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We can reduce crime with compassion
Grace Gordon: A more collective and sustainable approach to safety is to centre care, compassion and connection to the people and world around us.
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Justice reform needs a vision – and someone with the guts to speak up for it
Holly Willson: The honest confrontation needed to create transformative change, just as in a transformative justice model, requires articulating wrongdoings and engaging in open communication around efforts to work through and address harm.
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Unpacking the tough-on-crime election agenda
Lin Mussell: Tough-on-crime platforms are an easy way to shore up votes, but the evidence shows that crime statistics are actually decreasing.
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Care Not Cages online launch
We’re launching our campaign against ‘tough on crime’ narratives on Monday, July 10. Register now.
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The other side of talking tough on retail crime
Tom Pearce: Research shows that rising costs do drive crime. We need to reject the framing that conveniently ignores them.
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The media crime narrative
In a media landscape of declining ad revenue and web traffic mostly dictated by engagement-driven social media algorithms, the media’s profit incentive creates some particularly perverse outcomes.
People Against Prisons Aotearoa is a prison abolitionist organisation working for a fairer, safer, and more just Aotearoa.
Since our formation in 2015 as a group concerned about the treatment of transgender people in prisons, we’ve become a mass-based organisation that works with different communities to address the worst problems of the criminal justice system, and to build a better one.
what we believe
All the evidence shows that prisons don’t reduce crime. They take you away from your support networks, put you in an environment where violence is the only solution to your problems, and then expect you to come out a better person.
Prisons are places where people experience incredible violence every day. People take that violence out of prison when they leave and bring it home. Prisons have never kept our communities safe, and never will.
PAPA believes that everyone has the ability to change. No one is born a criminal. When someone has hurt others, that does not mean they are destined to keep hurting others for the rest of their lives. If people are treated with dignity and respect, and given the resources they need to survive and thrive, we can live in a less violent and more peaceful society.
We see prisons for what they are: a club to bash down poor people, brown people, and everyone our society doesn’t want to make space for. Prisons across the world double down on inequality and give more power to those who already have it. Prisons are a fundamental obstacle to social justice and equality.
That’s why we are prison abolitionists. We believe that there is a better way to achieve justice for everyone. Prisons can never be part of the way we get there.
publications
things we’ve written that you can read.
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