Human Rights and Prisons - Rethinking Crime and Punishment

Staff-prisoner ratios require improvement;
There is a need to build staff training in terms of enhancing skill-sets
with regards to particular groups (eg working with female prisoners)
and issues (such as human rights training or specific mental health
training);
Further primary research on rights standard practices within New
Zealand prisons is required. This research should highlight good
practice as well as areas that necessitate improvement.
However, taking a human rights approach to the issue of detention is not just
about exposing particular physical conditions and practices. It is important
that human rights thinking does not just become a case of ticking boxes
against a checklist of targets or processes or minimum standards. Following
the latter route, while useful in terms of managerialist practices, will not result
in a human rights ethos or culture.
Rethinking Imprisonment Practices
Beyond these concerns, building a rights-based culture also requires an
examination of what prisons should be about, it requires questions about the
criminal justice system as a whole (Livingstone, 2008). That is, taking a
rights-based approach should also include thinking about „overall patterns of
imprisonment, their institutional context, cultural attachment to penal
sensibilities and the general…consequences of imprisonment‟ (Piacentini,
2004:186). This may include thinking about whether certain groups of people
– such as asylum seekers or those with serious mental health problems or
women or others – should be imprisoned at all. Our current reliance on, and
expansion of, the penal system has indicated a mentality in which „the prison
has become both the starting point and the finishing point for the debate
around crime control‟ (Sim, 2008:141). In response, we need to pay much
more attention to how we understand, justify and administer imprisonment and
punishments generally.
Building a human rights culture also entails discussion on how human rights
within prison environments are interlinked to rights within wider societies. It is
evident, for instance, that many of those who are sent to prison are those who
have not enjoyed secure access to human rights standards within wider
communities. In addition, imprisonment aggravates this situation – as, on
release, prisoners are likely to find that attaining rights (such as gaining
employment, finding secure housing, and so on) becomes even more difficult.
Thus, human rights standards are currently being damaged or at least
endangered before, during and after imprisonment. Of course, it is not
possible for prisons to be able to prevent or resolve all these violations.
However, the attainment of these rights – inside and outside the prison walls –
is fundamental to the rehabilitation and successful reintegration of those we
choose to incarcerate, as well as to the wellbeing of families and communities.
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