 dollars which are also on ACON3D

did she change the setting and costumes out of nowhere just to justify spending that much money on a model she should have gotten earlier LOL I wouldn't put it past her

NOOO YOU'RE SO RIGHT THO ANON LOL

I think this just once again goes to show how inefficient Rachel's workflow is, that she's buying these $60+ models (after converting to NZ it's like $100) only to paint them with washed out gradients and then never use them again.

Not to mention, this is literally just some generic fantasy set, I know we should have suspension of disbelief when it comes to the modern setting of LO (obviously the gods also didn't have cars or cellphones) but like, the environment being so generic goes to show no thought went into it as a Greek setting. The Greeks and Romans literally invented the forum-

like?? what a missed opportunity to show off culturally relevant history through the architecture???

idk I'm probably being nitpicky but like. it just bugs me how you can literally switch out the characters in LO with normal people and it barely changes anything. what's the point of writing a comic that describes itself as "what the gods do after dark" if they have all of the things that make them GREEK GODS stripped from them?

[tinystepsforward]

ngl it makes me want to die a little bit that it's so often trans people who feel that sex is mutable but oppression is always-forever based on asab in ways that allow them to demand that information from other trans people. like it feels fucking bad. it feels bad when it's people holding up someone who posts a lot of selfies as transition goals to a degree they have to clarify what they have or haven't done or what "direction" they're going in, it feels worse when people are out there like "caster semenya is not tma" or whatever the fuck. i am, as always, not a trans woman, but here's a sentiment echoed by many of the trans women around me who log the fuck off, quoted directly from one: "people who draw a clear line where they say that semenya or khelif are tme and then call me tma are just calling me male at this point".

like i get it. i really do. we seek community and shared experiences, and we feel betrayed when people have less in common with us than we thought they did. [*more on this later.] but that's not those people's faults and my god in the case i'm seeing play out on twitter rn this poor person did absolutely nothing to intentionally mislead people, just posted pictures of their actual kid self. who looks a lot like i did, because shockingly enough "we can always tell" doesn't fucking work for trans people either!

on the one hand i move in intersex circles which are unapologetically welcoming in cis "dyadic" people with pcos, because it serves nobody to draw a clear line where mutilation or genetics or some ineffable childhood suffering are what make somebody intersex, especially when most of us (esp in places like nz) have never been karyotyped and are being treated for symptoms without a pinned-down cause anyway. the more of us there are the stronger we are, the more pressure we can exert on a medical profession which doesn't like to consider how common outliers are, how uneasy sex is at all. and then on the other hand there's dyadic trans people on the internet who've yelled me out of spaces because a couple of traumatised incarcerated trans women i worked with as a prison abolitionist assumed i was also a trans woman and i didn't immediately tell them my entire csa-involved history of being sexed in varying ways as an infant and child and/or exactly how big my phallus was at birth or where in my junk config my urethra lives so they could decide i was tme or whatever.

returning to the * for a related but not identical thought: i think presuming shared experiences leads to some fucked shit in general! "oh we all had a radfem phase" or "oh we all were channers" no we fucking weren't and it's particularly obnoxious when me & mine are trying to build trans community locally to organise and resist the growing wave of far-right backlash against our existence, and there's just white people in there on a spectrum from "straight up being antisemitic and trying to get the n-word pass" through "handwringing about how they need to make space for people who aren't politically correct" to "handwringing about how brown people are right to be mad at them but doing shit fuckall". and then the other fucking brown people in the space are on some identity politics shit where they're like "trans joy inherently excludes those of us who could get deported" or "big city white queers are killing us by being visible instead of going stealth bc it stirs up the discourse" or whatever the fuck i've heard pulled out this year. there's a bunch of reasons i primarily organise outside of trans spaces and that's one of them. i've never felt more alone in spaces where people claim we're all the same than being left as the brownest moderator or organiser in a space full of people to whom "this is a safe trans space" apparently means they get to abdicate all other responsibilities not to lapse into presumed shared patterns that are fucking racist or otherwise alienating. i've never felt more alone than surrounded by exclusively trans people who sort people into boxes and assume everyone in those boxes has the transition goals they have. like i was on cypro until it disagreed with me to the point of endocrine crisis and now i'm on t and at both those points people were so fucking presumptive or entitled to my reasons or journey or personal relationship w my body

literally just submitted on (and was invited to consult on) the nz law commission's review of the human rights act and like. it's straight up fucked how many nz trans people fully do not comprehend that any "sex assigned at birth" type definitions fundamentally exclude migrants who have no way of proving it and many intersex people who happen to have been reassigned later or many times or never assigned at all as a baby. we can't make law with this shit and that's why we have to have symmetrical protections for all genders/sexes/expressions/presentations, bc naming and defining a protected class here often leaves the people who already are left out from those shared experiences of marginalisation out in the cold when they face violence

[charliechats]

first, christopher luxon congratulates trump on his win regarding the presidential election

second, nz first are trying to implement new policies regarding inmates in prisons which borderline the label of slavery (looking at the statistic which says ~63% of inmates are māori and pasifika, its another example of this discriminatory government)

third, the treat principles bill made by act has been announced and is completely abandoning the concept of equity - further enforcing white privilege and an almost "more for you, less for you" attitude - which is to be presented and debated in parliament next week

i am so fucking disappointed in our country right now.

toitū te rangatiratanga

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

THIS WEEKEND (November 8-10), I'm in TUCSON, AZ: I'm the GUEST OF HONOR at the TUSCON SCIENCE FICTION CONVENTION.

#15yrsago Hypothetical peek into the feverish mind of Rupert Murdoch https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/nov/10/rupert-murdoch-charging-for-internet

#10yrsago Obama tells the FCC to class the Internet (including mobile!) as a “utility” https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/11/obama-urges-fcc-to-regulate-broadband-as-a-utility/

#10yrsago Pirate Bay and Flattr founder Peter “brokep” Sunde released from prison https://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bays-peter-sunde-released-prison-141011/

#10yrsago City Attorneys train local cops to use “wish lists” for civil forfeiture https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/10/us/police-use-department-wish-list-when-deciding-which-assets-to-seize.html

#10yrsago Mammoth, previously unpublished interview with Iain Banks about The Culture http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/a-few-questions-about-the-culture-an-interview-with-iain-banks/

#5yrsago Amazon spent a fortune to block a socialist candidate’s re-election to Seattle city council; she won anyway https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/09/seattle-amazon-kshama-sawant-socialist-elections

#5yrsago “OK Boomer” comes to the NZ Parliament and makes all the right people angry https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2019/nov/09/my-ok-boomer-comment-in-parliament-symbolised-exhaustion-of-multiple-generations

#1yrago Big Telco's fury over FCC plan to infuse telecoms policy with facts https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/10/digital-redlining/#stop-confusing-the-issue-with-relevant-facts

[flutterbyfairy]

if you live in aotearoa NZ, or otherwise have some knowledge around what's currently happening here with the treaty principled bill, please consider making a submission opposing the treaty principles bill.

if you don't know, this is what the treaty principles bill will look like. the waitangi tribunal report is a good place to start as to what the bill would actually mean for aotearoa, and they have summaries so you don't have to read the whole thing to get the basics. here is the first summary, and the second.

submissions don't have to be long or fancy, even if all you can do is a short submission stating that you oppose this bill that's still helpful! the only thing is it can't be directly copy-pasted from someone else or it won't be counted. however there are some very helpful guides to help you make a submission:

from ngā haumi: guide/template - google doc

from koekoeā: explanation of process, what you need to know, and FAQs - PDF ; info on oral submissions - PDF, explanation of the origins and function of the treaty principles - instagram post

from te pāti māori: FAQs about submitting on this bill - instagram post

from the green party: general info - instagram post ; short guide based on how long you wanna spend on your submission - instagram post ; longer guide - website

from people against prisons aotearoa: generic guide to making select committee submissions (this is not a specific guide for this bill, however if you've never made a submission like this before it will likely give some helpful explanations!) - website

listening to speeches made by te pāti māori and green MPs on this bill may also be a helpful way to get ideas of what you may want to say! they often post speeches on their instagram accounts, and specifically i think this speech from chlöe swarbrick and this one from rawiri waitiri are really good.

submissions close on the 7th of january next year, so as of now (20th november) you have about seven weeks, however it's important to not forget, so i'd encourage people to do it now or set reminders! let's make sure the government knows that the opposition to this bill is strong!!

[deeisace]

any Henry Jekylls?

Hello! I don't know! Let's find out!

...

There are two!

Here's one -

Right near the bottom there, in 1861, he is the son of Mary and Robert Jekyll, a grocer in London.

He got married in 1870, to Harriet Hanson, a farmer's daughter, where he is listed as a -- a tanning maker?

Ah, that makes sense - 1871, he is a dairyman in Marylebone.

An 1875 London directory -

Cows is a recurring theme here, I feel. Tho I would rather like to know about his neighbours, honestly.

In 1872 they had a daughter, Hilda Beatrice -

And I know she married a George Long and moved to Berlin and died in 1937, but my German is nonexistent - and I can't find any more about this Henry or his wife, so there my research ends tbh.

Next!

Here we have Henry Joseph Campbell Jekyll, age 17 in 1861 -

This one is a lot posher than the previous - his dad Joseph, who died in the 50s was a "fundholder", and even post his death they have a cook a housemaid and a footman. Not The Poshest, a small household, but certainly I should say middle class.

Now, what's interesting here is they are being visited by Australian cousins - or, one - I don't know if she or the rest lived there, but Lucy was certainly born there, and given her age she might've been in England to go to boarding school.

It's interesting, because if we skip forward,, several years, he is living - well, it's the same general part of the world - he's in NZ Aotearoa!

He's a landowner, per the electoral roll - here he and his wife are in 1902

They got married in 1878, in New Zealand, so he must've moved before then, so let's go back a bit -

In 1860, he's hmm apprenticed not really, employed, as a clerk to an attorney for 5 years

Okay, so we know he was in London til at least 1865, where/when else can we find him?

.

Is this a new guy??

New South Wales is Australia, and this guy's being released from prison?? Doesn't seem to match up with our middle class clerk in Linwood.

Parramatta Australia? Stealing?? Stealing what? I don't know, I'm afraid.

Back to the posh one, if this isn't the same guy -

One of them, anyway, is "unassisted" in travelling to Queensland in 1878 - I'd presume, tho I don't know the dates of that practice, that means he wasn't transported - aboard the Ramsey, docking in Brisbane

In 1885, our one is selling some land in Pigeon Bay, on the South Island (which from a google looks gorgeous tbh)

Then there's a bunch of electoral rolls, his son Edward was born in 1886 (and became a lieutenant of some kind in WW1), and finally -

Died age 69.

No wait! A description of the one who was in prison!

He is the one that arrived aboard the Ramsey, he's from London and born in 1849 (same as the cowkeeper, who I cannot find any further details for), is Church of England, a haberdasher (I think?) 5 foot 5 "of spare make" (skinny, I spose), fresh complexion, dark brown hair and light brown eyes, he can read and write and he has some kind of pox marks "all over body".

There, now I'm done!