Our housing crisis is intimately linked to our prison overcrowding crisis, write Vanessa Cole and Ti Lamusse

In May 2018, Charlotte was unexpectedly released from prison following a short period on remand. While in prison, Charlotte* lost her only source of income and the room she was renting. Her family were a major source of trauma for her and her entire support network were people she met in prison or while she was living on the streets. She was starting her life out of prison with no house, income, or support. Despite consistent effort from NGOs and community organisations, she was never really able to get off her feet. Within a couple of weeks, she was back in prison for a minor infraction.

Charlotte’s story is, unfortunately, a common one. A 2017 report by JustSpeak found that many people who are remanded in custody are there simply because of their housing situation – they were homeless, living in a tent or caravan, or had extremely unstable housing. This meant that when they applied for bail, they didn’t have a suitable address and were declined. Similarly, the Salvation Army found in a 2016 report that many people coming out of prison expect to be homeless and that unstable housing potentially plays a major role in recidivism.

So how did we get to a situation where thousands of people are cycling in and out of prison, homelessness and precarious housing?

Public housing has been significantly disinvested in over the past 50 years, and in particular over the last decade, with numbers dropping from 69,173 in 2009 to 64,386 in 2019. The waitlist for public housing as of March 2019 was more than 11,000, which has doubled from just two years ago.

While this is the highest it has ever been, the waitlist does not fully capture the extent of those in need of subsidised and secure accommodation. It does not account for those in private rental housing that cannot afford their rent, the working poor that earn slightly above the threshold to access it, or those in motels forced to take an offer of substandard or unaffordable accommodation so that they do not get into debt from emergency accommodation. When you look at the state of renting in this country, the need for public housing expands well beyond this waitlist.

While Budget 2019 invests $197 million in Housing First and $149 million increasing transitional housing, this is not nearly enough to address homelessness or the housing crisis generally. There was no new funding for public housing in Budget 2019.

That being said, in last year’s budget, the government did announce a package to build 6,400 more public houses over four years. Even with these 6,400 additional public houses over four years from 2018, however, this will only get us to the number of public houses in 1993, before successive governments disinvested, sold, or transferred the stock. In 1993, however, the total population was 1.2 million people fewer than it is now. When we account for population increases, the current number of state houses is 33.91% lower than it was in 1993. An additional 6400 homes is just 19.37% of the 33,041 homes we need to get us to 1993 levels. It isn’t even close to what is actually needed.

This housing crisis is intimately linked to the prison overcrowding crisis. People like Charlotte cycle in and out of homelessness, insecure housing, impoverishment, and imprisonment.

However, the housing crisis also came at a time of extreme law-and-order policies that have exploded the prison population. Since 2013 changes to bail laws, the overall prison population has increased by about 20%, with Māori and Pacific peoples bearing the brunt of that increase. Most concerning, the remand population – people who either haven’t been found guilty of anything or haven’t been sentenced to imprisonment – has more than doubled. Put simply, there are around 2000 more people in prison today than there were six years ago, largely because of a policy changes made by the previous government, and supported by Labour and NZ First at the time.

Instead of addressing the policy cause of the prison overcrowding crisis, this government has ramped up double-bunking, where two or more people are housing in a single cell. Since the bail laws were changed in 2013, the use of double-bunking has increased by 80%. This despite the fact that double-bunking substantially increases the risk of violence, sexual assault, and is in breach of international human rights standards.

Budget 2019 continues business as usual in the justice sector. Spending more than $2bn a year on Corrections, this “Wellbeing Budget” clearly doesn’t prioritise reducing our skyrocketing prison population. Instead, the government plans to spend over $1bn on capital expenditure (largely new prison beds) in the next four years, after spending $600m last year alone. In other words, the single biggest housing investment in the “Wellbeing Budget” was prison cells.

So what could a “wellbeing budget” have looked like for housing and criminal justice? How could we have prioritised wellbeing for someone like Charlotte? The Welfare Expert Advisory Report, alongside recommendations to increase benefit levels far beyond what was promised in Budget 2019, has urged the government to ‘substantially increase public housing on an industrial scale’. Imagine if we had a massive build in public housing, and extended its criteria so that more people had access to it. This, alongside funding mana whenua papakāinga, would be good for everyone.

If this truly was a “wellbeing budget” the New Zealand government would have been bold enough to tax wealth, throw out the Budget Responsibility Rules, and spend that money on social welfare and public housing. It would have deprioritised tough-on-crime policies and reprioritised social wellbeing and social security. A “wellbeing budget” would have grappled with the root causes of the societal failure that is mass imprisonment, investing far more in teachers, nurses, welfare, housing, and less on prisons. Only when the government fundamentally transforms its priorities can we help prevent people like Charlotte from cycling in and out of the system.

* Not her real name.

In the land of hope and glory, the US president’s state visit is under way against a backdrop of wild insults between Donald Trump and the London mayor, Sadiq Khan. Here’s the backstory.

Not since Lindsay Lohan slandered the Northamptonshire town of Kettering and failed to switch on their Christmas lights has a transatlantic feud scaled such heights. As Air Force One prepared to land in the United Kingdom for a state visit, President Donald Trump thumbed out a Tweet declaring the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, to be a “stone cold loser”. Hours earlier, Khan had accused Trump of parroting “the fascists of the 20th century”.

Where does it all stem from? Here’s a short history.

‘I hope his campaign dies a death’

The two men are both gearing up for elections next year, and so they were in 2015, when they first sparred. Khan started it all, raising concerns about Trump’s “outrageous” push for a so-called “Muslim ban”.

When Trump said London had become “so radicalised the police are afraid for their lives”, he was roundly condemned, including by then-London-mayor (and Trump’s favourite to succeed Theresa May as UK prime minister) Boris Johnson.

Khan tweeted in response: “Donald Trump doesn’t have a clue about London – his comments are divisive and dangerous. I hope his campaign dies a death.”

A few days later, in an article for the Guardian, Khan wrote: “It’s too easy to dismiss Donald Trump as a buffoon – to point and laugh at a man whose worldview is as ridiculous as his hairdo. But to do so is to make light of a very serious threat. Trump is just the latest public figure to articulate a growing wave of Islamophobia across the western world. His shocking views justify the actions of those who commit hate crimes and worse, play into the hands of terrorists such as Daesh (Islamic State) – making Britain less safe.”

Trump said Khan, a Muslim, could be exempted from any ban.

Khan was unimpressed, saying, “Donald Trump’s ignorant view of Islam could make both our countries less safe – it risks alienating mainstream Muslims around the world and plays into the hands of the extremists.”

After Khan’s victory, Trump, then running for president, responded by saying, “when he won I wished him well. Now, I don’t care about him.” He said he was offended by the “ignorant” comments: “Frankly, tell him I will remember those statements, they’re very nasty statements.”

He also challenged him to an IQ test.

‘Pathetic excuse by London Mayor’

Following a terrorist attack at London Bridge in June 2017, Khan urged Londoners not to be alarmed by the increased police presence on the streets. Trump dispatched a Tweet, misquoting him: “At least 7 dead and 48 wounded in terror attack and Mayor of London says there is ‘no reason to be alarmed!'”

Khan pointed out that he was clearly talking about the police presence. Trump unleashed another Tweet. “Pathetic excuse by London Mayor Sadiq Khan who had to think fast on his ‘no reason to be alarmed’ statement. MSM is working hard to sell it!”

The mayor of New York, Bill de Blasio, chipped in, commending Khan and lambasting Trump for “trying to undermine a man who’s trying to protect the people of London. It makes no sense.”

Khan subsequently called on a planned state visit to be cancelled. “I don’t think we should roll out the red carpet to the president of the USA in the circumstances where his policies go against everything we stand for,” he said.

‘A betrayal of the special relationship’

Late in 2017, Khan castigated Trump for retweeting racist videos from the far-right group Britain First.

He had “used Twitter to promote a vile, extremist group that exists solely to sow division and hatred in our country,” wrote Kahn in a Facebook post. “Many Brits who love America and Americans will see this as a betrayal of the special relationship between our countries … It is increasingly clear that any official visit at all from President Trump to Britain would not be welcomed.”

Trump later insisted he hadn’t known the nature of Britain First when he shared the posts, saying: “If you are telling me they’re horrible people, horrible, racist people, I would certainly apologise if you’d like me to do that.”

‘He has done a terrible job’

The state visit did end up getting downgraded to a working visit, meaning Trump, when he arrived in July last year, was denied the full regal pomp and ceremony, though he did find the time to slide around in front of the Queen like an ice-skating bollard.

Protesters flew a giant Trump blimp, in which the president appeared as a baby in nappies. That had been approved by Sadiq Khan, further infuriating the president. Later, in some kind of free-speech protest, a blimp of Khan in a bikini was also launched. That wasn’t a Trump stunt, but it very likely played a part in making America great again.

As he began his visit to Britain, Trump told the Sun that Khan had “done a very bad job on terrorism”. And: “I think he has done a bad job on crime, if you look, all of the horrible things going on there, with all of the crime that is being brought in.”

In Brexit-riven Britain, Trump said: “I think allowing millions and millions of people to come into Europe is very, very sad. I look at cities in Europe, and I can be specific if you’d like. You have a mayor who has done a terrible job in London. He has done a terrible job.”

Khan, who is the mayor of London, which is a city in the United Kingdom, and so has no power over immigration laws, said Trump’s comments were “beastly”, but he wasn’t taking the bait. “It takes two to tango, and I’m not tweeting President Trump or saying beastly things about him.”

‘Egregious example of a growing global threat’

On Sunday, Khan wrote in the Observer that Trump was guilty of using the rhetoric of “the fascists of the 20th century”. He added: “President Donald Trump is just one of the most egregious examples of a growing global threat. The far right is on the rise around the world, threatening our hard-won rights and freedoms and the values that have defined our liberal, democratic societies for more than 70 years.”

In an interview in the Sunday Times published the same day, Trump said of Khan: “I don’t think much of him”, adding, “I think that he’s the twin of De Blasio, except shorter.”

On the eve of Trump’s arrival, Khan opened another flank, posting a video in which he criticised the president’s position on abortion, which  would relegate women to second-class status.

“Your values and what you stand forare the complete opposite of London’s values and the values in the country,” he said.

Though Trump had insisted he didn’t think much of Khan, he was thinking of him on the descent into London.

“Sadiq Khan, who by all accounts has done a terrible job as Mayor of London, has been foolishly ‘nasty’ to the visiting President of the United States, by far the most important ally of the United Kingdom,” tweeted the visiting president of the United States. “He is a stone cold loser who should focus on crime in London, not me……”

And soon came a follow-up: “….Kahn reminds me very much of our very dumb and incompetent Mayor of NYC, de Blasio, who has also done a terrible job – only half his height. In any event, I look forward to being a great friend to the United Kingdom, and am looking very much forward to my visit. Landing now!”

Khan’s response? “This is the sort of behavior I would expect from an 11-year-old.” And: “President Trump’s behaviour flies in the face of ideals America was founded upon.” And: “I think there are many, many racists who think he’s their poster boy”. Racist groups “have been normalised and mainstreamed because of Donald Trump”.