Listen Now: 
Locking Maori up in Prison.
MARTYN BRADBURY
The UN are concerned. They are concerned by New Zealand's appalling incarceration rates for Maori. At 15% of the population, Maori make up over 50% of the prison population. It's a situation the UN Committee of Torture describes as 'worrying'.
Worrying indeed. The fundamental problem seems to be multifaceted. Poverty and the over representation of Maori in poverty is a generational problem rooted in Maori losing 95% of access to their land in less than a century. When you have nothing to lose, punishments aren't the threat they are to those who have something to lose. Lock ups for breaching rules once arrested bloom into longer and longer sentences, so a simple infraction of the law ends up as time inside.
There are also genuine concerns that the system itself is biased against Maori. In 1994 the proportion of Pakeha 10-16 olds who were prosecuted for drug possession was 4.9%. For Maori it was 6.7%. Ten years later the proportion was 9.5% for Pakeha, for Maori it had blown out to 11.4%. The troubling part was that these prosecutions were at the discretion of Police Officers.
That's an awful lot of discretion for Pakeha youth, not much discretion for Maori youth.
Generational poverty creating cultural resistance and a biased justice system however are ignored by the Government when challenged on the gross over representation of Maori in prisons. The National Government's response is to talk about rehabilitation and work skills as solutions. Those are great words in theory, but the practice is very different.
When the Government talk about rehabilitation and work skills, what they are really saying is forced labour. The new private prisons that the Government have commercial interests in generate their profit margin from forced prison labour. Rules have been changed meaning prisoners who refuse to work for $2 a day aren't eligible for parole, so when the Government talk about 'work skill's they really mean corporate indentured servitude.
This isn't a solution, it's a new kind of slavery.
Martyn Bradbury
Editor – TheDailyBlog.co.nz
Facebook/CitizenBomber
twitter.com/CitizenBomber
Copyright © 2015, UMA Broadcasting Ltd: www.waateanews.com
RELATED NEWS
