Awatea Mita, in this still from the Spinoff-Storybox series Aren’t Can’t Don’t. Photo: Ness Patea

OPINIONĀteaJuly 3, 2020

These are the women’s stories at the heart of a crisis in criminal justice

Guest writer

Awatea Mita, in this still from the Spinoff-Storybox series Aren’t Can’t Don’t. Photo: Ness Patea

We should be unanimously outraged that in seven short years the number of Māori women on remand has doubled, in part thanks to a pernicious reform. What will you do about it, asks Awatea Mita.

In December this year, it will be six years since I was released from prison. Since gaining my freedom I have a double BA in Psychology and Criminology. Currently, I’m a Criminology Honours student and work part-time at Restorative Practices Aotearoa. Most people who meet me today can’t believe I was a meth addict or had been in prison; I only spent 22 months in prison. Despite the progress I’ve made, I’m still disturbed by the stories of the women I met. I wanted to share my memories to bring the statistics to life and humanise the numbers.

There were nights I didn’t have a blanket; it took two days to get one. I didn’t have proper fitting bras. I had some that my brother brought me, and others being held by prison property, but the prison staff gave them to someone who was being released. She took them too! They tried to pass on her property to me. I had to lay a complaint. The solution the prison came up with was for me to access a couple of bras through the charity that supplied bras to women in prison. I didn’t think that was fair because the prison made a mistake and the prison was responsible for fixing it. I did not want to take the charity bras because it meant there would be a couple less bras for someone else who needed them.

I got lucky at one point. An old kuia left a couple behind for me. She and her daughter were there for benefit fraud. There were a few older Māori women who collected a benefit for a grandchild not in their care to help make ends meet. I could not help but feel they did not belong there. A much smaller number of white-collar criminals had cases that involved so much more money, in some instances millions of dollars. They had not been struggling financially. Anyway, there was no underwire in the bras that the kuia left behind for me, but it was better than nothing. These seemed like big problems at the time, however they would become the least of my worries.

While I was on remand intrusive, illegal internal searches were being carried out on the women. They received little compensation for the violation of their bodies; the violation of Māori women’s bodies has almost become an expectation rather than an exception. I was on remand for six weeks before I was sentenced to prison. If that were today, I could easily be waiting for double that amount of time, maybe longer.

It was hard enough for me when my 13-year-old son accidentally drowned 11 months into my sentence. On the grief and loss course Kara told us how she could not get over the loss of her young teenage daughter, Aroha, who committed suicide. Aroha and her siblings were placed in state care and it was her younger sister who found her. When it was finally revealed that their father was innocent of the crimes he was accused of, the rest of the children were returned to him.

Aroha’s death was preventable. The state had a “duty of care”, but the state did not care enough to follow their own procedures. If they had, the death of a young teenage girl may have been prevented. Aroha was missing her parents, experiencing sexual violation while in state care and subsequently ended her short life. Kara had a permanent injury to contend with in her day-to-day life. Even though I knew, rationally, I shouldn’t compare, I felt I was more fortunate than Kara.

I remember the day Mere broke the prison rules just to talk to me. I had moved to a different unit. People in different units were not allowed to speak to each other. She was crying because she had received the news that her 23-year-old son had died in a car accident. She was grief-stricken and powerless. Mere had been working on recovery from addiction. At that moment, all she wanted was to get out of prison and drink and just give up on recovery. She managed to wipe her tears away before we were warned that we were not supposed to be talking. I hoped I managed to help her feel better that day. She needed care and treatment, not a jail sentence.

Truth be told, I was barely coping with my own loss. I felt a tremendous pressure to pretend I was OK so I could progress through the prison system to self-care and release-to-work. There were so many nights I cried silent tears into my pillow mourning the loss of my son.

We watched Georgina dying of cancer, slipping away a little more each day. She left the prison to go to palliative care and died a few days later. The closer she came to death, the harder it was to watch her life wasting away in the prison from a terminal illness. It was a clear illustration that there was precious little compassion in that soulless place.

I was upset when I heard the news of my cell mate, Tina. She had committed suicide after she went back to Christchurch Women’s Prison. She had been on release but had to return to prison. Shortly thereafter she took her own life. When we shared a cell, she was always trying to get drugs and use drugs. Without going into details, she was often successful. She had participated in the robbery of a couple of chemists and stolen a couple of cars. I still do not think those crimes should have resulted in Tina taking her life in prison.

I remember Shayly, whose young teenage son had become involved in a murder. She approached me with a look of sadness and bewilderment. Shayly was such a proud woman. She asked me, almost pleaded with me, “What can I do?”. Shayly had pleaded guilty to charges she was not guilty of, to keep her man from doing more time. That was a familiar story within those concrete walls.

I share the stories of these women, not for mere sympathy but to honour them, in the hope that you will be moved to demand action for change. Through their stories, I want you to truly understand the truth behind the words that “poverty deserves compassion not punishment, addiction needs treatment, not a jail sentence, mental health issues require care, not a cage”.

People might say, “well these are extreme cases”. So, did I just happen to be in prison at the same time as all of these extreme cases, or are there Māori women inside our prisons now who are not being heard, who are voiceless and still waiting for the promise of change? Telling our stories to help grow people’s awareness and understanding is the only way I can make sense of these tragedies. I do not want these stories of heartbreak to be the stories of my nieces and granddaughters. These experiences had such a profound effect on me that I am determined to devote the rest of my life pursuing transformational change.

Black Lives Matter has raised awareness worldwide about biased policing, along with institutional and systemic racism. Despite this, we have yet to see a serious reckoning of the criminal justice system, and a reflection of the progress in our country. If there was, we would be unanimously outraged that in seven short years the number of Māori women on remand has doubled. We hear a lot of statistics like this and there has been little change, except the worsening of circumstances and experiences for Māori women.

The Sensible Sentencing Trust lobbied for the Bail Amendment Act 2013 and are unmoved by the detrimental outcomes for Māori women. The advisers to the National government at the time estimated the bill would increase people on remand by a maximum of 60. We are now on course for more people to be imprisoned on remand then sentenced for a crime. We need to repeal the Bail Amendment Act 2013.

Will you help? Will you stand with me in action to ensure that change will come?

Names have been changed.

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Miriama McDowell plays Renee O’Kane in Three’s new rugby-slash-family drama Head High. (Photo: Supplied)

Pop CultureJune 27, 2020

‘I know these people’: Miriama McDowell on leading the pack in Head High

Sam Brooks

Contributing writer

Miriama McDowell plays Renee O’Kane in Three’s new rugby-slash-family drama Head High. (Photo: Supplied)

Sam Brooks talks to actor-director Miriama McDowell, fresh from a top billing in Head High and directing Ahikāroa.

There’s a moment in the second episode of Three’s new family-and-rugby drama Head High that stands out for me. A committee, entirely made out of bureaucratically-aligned adults discussing a student’s future in rugby, descends into personal attacks and basic bickering. Renee O’Kane, played by Miriama McDowell, has had enough of it and stands up.

“I’m sorry, I know there’s supposed to be some kind of process here, but this is just a room full of adults throwing insults at each other, when what really matters is the two boys who met each other for the first time when they were playing under fives. Bare feet on the frozen ground, they didn’t care, they loved it. I can still see them.”

It’s a great speech; it’s basically handing an actor a big ol’ ham, asking them to cut off a big, juicy slice and serve it up to the audience. McDowell doesn’t ham it up, though. She goes pointed and sharp – it’s not that Jones, both mother and cop, thinks that these adults are wrong for bickering. No, it’s that they simply are wrong. She softens up, appeals to their humanity.

It’s a Tami Taylor moment; a beacon of humanity shining through some less than stellar displays of the human condition. Tami Taylor seems not just a fitting comparison, but an intentional one; the character’s resemblance to that inspiration-dispensing, warm-wine-swilling human spotlight is one of many things that Head High cribs, wisely, from Friday Night Lights. I wager that it’ll be a moment that will stand out for a lot of the audience as well.

It’s the kind of speech that actors would push someone down the stairs to get to say at all, let alone on primetime TV, and a lot of actors could have done that moment justice, but Miriama McDowell doesn’t just do it justice. She takes the opportunity and she runs with it, weaving it to a five pointer.

Miriama McDowell as cop Renee O’Kane in Head High. (Photo: Supplied)

Since graduating from Toi Whakaari in 2002, McDowell has worked pretty much constantly in film, TV and theatre. She’s delivered stand out performances in Toa Fraser’s No 2, The Dark Horse, and a Moa Award winning turn in The Great Maiden’s Blush. In addition to this, she directed the Pop-Up Globe’s sell-out performance of Much Ado About Nothing in the venue’s second season, and also directed the venue’s final show, Emilia, earlier this year. While she’s been on TV in more roles you can count on two or even three hands, including an obligatory stint on Shortland Street, Head High marks the first time that she is the top-billed actress on a high end television drama.

McDowell admits it’s a big deal. “Being a lead character like that in a show involves work behind the scenes as well. It’s about making sure there’s proper kaupapa Māori in the production, and making sure that we don’t need to put the character in a box of, ‘You’re fluent or you don’t speak anything, so you’ve lost your culture.’ There’s a lot of Māori who sit between those points, but we don’t see them much. It’s also a big deal as a New Zealander to reflect and go, ‘How come we don’t see these versions of ourselves more often?’

Head High focuses on the conflict between two (fictional) South Auckland high schools, Southdown and St Isaac’s, and their rugby teams. The Southdown team has just been promoted into the 1A division, and St Isaac’s is poaching them. It’s a show that uses rugby more as a setting to discuss a range of other things: privilege, race, class, even gender.

Jordi Webber as Cruz and Miriama McDowell as Renee O’Kane on Head High.

When McDowell watched the screening, she saw something that she hadn’t seen depicted onscreen a lot. “Look at South Auckland. Look at the brown actors and look at the families we see. Look at that school, look at all the brown boys behind the lead characters. I know them. I know those people, I grew up with them.”

That diversity, and in the case of Head High, it feels less like tokenised diversity and more like decisive inclusivity. Two of the writers, Tim Worrall and David Geary, are Māori, and two of the writers are women, Kate McDermott and Shoshanna McCallum. McDowell credits the latter with the feel of some of Renee’s scenes. “I really felt like those were scripts that were written by women for women. It’s just so great to play Renee and go through the things that she goes through as a mother. We really feel like we were getting to the heart of it.”

In addition to her impressive resume onscreen and onstage, McDowell has also been working steadily behind the scenes. She was a writer of Silo Theatre’s critically acclaimed Cellfish, alongside Rob Mokaraka and Jason TeKare, and has been steadily building up credits as both a director and an intimacy coordinator. She’s filled both these roles on on Ahikāroa, Aotearoa’s first bilingual drama, and it’s a job that is incredibly special to her.

Miriama McDowell directing on the third series of Ahikāroa. (Photo: Supplied)

“What I love about Ahikāroa is that it’s created for the generation of Māori who have grown up with Māori. So the generation who’ve come beyond my generation can’t necessarily see themselves on TV. So the chance to watch flatmates, whose first language in Te Reo, just hang out in a flat is great. If we’re so passionate about creating a whole generation of fluent Māori speakers, then we have to give them something to watch or they’re just going to watch English shows.”

The show, now in production on its third series, is great in its own right, but the most special thing about it is how it serves as a training ground for Māori practitioners to get into the industry, both in front of the camera and behind it. “It’s a show where Māori get to learn TV, and get to learn the skills of TV. Shortland Street is an incredible training ground too, but this is specifically for Māori.”

McDowell has also found the growth of the actors between seasons incredible to see; the core cast aren’t necessarily trained actors, they’re kids who speak fluent Māori who were auditioned, and then put on TV. But the show has also given a break for people like McDowell. Despite all her experience as an actor, writer, and director for theatre, she wasn’t like to get dropped into the director’s chair of a big TV show.

“For someone like to me to get the opportunity to learn is incredible. And it’s incredible that it’s a big part of the production – so often I’ll be on set and then suddenly the guy who’s been doing the clapper board is suddenly on the camera and he’s going to shoot one scene and it’s like, ‘Whoa, cool, OK. Let’s go, then.’ We’re all learning.”

McDowell hasn’t just been taking opportunities as they come, she’s been excelling at them.

Head High airs on Sunday nights at 8.30pm on Three.