As a prisoner at Mount Eden is charged with his cellmate’s murder, criminologist Emilie Rākete of People Against Prisons Aotearoa explains why double bunking is an improvised, dangerous response to prison overcrowding.
What happened?
On the morning of September 27, staff at Mount Eden Corrections Facility found Andrew Chan Chui dead in his cell. His family told me that Chan Chui had only been in Mount Eden for a few weeks before he was killed. Chan Chui’s cellmate was immediately removed to a secure cell so that an investigation could take place. Within a few days, the police announced that they were charging that cellmate with Chan Chui’s murder.
What is double bunking?
Double bunking is a controversial prison management technique used to cope with overcrowding. Historically, New Zealand prisons used something like dormitory housing – prisoners were held in groups, which often doubled as work gangs. As penal philosophy evolved and the use of forced labour declined, New Zealand moved towards single-person cells as the ideal. After the 1980s, the prison boom began, and the worsening crisis of mass incarceration made this ideal increasingly impossible. In the 2010s, the Department of Corrections decided to return to the 1800s practice of holding multiple people in one cell.
Double bunking is appealing to prison administrators and politicians because it allows them to reclassify cells designed for one person as being for two people. On paper, this drastically increases prison capacity – making prisons that were badly overcrowded now appear to be underutilised. The negative consequences of this bureaucratic sleight-of-hand are all offloaded onto incarcerated people.
Has this type of thing happened before?
Violence is common in New Zealand’s prisons, but double bunking is widely understood to make violence worse. Prisons are already unsafe places, but being forced into close proximity with a stranger can make confinement intolerable. Most concerningly, double bunking creates situations where violence can be inescapable. For years, William Katipa serially sexually assaulted people who Corrections double bunked with him. The forced proximity of double-bunked cells provided the opportunity for these rapes, and the prison culture prohibition on snitching meant he was able to prey on a succession of his cellmates for years. Mount Eden Corrections Facility administration knows well that double bunking can facilitate violence – in 2017, Stephen Gotty was convicted for raping the cellmate who he was double bunked with in Mount Eden.
Seems bad. Why are we double bunking prisoners?
New Zealand has a very high prison population, which kicked off in earnest after the neoliberal economic reforms of the 1980s. The state hit the brakes on government housing, stopped guaranteeing full employment, restricted benefits, and emptied out the asylums. For communities that were struggling, neoliberalism was ruinous – and this attack on ordinary people’s ability to live manifested in poverty, mental illness, addiction, violence and crime. Because rolling this back would require – to pick a totally arbitrary example – something like taxing capital gains to fund hospitals and schools, New Zealand has instead managed dysfunctional behaviour through police and prisons. Consequently, the prison population has exploded, reaching greater heights almost every time we measure it.
When the prison population hit the limit imposed by the number of prison beds, double bunking provided the Corrections bureaucracy with an immediate, cheap solution. It might result in prison administrators locking people in cells with a serial rapist every now and then, but that has been a price they are willing to make incarcerated people pay. Double bunking is cheap, administratively easy, and mostly harms poor people: neoliberal decision-making in a nutshell.
Are all NZ prisoners double bunking?
As the prison population expands and contracts in response to economic and social forces, the need for double bunking changes. For the last few years, the moderate reduction in the prison population under the Ardern government has decisively reversed, and so double bunking has become increasingly widespread. Some prisons do not use double bunking at all. Waikeria Prison used to use double bunking in its decrepit high-security unit, until the Waikeria uprising burned that unit to the ground.
Other prisons use double bunking more widely. As of June this year, 41% of the overall prison population is double bunked. With 1,030 people incarcerated in it, Mount Eden is the country’s largest prison, and is also one of our most double-bunked prisons. Seventy-two percent of Mount Eden Prison’s inhabitants are locked in with a cellmate. As the government announces more cuts to social services, harsher laws, and more spending on cops and megaprisons, the prison population is about to soar to unprecedented heights. When it does, more and more people will live and die in double-bunked cells, just as Andrew Chan Chui did.
Is there a solution to all this?
As a criminologist, I sometimes feel like the study of prisons is really the study of everything next to prisons. Policy-oriented solutions to the danger and violence of double bunking miss the real point. Corrections will no doubt point to their Shared Accommodation Cell Risk Assessment (SACRA) tool, which they use to decide how people are double bunked. They’ll pin Chan Chui’s death on operational failure, human error, or unforeseeable tragedy. If we think more realistically about society as a structure, it’s obvious that there’s no way to lock traumatised people with histories of criminal offending into cells together, sometimes for days or weeks at a time, without some of those people harming, raping or killing each other. It is not how we double bunk people that is unsafe, it is that we double bunk them.
Because double bunking is an improvised, dangerous response to prison overcrowding, we have to act to reduce the prison population to at least a manageable level. Repealing the disastrous Bail Amendment Act (2013), which has massively increased the prison population, would go some way to achieving this. Ultimately, prisons are machines for solving social problems that do not solve those social problems. Violence and crime are the product of structural economic forces working away in the background. Sad, pointless deaths like Andrew Chan Chui’s death will end when prisons themselves end.