Lived Experience and Indigenous Pasts: A Flourishing Future Without Prisons
| Monday, October 21, 2024 |
| 4:20 PM - 4:50 PM |
Overview
Awatea Mita, Justice Advocate
Speaker
Awatea Mita
Justice Advocate
Lived Experience and Indigenous Pasts: A Flourishing Future Without Prisons
Abstract
Lived experience identifies harms while simultaneously informing solutions towards the flourishing of Indigenous communities and the wellbeing of our people.
Early colonisation lays a foundation for contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, social exclusion, and marginalisation. One of the most egregious examples of this is the Prison. Systemic racism ensures that policies of punishment disproportionately affect Māori. Understanding how these criminal legal systems work and what that looks like for our whanau is essential to understanding and creating solutions.
Systemic racism and structural violence ‘look like’ formerly incarcerated people trapped in cycles of failure due to failed rehabilitation strategies for people in prisons. It looks like people cycling in and out of the prison system. It looks like children, in some cases, being nine times more likely to serve a prison sentence in their lifetime. It looks like high rates of reoffending. It looks like entrenched inequality within society. It looks like intergenerational trauma, reduced social cohesion. It looks like impeded development within sectors of society, continually experiencing structural violence, unsurprisingly, hampering sustainable development. Systemic racism and structural violence also look like resistance and social movements.
The ongoing experience of systemic racism and structural violence also leads to resistance and the formation of social movements that demand change and the dismantling of unjust structures. Although this can lead to some positive changes, it also indicates a level of societal distress and conflict that could have been avoided through more equitable structures. Finally, structural inequality looks like policy challenges, for example, reforming institutions and structures that perpetuate discrimination and exclusion, which I acknowledge is complex and politically challenging. However, from a decolonial perspective, the structural violence inherent in colonial structures cannot be reformed and must be dismantled. We need to honour Te Tīriti, dismantle the prison and build up our communities. Lived experience identifies harms in our prisons while simultaneously informing solutions towards the flourishing of our communities and the wellbeing of our people.
Early colonisation lays a foundation for contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, social exclusion, and marginalisation. One of the most egregious examples of this is the Prison. Systemic racism ensures that policies of punishment disproportionately affect Māori. Understanding how these criminal legal systems work and what that looks like for our whanau is essential to understanding and creating solutions.
Systemic racism and structural violence ‘look like’ formerly incarcerated people trapped in cycles of failure due to failed rehabilitation strategies for people in prisons. It looks like people cycling in and out of the prison system. It looks like children, in some cases, being nine times more likely to serve a prison sentence in their lifetime. It looks like high rates of reoffending. It looks like entrenched inequality within society. It looks like intergenerational trauma, reduced social cohesion. It looks like impeded development within sectors of society, continually experiencing structural violence, unsurprisingly, hampering sustainable development. Systemic racism and structural violence also look like resistance and social movements.
The ongoing experience of systemic racism and structural violence also leads to resistance and the formation of social movements that demand change and the dismantling of unjust structures. Although this can lead to some positive changes, it also indicates a level of societal distress and conflict that could have been avoided through more equitable structures. Finally, structural inequality looks like policy challenges, for example, reforming institutions and structures that perpetuate discrimination and exclusion, which I acknowledge is complex and politically challenging. However, from a decolonial perspective, the structural violence inherent in colonial structures cannot be reformed and must be dismantled. We need to honour Te Tīriti, dismantle the prison and build up our communities. Lived experience identifies harms in our prisons while simultaneously informing solutions towards the flourishing of our communities and the wellbeing of our people.
Biography
Awatea (Ngāti Pikiao/Ngāti Porou) is a formerly incarcerated justice advocate and lived experience scholar. Awatea attended the first convening of the international network for formerly incarcerated women and girls in Colombia last year as an Aotearoa New Zealand representative. She uses her lived experience of incarceration to amplify the voices of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women. She currently sits on the Te Ngapara Centre for Restorative Justice Advisory Board and the Services and Strategies Portfolio Board with Corrections as a full voting member. Awatea is a criminology masters candidate with interests in settler colonialism, Māori justice and mātauranga Māori.
