“We Must Go Hard and We Must Go Early”: How New Zealand Halted Coronavirus in the Community and Corrections

ABSTRACT

New Zealand’s success at containing the coronavirus, despite a potential reemergence in August, is viewed by the World Health Organization as a model for handling a pandemic. This same success also appears within one of its most vulnerable locales—prisons. While New Zealand’s Department of Corrections has not experienced a single COVID-19 case within prison walls, the efforts to contain the virus have also come at costs to incarcerated individuals’ rights. This article demonstrates the successful efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic in New Zealand and how these efforts have been met with both praise and criticism. In particular, we will highlight the ways in which prison officials have quickly responded to the pandemic as well as their ongoing efforts to improve the conditions for those incarcerated.

KEYWORDS:

• Prison experience
• prisons
• international
• public safety
• Covid-19
• pandemic
• alternatives to incarceration
• early release mechanisms
• prison reform

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. As of September 24, 2020.

2. Home detention refers to the entire supervision period occurring at the individual’s residence, Community detention refers to electronic monitoring with curfew, and Community work refers to supervision through community service projects (DOC, 2020b).

3. As of September, 24th, 2020. This is with exception of a woman who was imprisoned for refusing medical treatment for a positive COVID test while in the community (Block, 2020b).

4. Alert Level 1: Prepare, the disease is contained; Alert Level 2: Reduce, the disease is contained, but the risk of community transmission remains; Alert Level 3: Restrict, High risk the disease is not contained; Alert Level 4: Lockdown, the disease is not contained (https://covid19.govt.nz/assets/resources/tables/COVID-19-alert-levels-summary.pdf).