The problem with double bunk beds in prison

As a prisoner at Mount Eden stands accused of murdering his cellmate, criminologist Emilie Rākete from People Against Prisons Aotearoa explains why double bunks are a improvised, dangerous response to prison overcrowding.

What happened?

On the morning of September 27, staff at the 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 transferred to a secure cell so that an investigation could take place. Within a few days, police announced they were charging that cellmate with Chan Chui’s murder.

What is double bunk bed?

Double stacking is a controversial prison management technique used to deal with overcrowding. Historically, prisons in New Zealand used something like dormitories: prisoners were held in groups, which often doubled as work gangs. As criminal justice philosophy evolved and the use of forced labor declined, New Zealand moved towards single cells as the ideal. After the 1980s, the prison boom began, and the worsening mass incarceration crisis made this ideal increasingly impossible. In the 2010s, the Department of Corrections decided to return to the 19th century practice of holding multiple people in one cell.

Double bunk is attractive to prison administrators and politicians because it allows them to reclassify cells designed for one person as cells for two. On paper, this dramatically increases prison capacity, meaning that prisons that were severely overcrowded now appear to be underutilized. The negative consequences of this bureaucratic magic trick are all passed on to the incarcerated people.

Has this kind of thing happened before?

Violence is common in New Zealand’s prisons, but double bunks are widely believed to worsen violence. Prisons are already unsafe places, but being forced into close proximity with a stranger can make the confinement unbearable. Most worryingly, double bunk beds create situations where violence can be unavoidable. For years, William Katipa serially sexually abused people in bed with him. The forced proximity of double-bunk cells provided the opportunity for these rapes, and the prison culture’s ban on betrayal allowed him to prey on a succession of his cellmates for years. The administration at the Mount Eden Corrections Facility knows well that double-sleeping can promote violence – in 2017, Stephen Gotty was convicted of raping the cellmate he double-berthed with at Mount Eden.

Seems bad. Why do we double-place prisoners?

New Zealand has a very high prison population, which only really took off after the neoliberal economic reforms of the 1980s. The state curbed public housing, stopped guaranteeing full employment, limited benefits and emptied asylums. For struggling communities, neoliberalism was disastrous – and this attack on ordinary people’s ability to live manifested itself in poverty, mental illness, addiction, violence and crime. Because rolling it back would – to take a completely arbitrary example – require something like taxing capital gains to fund hospitals and schools, New Zealand has instead managed dysfunctional behavior through police and prisons. As a result, the prison population has exploded, reaching higher levels almost every time we measure it.

When the prison population reached the limit imposed by the number of prison beds, double bunks provided the Corrections Bureaucracy with an immediate, low-cost solution. It might lead to prison administrators occasionally locking people in cells with a serial rapist, but that’s a price they’re willing to make incarcerated people pay. Double deception is cheap, administratively simple and mainly harms poor people: neoliberal decision-making in a nutshell.

Are all New Zealand prisoners in a double bed?

As the prison population grows and shrinks in response to economic and social forces, the need for dual shelter is changing. Over the past few years, the moderate decline in the prison population under Ardern’s government has been decisively reversed, with dual care becoming increasingly widespread. Some prisons do not use double bunk beds at all. Waikeria prison used to use double bunk beds in its decrepit maximum security unit until the Waikeria riot burned that unit down.

Other prisons use double bunk beds more widely. As of June this year, 41% of the total prison population is in double cells. With 1,030 people incarcerated inside, Mount Eden is the largest prison in the country, and also one of our prisons with the most double bunk beds. Seventy-two percent of Mount Eden Prison residents are locked up with a cellmate. With the government announcing more cuts to social services, tougher laws and more spending on police and mega-prisons, the prison population is about to reach unprecedented levels. If so, more and more people will live and die in double bunk beds, just like Andrew Chan Chui did.

Is there a solution to all this?

As a criminologist, I sometimes feel that the study of prisons is actually 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 to double stack people. They will blame Chan Chui’s death on operational failures, human error or unforeseeable tragedies. If we think more realistically about society as a structure, it is clear that there is no way to lock traumatized people with a history of criminal offenses together in cells, sometimes for days or weeks at a time, without some of those people harming each other , rape or murder. other. It’s not How we have people with a double bunk bed, that’s unsafe, that’s it That we have them double bunk bed.

Because double-stacking is an improvised, dangerous response to prison overcrowding, we must take action to reduce the prison population to at least manageable levels. Repealing the disastrous Bail Amendment Act (2013), which has massively increased the prison population, could go some way to achieving this. Ultimately, prisons are machines for solving social problems do not solve these social problems. Violence and crime are the product of structural economic forces operating in the background. Sad, senseless deaths like the death of Andrew Chan Chui will end when the prisons themselves end.