92 Maranga Mai! The percentage of Māori men in prison has been much the same since the 80s. But the percentage of Māori women has gone up from less than 10 percent in the 80s, to 64 percent today. Our women are one of the most imprisoned groups in the world. I think there’s a direct correlation in that between neoliberalism and the increased poverty and marginalisation that has impacted upon Māori (Jackson, 2021a). Decolonising prisons When rangatira Māori signed Te Tiriti in 1840, they did not envision a future where large numbers of their young people, men and women would be incarcerated. Decolonisation, and constitutional transformation based on Te Tiriti and He Whakaputanga, necessarily involves abolishing prisons (Hurihanganui, 2017). A constitutional framework that embodies rangatiratanga is inconsistent with the mass incarceration of tangata whenua, because prisons themselves are institutions of colonial racism and violence: Abolishing prisons and protecting those who have been harmed is a step away from the racism which underpins the colonising society which benefits from it. In itself, that is therefore a decolonising act (Jackson, 2017, p. 11). We are challenged to envision a world free of prisons, as they maintain colonial structures and inequities in the disproportionate incarceration of Māori: This is particularly urgent for wāhine Māori, because of their comparably higher incarceration rates than tāne, and the fact that Indigenous women are more likely than any other group in the world to be killed and harmed. Diminishing women in a society is an attack upon families for they are so often at the forefront of change (Ngata, 2021). In a colonising society, prisons are “dedicated to controlling the people it has dispossessed” (Jackson et al, 2016, pp. 2–3) by quarantining its Indigenous peoples (Foucault, 1982, 1980; Aikman, 2019). Tangata whenua cannot exercise full rangatiratanga when the majority of those in prisons are our whānau and whānau whānui. Co-managing prisons with Māori is also not an option, as “that’s not the taumata of prisons” (Snelgar, 2021) and, in such an arrangement, Māori remain incarcerated. Moreover, as Abolitionist Demands: Toward the End of Prisons in Aotearoa, No Pride in Prisons has reiterated, “incarceration does nothing to address the underlying issues the person may be experiencing” (No Pride in Prisons, 2016, p. 2). For Māori, these structural issues are based on established histories of institutional and interpersonal racism within the criminal justice system. No Pride in Prisons details actionable steps toward achieving prison abolition in New Zealand across the short (2016, pp. 63–80), intermediate (pp. 81-88) and long-term futures (pp. 89-96). The report emphasises the need to defund the Department of Corrections (p. 82) and do away with privately run prisons entirely (p. 81). The latter are organisations run for profit, which means private prisons profit from the continued incarceration of Māori. This terrible situation serves also to “limit the state’s responsibility to prisoners and thus its accountability for their treatment” (No Pride in Prisons, 2016, p. 81). The report echoes the need for decolonising Aotearoa, in a way imagined by the type of constitutional transformation described here. Funding otherwise spent on incarceration could be redirected towards reconciliation, rehabilitation, and other community-based social initiatives to address the root causes of harm.