November 22, 2017
Time to axe prisons
A Maori legal scholar says incarcerating people is alien to indigenous peoples, and New Zealand needs to start thinking about how it can shut its prisons down.
Moana Jackson say indigenous people had found ways to deal with people who caused harm and to look after their victims which differed from the western European model of locking people up.
That’s especially relevant when 51 percent of male inmates and 64 percent of female inmates is Maori, and that rate hasn’t really changed in 40 years.
"The prison system is clearly not working in preventing reoffending and rehabilitating those who have caused harm so perhaps it might be time to have a discussion about alternatives to prison, their eventual abolition, and one way to perhaps start that conversation is look at societies like indigenous societies which never had prisons," Mr Jackson says.
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