There is an “informal hierarchy” among prisoners in New Zealand jails, with gang members generally at the top, enforcing “informal rules and codes, which are often constructed with their own interests in mind,” a multi-year study of the country’s prisons has found.
Written by Jarrod Gilbert, a senior lecturer at Canterbury University and author of a book on gangs, the report “Gang Influence on New Zealand Prisons” paints a picture of jails where gangs offer “protection, access to goods, status, and brotherhood” as incentives to recruits.
Anyone not gang-affiliated is quickly identified and targeted.
“Yeah, as soon as you get to your ... holding cell, straight away they’ll ask you at the glass window, ‘Who are you with?,’” one prisoner told the study.
“If you’re not with anyone, then ... they‘ll go back and tell their boys, ’Ah, there’s a new fella over there ... Go take all his [expletive].'”
While inmates are not directly pressured to join gangs, the pressures of the prison environment mean that gang membership “is both a rational and a common choice,” the report says.
“While a number of those who make this choice may later regret it, the difficulty of gang exit means that membership normally continues.”
Fights and assaults are common, and most go unreported to staff.
“Gangs are a disproportionate driver of this violence,” the report says. “Confronting a person face-to-face and extorting—sometimes known as taxing or standing over—is considered acceptable behaviour, particularly among gangs.”
The items most commonly robbed—and highly sought-after—are nicotine lozenges and chicken dinners, the latter especially prized as a rare source of solid protein as opposed to the other staple meat, mince.
Reducing the artificial scarcity of such items, which drives their high value, would be a simple solution for Corrections to adopt, Gilbert says.
But inevitably, extortion will continue to some extent because it’s a way for gangs to establish and demonstrate their dominance.
“Oh, you got to pay rent to established gang members that have been in so many years, because of what they did and who they are in terms of gang membership,” one prisoner told Gilbert.
“You got to pay them a chicken a week to pretty much save yourself from getting hurt in the stomach area, because that’s where they’re attacking now.
“On the special chicken night, you get a nice chicken, then everyone has to give it to this guy no matter who you are, him and his mates.”
Gang Members More Violent
Prisoners with links to gangs are highly likely to be violent offenders. Since 2010, the proportion of gang-affiliated prisoners incarcerated for violent offending has not fallen below 50 percent, and in 2023 it was sitting at 56 percent.
Within New Zealand’s jails, gang affiliates were involved in assaults at a rate that is consistently around twice as high as those with no recorded gang connections.
Newer, “LA-style” gangs consisting mostly of younger members who are keen to “make their mark” were responsible for higher levels of violence than the more established, patched gangs.
For most of the time, however, gangs maintain what Gilbert calls an “armed truce.”
“The realities of prison life—where members could be moved into a unit where they were outnumbered by other gangs at any time—meant that for the most part, it was simply not worth engaging in dangerous disputes,” his report says.
One prisoner is quoted as saying, “You always have incidents from time to time, but what most people don’t realise about prison is that 99 percent of the time, nothing happens at all.”
Alongside assaults on other prisoners, gang members are disproportionately responsible for assaults on prison staff members.
This was identified as a significant concern by staff, and one which has become more acute in recent years.
“We’ve seen other phenomena happening in prison that you just wouldn’t have seen 20 or 30 years ago,” one jailer told Gilbert. “Female officers being assaulted, even non-custodial staff being assaulted; nurses, program providers. You just never used to see that back in the day, you know, just didn’t happen.”
Voluntary Segregation Becoming More Popular
The report suggests voluntary segregation was a good option for prisoners—both the victims of gangs and those wanting to leave a gang—although it carried considerable stigma as it was perceived as a place for informants and child sex offenders.Provided it was carefully planned, prisons could also establish separate wings for gangs. However, non-gang members placed in such a unit were at far higher risk of danger than someone in a unit with a mix of gangs.
“Units with balanced numbers would be less likely to see one gang abusing their power, resulting in less violence overall and less gang-related harm for non-gang prisoners,” the reports says.
Another option—one which Gilbert says is the most effective—is to try to evenly distribute members from different gangs through different wings, though this of course depends on prisoner numbers, which are constantly changing.
“It’s much better when numbers are even, evenly balanced. Without question. Without absolute question,” one prisoner said, while another recalled a time when “there was only one of every gang member pretty much. There was me, which they classed as a Killer Bee, there was one Bandido, one Black Power, one mobster [Mongrel Mob]. So we were all kind of equal, and we all hung out together. It was weird. But it was all good.”
Prisons need to offer far greater support to those wanting to leave gangs because the close-quarters environment means it is extremely difficult to avoid encountering other members, Gilbert recommends.
“Unless you sign on protection or go to the at-risk unit. Unless you get out of the unit, nah. Unless you sign on protection ... you’re going to get hidings [beatings] every day,” one prisoner told Gilbert.
Actively promoting gang-neutral units—or entire prisons—with extra freedoms and privileges to counteract the attractions of joining a gang, may also yield results.
For those already in, but who want to get out, voluntary segregation is an option, but does have some issues. Most notable is the “social-psychological barriers of going from the highest tier in the prison hierarchy to being housed with the lowest,” Gilbert says.
“The actual number of prisoners in voluntary segregation has remained steady over the last five years, but because of [large] declines in the prison population over that time, this amounts to a significant proportional increase in its use. In 2018, 24.5 percent of the prison population were in voluntary segregation, but as of 2023 that proportion had risen to 35.08 percent.”
However, segregation risks creating “two parallel prison systems ... a gang and a non-gang one. If this comes to pass, it will not be by design but by ongoing circumstance.”
“The largely flat inmate structure that once existed, with its ‘all-for-one’ ethos, which attempted to quell conflicts and stand-overs in the interests of prisoner solidarity, has been replaced by schisms along gang lines and a prison hierarchy based on ’might-makes-right,'” Gilbert concludes.
“This privileges and promotes gang membership, and creates a hostile environment for other prisoners. It also produces greater challenges for prison management. The prison environment has ostensibly become a gang environment.”
