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DRAFT Submission on the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill 2024
This is a draft of our submission on the Treaty Principles Bill. Please feel free to use it for ideas when writing your own.
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DRAFT Submission on the Oranga Tamariki (Responding to Serious Youth Offending) Amendment Bill 2024
This is a late draft of our submission on the Boot Camps Bill. This Bill will cause a lot of harm and trauma to rangatahi, so we encourage everyone to submit against it.
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Parliamentary Select Committee Submissions 101
This guide will provide a basic overview of the select committee submissions writing process.
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How to email your local MP about the Ram Raids Bill
A step-by-step guide to writing to your local MP, asking them to stop the Ram Raids Bill.
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Dire Conditions in New Zealand Prison Visiting Rooms For Whānau & Friends
Families and prisoners report unwelcoming and restrictive environments during visits. Under the Corrections Act 2004, prisoners are entitled to one 30-minute visit per week, yet many face extreme limitations and distressing conditions, especially since COVID-19. Visiting rooms should support family bonds, not strain them!
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Corrections Shining Torches Into Prisoners’ Faces Overnight
At night, Corrections officers are required to shine torches into each cell, usually every two hours but as often as every 15 minutes for people in ISU. This is a form of torture. Cheap technological interventions could avoid the need for this practice.
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Neglected Bedding Crisis in NZ Prisons: Inadequate Hygiene & Health Risks, Urgent Action Needed for Prisoner Welfare
Corrections are failing to provide prisoners with even the most basic standards of hygiene. Bedding in prisons is often mouldy and rotten, and Corrections are failing to replace it.
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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.
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.
latest update
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The Queer Case for Prison Abolition — Tāmaki, March 16
Ten years ago, a protest against Police and Corrections participation in the Auckland Pride Parade led to our formation as queer and trans prison abolitionist group No Pride in Prisons. Today, we’ve become People Against Prisons Aotearoa, a broader abolitionist organisation that struggles for an Aotearoa without prisons and police, where those who have caused…
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things we’ve written that you can read.
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