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(Image: Getty Images)
(Image: Getty Images)

SocietyApril 5, 2020

People in prisons are at risk: here’s how we can protect them

(Image: Getty Images)
(Image: Getty Images)

The health and wellbeing of people working and being held inside our prisons needs to be a priority, writes JustSpeak director Tania Sawicki Mead. 

Kelvin Davis’s interview on The Hui last weekend made it clear that precautions taken by Corrections to stop the spread of Covid-19 will create an unprecedented restriction on the movement and rights of people in prisons. No rehabilitation programmes, no visits from family or lawyers, no release to work and for many people, 23 hours a day inside their (in some cases double-bunked) cells.

Emergencies such as the Covid-19 pandemic require unprecedented measures to stop the spread, but it’s vital that in doing so they do not create more harm long term or entrench existing inequities. The best strategy for keeping all of our communities safe in this pandemic is to tackle the other huge public health crisis in New Zealand – prisons themselves. 

Prisons are by their very nature vectors of disease. Physical distancing is near impossible with a third of prisoners held in double bunking, open-plan eating spaces and small exercise yards. Access to good health care in prisons is frequently undermined by insufficient resources or staff, not to mention the constant tension between care and control. There is also a huge issue for the government’s obligations under Te Tiriti and equity for Māori, who make up 50% of people imprisoned in Aotearoa and who have been failed over and over again by deeply biased health care and justice systems.

We have an opportunity now to prevent the escalation of the Covid-19 crisis by reducing the number of people inside institutions that cannot meaningfully keep them safe. This includes people held in prisons as well as prison officers and other support staff inside. Once the virus does enter the prisons, it will be extremely difficult to stop the spread into the wider community, and the impact will be devastating. Prevention is key.

The first priority for a compassionate public health-based response is the release of elderly people in prison. Already they are significantly less likely to reoffend, and of course they are at profound risk of serious ill health or death from Covid-19. People with pre-existing health conditions or who are immunocompromised should also be released where they can, particularly people being held for non-violent offences. This is a massive issue of equity for Māori; the Ministry of Health has reported that 47% of Māori men in prison have a chronic condition, with the most common being asthma. And anyone with only six months left to serve on their sentence should also be considered for early release.  

These urgent, public health-based steps are already being taken around the world – in New Jersey, Oklahoma, California, New South Wales and even Iran. Canada and the UK are considering similar actions.

One of the many issues that can keep people trapped in the justice system or in prisons is the denial of access to a safe home – because people are experiencing homelessness, have family with criminal records who are prevented from housing them or live somewhere where they can’t be monitored on electronically monitored bail. There is currently a rare window of opportunity with the sudden availability of accommodation across New Zealand since the abrupt end to domestic and international tourism. Releasing people to self-isolate in motel units or available houses is a pragmatic option, with support and oversight where appropriate. 

Releasing people back to their communities or into supported living situations may not be possible in the next two weeks, but if the appropriate plans are put in place now, then when restrictions do eventually ease the system can act quickly to reduce the risk posed by overcrowded prisons. 

Alternative accommodation could also address the crisis that our policy settings have created in remand, whereby 34% of people in our prisons currently are being held prior to conviction or sentencing. This is a long-standing issue, thanks to a toxic combination of reactionary law changes, intense pressures on housing and delays in the courts. Both Andrew Little and Kelvin Davis have raised this issue and claimed it is a priority for their government, so now is the time to act.

Remand will likely escalate the public health crisis caused by Covid-19, because of the churn of people regularly coming into remand from the outside. The “bubbles” that we are all so desperately trying to hold would be burst over and over again. 

To prevent the spread of the virus, police must urgently review the criteria under which they oppose bail. At the moment, opposing bail is often the first course of action for police rather than a case-by-case assessment. In some cases, there are genuine causes for concern on the basis of the safety of the community, but every decision on bail should now consider the public health implications of detaining more people in crowded buildings where the disease will spread. This is particularly urgent given that an unknown number of hearings for people being held in remand were cancelled due to the lockdown, despite the assurances of the chief district court judge. It’s a far cry from the example set in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where public defenders and prosecutors joined forces to get 75 people released from jail in a single day.

There is the potential to use the sudden and immense demand for remote working systems to reduce the enormous delays in our courts. As Marie Dyrbergh explained on RNZ, the use of AVL or other effective systems that can assist with timely court processes could make a huge impact on the injustices and delays currently plaguing our system.

We are all in this together, and stopping the spread requires all of us to act responsibly and with compassion. To quote Andrew Geddis, “over the next four weeks human kindness and concern will matter every bit as much, no… will matter far more than, coercive enforcement of ‘the rules’.”

Kelvin Davis is right that these decisions are not Corrections’ alone to make. To stop the spread and protect all of us we need ministers of justice, health and police to also get on board and work collaboratively. We urge them to take the compassionate and pragmatic path to protect the health and survival of everyone in our community. 

Tania Sawicki Mead is the director of JustSpeak, a youth-led movement for transformative change in the criminal justice system.

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SocietyApril 4, 2020

You aren’t the only one having buzzy Covid dreams

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Alex Casey speaks to a dream expert about why so many people are suddenly remembering their vivid and often horrible dreams.

As the days begin to blur together and the only thing we get between sleeps is unimaginably horrible news and an embarrassing tootle around the block, it’s no surprise that our dreams are getting weird. Tiny Elton Johns buying burgers at the food court. Being covered in spiders having sex with each other. Michael Bay-style scenes of disaster. I asked the people of the internet how they had been dreaming, and the answers were chaotic and mostly quite scary and sad. 

Margaret Bowater, 83, is the national secretary for the Dream Network and has been researching and writing about dreams for over 30 years. In her work she has seen the way that global events and collective trauma can increase the rate of nightmares and anxiety dreaming, from soldiers returning from Vietnam to the people who witnessed the collapse of the Twin Towers. Living through this current moment, she says, is no different. 

“Dreams tend to reflect our major emotional concerns, so at the moment a lot of people are anxious about their physical survival, whether they will have a job or not, feeding their families, being isolated from their usual social network, worried about family members they can’t get to,” Bowater says. “There is real reason for fear, so it’s not surprising that people’s dreams are activating feelings of anxiety from other points in their lives.”

Because after you eventually fall asleep listening to a soothing podcast about the killer virus, you lose control over what happens next. “The part of our brain that makes decisions gets switched off as soon as we enter REM, which is when we have the most dreams,” Bowater explains. “We are then operating on the emotions present in our mind, which connects us with previous examples of emotions we have felt from stories, films, experiences – anything.” 

After crowdsourcing a bunch of dreams, trends started to emerge. The first, and most obvious, was people dreaming about having Covid-19, with many waking up gasping, coughing or short of breath. “That’s clearly a direct fear of contracting the virus,” says Bowater. “In our dreams we can’t determine between what is real and what is not, so if you were feeling in the dream that you had caught an illness, you might well experience some of the bodily symptoms of it.”

“It’s not an abnormal response, but it’s not a prediction that you are going to get it either.”

Let sleeping dogs lie (Photo: Getty Images)

People who dreamed of being stuck on the toilet, pissing on the carpet or pooing in a food court in front of Will Smith all share another emotional concern. “The theme there is exposure and feeling embarrassed,” says Bowater. “That would be consistent with the feeling that if you leave your house right now, you are under surveillance but you are also at greater risk of literal exposure to the virus.” She was unable to shed any light on the specifics of the Will Smith appearance.  

If you are seeing family members or pets who have passed away in your dreams right now, that’s normal too. “That’s consistent with the general fear that some of us are going to die; the news is forcing us to face our own mortality,” says Bowater. “For those who haven’t done any serious thinking about death, this is an expression of the apprehension that death could be coming our way or for the people we love.” 

She explains that when you feel emotions of mourning and loss in the present, your brain will often pull up an old memory associated with those feelings. “If you lost a family member or a pet and felt very upset about it at the time, that feeling will stick in your memory and will come back up when you are facing the issue of death at present times. It shakes us out of our complacency, especially among young people in their 20s who think that they are immortal.” 

Nightmares about sleeping through a phone call, being late for a flight or missing a meeting are all rooted in genuine fears from our “new normal”. “A lot of people are dealing with new schedules and missing things at the moment. These dreams could be a reflection of your anxieties around that, or you could be putting yourself in the shoes of someone else in the population and living their experience.” 

Another vivid theme in people’s responses was the feeling of trying to shake something off your body, whether you are suddenly a big wet dog trying to get dry or a person inexplicably on a beach covered in frisky spiders. “That’s fair enough too,” says Bowater. “That’s just a metaphor to symbolise the avoiding of contamination, literally trying to shake off the thing you don’t want – the bug, the little particles that might be on you from someone who is infected.” 

But why does it feel like everyone is suddenly remembering all their dreams? That’s simple, says Bowater – it’s because most of us are slowing down in the morning. “A lot of people now don’t have to leap out of bed and run for a bus. If you’ve got more time when you wake up and you become aware of dreaming, you can remember more.” Beware, though, if you drink more than a couple of bevvies in a night, you’ll find you probably won’t dream at all. 

If you want to try and get a little more control over your dreams, try limiting your social media and practising better sleep hygiene. “I think the amount of news on social media tends to heighten the anxiety because everyone is worried all the time, particularly younger people who tend to wind each other up,” says Bowater. Her advice is to switch off your phone an hour before bed, and keep it in another room if you can. 

“It’s a matter of being sensible and trying to not let terrifying imagery swamp your mind,” she says. “You have to try and keep control of your own mind. There’s no need to be terrified, but there is room for rational fear. Go outside. Go for a walk, observe the cycles of nature. Appreciate the seasons, we have seasons of decline and seasons where things rise up again. This is like a tidal wave, it will eventually pass.” 

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