Public Attitudes Toward New Prisons in New Zealand and Deficit Narratives: A Quantitative Survey

Abstract

The imprisonment rate in New Zealand ranks seventh among the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Yet the imprisonment of Indigenous people is on par with the United States, which has the world’s highest incarceration rate. Almost 70% of the prison population in New Zealand is comprised of people racialized as non-White. In 2016, the National Government proposed to spend $2.5 billion over a 5-year period to build new prisons (1,500 prison beds) to accommodate a growing prison population. This study assessed public attitudes toward the need for more prisons and the equity of treatment of individuals within the criminal justice system. Findings from a 2016 and 2017 quantitative survey of 5,000 respondents each year revealed that roughly half of the respondents believed the proposed spending for new prisons to be extremely to somewhat necessary. A large proportion of respondents also believed Māori and Pākehā, if convicted of the same crime, are treated similarly within the criminal justice system. New Zealand scholars have critiqued news media coverage of contentious sociopolitical issues, such as crime and prisons, for employing tactics that have worked to construct a morally and culturally deficit “Other” while normalizing whiteness, rendering it invisible and raceless. This article concludes that this process masks racial disparities of individuals located within the criminal justice system and preserves the ideal that prisons are a normal function of the social landscape.

Racialized Surveillance in New Zealand: From the Tūhoe Raids to the Extralegal Photographing of Indigenous Youth

“…The question then becomes what keeps white bodies from being surveilled and omitted from narratives of deviance in New Zealand? The construction of the criminal as nonwhite is a political strategy held by power holders with authority to enforce racial social control on others through laws, institutional practices, and social relations (Alexander, 2012;Awatere, 1984;Lewis et al, 2020;Norris & Lipsey, 2019;Quinney, 2002). Bonilla-Silva's (1997) articulation of structural racism elucidates its complexity and force in the lives of the dispossessed that has largely gone unexamined in New Zealand:…”

Stigmatising Gang Narratives, Housing, and the Social Policing of Māori Women

“…Indigenous and Black scholars have identified specific ways stereotypes and the creation of controlling images have permeated mainstream discourses and societal perceptions so much so that race or ethnicity do not have to be identified for one to conjure the image of the 'racial other' as criminal and/or violent (Bull, 2017;Collins, 2004;hooks, 1981;Norris & Billings, 2017;Ritchie, 2017;Ross, 1998;Welch, 2007). Ample research exists detailing specific ideological and political tactics employed at all levels of society to criminalise Black and Indigenous peoples while at the same time excluding or exonerating White people from criminalising and deficit narratives (Alexander, 2012;Norris & Billings, 2017;Norris & Lipsey, 2018;Quince, 2017;Walker, 2002).…”