The Making of Māori Hyper-Incarceration: Narratives of Imprisonment and the Violence Continuum

Abstract

The following thesis is a study about Māori hyper-incarceration and the ongoing targeted incarceration of Indigenous peoples in Aotearoa New Zealand. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with Māori ex-inmates, their family members and Indigenous prison scholars, this thesis analyses structural constraints and everyday struggles regarding incarceration, violence and dispossession. Acknowledging the social structures, historical context and power relations between Indigenous peoples and settler-colonial society, this thesis investigates Māori incarceration as a structural problem that has its roots in New Zealand's colonial and neo-colonial history. Throughout the thesis, the over-representation of Māori in the criminal justice system is not understood as an independent issue, much less a criminogenic problem, but as a wider social harm issue that has been in the making by various historical and structural processes of dispossession. The study investigates the ongoing process of the making of Māori hyper-incarceration with its destructive social, cultural, economic and political consequences. It reveals the active presence of structural violence that intimately translates into the violence continuum in everyday social settings and relationships. This includes a critical outcome where Māori incarceration becomes unremarked, internalised and taken for granted. This study investigates Māori hyper-incarceration as a both condition and process. Because it is constantly in the making - constructed, experienced and normalised - and as such a political decision it can also be unmade. Thus, the aim of the research is to critically analyse and understand this systemic process while at the same time identify the potential for transformative change in the prison and community sector that could lead to significant change in the criminal justice system and the broader society leading to higher levels of personal and community well-being.