Unleashing the carceral imagination: Moving beyond conceptualisations of risk and safety to imagine an Aotearoa without prisons.

Abstract

In recent years, both Labour and National governments in Aotearoa New Zealand have recognised prison as a moral and fiscal failure. Nevertheless, both parties still invest in policies that promote the use of incarceration. Public safety remains a strong rationale for both the continued use of prisons and the demand for even greater use of carceral responses. Ultimately, risk logics, safety logics, and carceral logics intersect to dominate our responses to harm. Through these logics, the priority continues to be exclusionary and punitive approaches to harm, which restrict the ability to develop sustainable and collective safety. Prison abolitionist scholarship highlights the destructive consequences of prison and promotes the rebuilding of life-giving institutions, thus rendering the prison and the carceral state obsolete. This thesis examines contemporary conceptualisations of risk and safety in Aotearoa New Zealand, focusing on understanding how they may contribute to responses to harm. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 16 people who work or advocate in the criminal justice sector, conceptualisations of risk and safety and criminal justice responses to harm are critically examined using reflexive thematic analysis. Participants in this project had a broad range of experiences and semi-public positions; Parole Board members, expolice officers, victims’ advocates, justice advocates, a judge, a politician, a member of local government, the Secretary of Justice, and the Department of Corrections National Commissioner. The analysis of the findings shows that the justice system functions as a site of both power and pain. While Aotearoa New Zealand’s justice system may benefit some people, it primarily operates as a wheel of failure that continually perpetrates harm. This thesis also suggests that contemporary conceptualisations of risk and safety can promote exclusionary and Othering approaches that operate for or against specific communities. These conceptualisations promote punitive and carceral responses to harm, which in turn (re)produce more harm and pain in society. Reconceptualisations of risk and safety are offered through the notions of ‘humanising risk’ and ‘safety from presence’. This thesis contributes to current conversations about the need for transformative change in responses to harm in Aotearoa New Zealand. The findings from this thesis provide an important platform for continued interrogation of how contemporary conceptualisations of risk and safety can be reimagined to envision an abolitionist reality.