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Image: The Spinoff

SocietyOctober 8, 2024

The cost of being: A graduate with health issues who works for an NGO

a red grid background overlaid with a green receipt and the words The Cost of Being in white with green and red backgrounds on alternating words. In the centre of the image is a red picnic basket, a green coat and a black and white bowl of porridge. To the left are two green dollar signs.
Image: The Spinoff

As part of our series exploring how New Zealanders live and our relationship with money, a 23-year-old who’s ‘constantly on edge’ about finances explains how they get by.

Want to be part of The Cost of Being? Fill out the questionnaire here.

Gender: Gender fluid.

Age: 23.

Ethnicity: Māori Irish.

Role: Queer disabled graduate, working as a project coordinator at an NGO.

Salary/income/assets: Less than $50k a year.

My living location is: Urban.

Rent/mortgage per week: Three-bedroom house with four flatmates including myself because one of them lives in what should be the study, $210 per week.

Student loan or other debt payments per week: $90,000 student loan for a law degree and politics degree, plus costs for medication that isn’t subsidised because it’s for endometriosis and specialist appointments.

Typical weekly food costs

Groceries: $90.

Eating out: $20.

Takeaways: $20

Workday lunches: $0

Cafe coffees/snacks: $10.

Other food costs: $0

Savings: I managed to save $500 once, but then I had to spend it on dental care because my wisdom teeth needed to come out.

I worry about money: Always.

Three words to describe my financial situation: Constantly on edge.

My biggest edible indulgence would be: Porridge.

In a typical week my alcohol expenditure would be: None.

In a typical week my transport expenditure would be: $30.

I estimate in the past year the ballpark amount I spent on my personal clothing (including sleepwear and underwear) was: $500.

My most expensive clothing in the past year was: A winter coat, it cost me $120.

My last pair of shoes cost: $20, my feet hurt SO bad lol but shoes are expensive.

My grooming/beauty expenditure in a year is about: $40 for Kmart DIY products and YouTube tutorials.

My exercise expenditure in a year is about: $50 for socks and shoes and a couple of T-shirts.

My last Friday night cost: $40, we did a potluck picnic.

Most regrettable purchase in the last 12 months was: A gym membership. I thought it would be a nice treat but it just ended up being really expensive and I punished myself if I didn’t go because it meant I could’ve spent the money on food.

Most indulgent purchase (that I don’t regret) in the last 12 months was: My winter coat. It’s great not freezing to death.

One area where I’m a bit of a tightwad is: Clothes. I’m autistic so I prefer to wear the same outfit (or some variation) every day and don’t have enough money to buy nicer clothes because then I would have to buy enough to wear the same thing every day.

Five words to describe my financial personality would be: Capitalism’s bitch – broke girl edition.

I grew up in a house where money was: Not an issue. But because my parents grew up in homes where money was an issue they were incredibly strict with it and never let us have any. Which was great at teaching us to be frugal except now I don’t know what to do when I have extra money because I never had the finances growing up to learn how to save and invest etc. Financial literacy is definitely something I learned only recently.

The last time my Eftpos card was declined was: Never. I’m terrified of it getting declined, my anxiety couldn’t handle it lol. I check my bank account almost daily so that I always know if I have enough for groceries and rent etc.

In five years, in financial terms, I see myself: Hopefully not struggling any more. It would be nice to own a bed frame lol, sleeping on a mattress on the floor is not cute.

I would love to have more money for: My health. I feel like it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy when you don’t have the resources to take care of yourself, so then I get sick, which costs money. And then I’m even deeper I’m the hole than before.

Describe your financial low: I had to use Afterpay to buy groceries. It cost more than it would have in person but I needed food and I couldn’t afford to buy it outright at the supermarket.

I give money away to: I donate to Rainbow Youth and women’s shelters when I have a spare $20.

Keep going!
Photo: Getty Images; design The Spinoff
Photo: Getty Images; design The Spinoff

OPINIONSocietyOctober 7, 2024

The problem with prison double bunking

Photo: Getty Images; design The Spinoff
Photo: Getty Images; design The Spinoff

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. 

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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.

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