Pitched as a generational plan to end what Te Pāti Māori calls a system that "cages Māori generation after generation", replacing prisons with Māori-led, community-based justice by 2040.

The Policy: Te Pāti Māori Transformational Justice Policy — September 2023 →

_Neutrality note: this is a racially and constitutionally charged debate. Positions below are attributed to the people and parties who hold them; figures are from official sources where available._

What it does:

• Sets a long-term goal to abolish prisons by 2040 and youth justice residences by 2030, first launched as Te Pāti Māori's "transformational justice" policy in September 2023 and re-confirmed as a 2026 campaign plank.
• Establishes an Independent Māori Justice Authority and a parallel tikanga-based system, funded by reallocating a large share of the Corrections, Police and Courts budgets toward community solutions, with the 2023 policy citing an initial 20% reallocation.
• Targets a system where Māori are 52% of the prison population despite being roughly 17% of New Zealanders — a disparity the existing official "Hōkai Rangi" strategy already aims to cut from 52% toward 16%.
• Leans on the economics of incarceration: Corrections' 2024/25 figures put the cost of a sentenced prisoner at about $201,408 a year, or $552 a day, against a muster the World Prison Brief records at 11,255 people, a rate of 211 per 100,000 at March 2026.
• Cites overseas rehabilitation models — the party and commentators point to Norway and the Netherlands, where a shift away from punitive prisons coincided with sharply lower reoffending.

The result:

Co-leader Rawiri Waititi frames it as a "by Māori, for Māori" solution and argues prisons "had never improved anybody's wellbeing"; the late constitutional lawyer Moana Jackson, whose work underpins the kaupapa, long argued the conversation about a separate Māori justice system is decades old. The direction echoes recommendations of the 2019 Te Uepū Hāpai i te Ora report ("Turuki! Turuki!"). But the policy is unlegislated and faces near-total opposition across Parliament. Labour leader Chris Hipkins says he "cannot envisage a scenario at all" where Labour would back abolition, and corrections spokeswoman Tracey McLellan calls prisons a "necessary measure"; Justice Minister Nicole McKee (ACT) and ACT leader David Seymour argue abolition would endanger public safety and crime victims. Even the Greens' corrections spokesperson Tamatha Paul, broadly sympathetic to reducing imprisonment, has cautioned that abolition without a fully planned alternative could be dangerous. With no governing-coalition support and no costed transition plan published, independent feasibility on the 2040 timeline remains unproven.

Our suggestion: the pipeline from colonisation to the prison muster

_The foundation for this section is the 2019 Turuki! Turuki! report of Te Uepū Hāpai i te Ora — the Safe and Effective Justice Advisory Group, chaired by Hon Chester Borrows QSO — which is the government-commissioned report Te Pāti Māori explicitly cites as the basis for their prison abolition policy. Māori told the advisory group (in their own words to the group's hui) that "the system was 'a blunt tool of colonisation' which suppressed and marginalised Māori laws and values while imposing those of Pākehā; that institutional, structural and personal racism contributed to Māori over-representation in the system, tearing apart Māori families and whānau." The report's Recommendation 11 called for "gradual replacement of most prisons with community-based habilitation centres"; Recommendation 2 for a "By Māori for Māori" governance model. TPM's 2023 prison abolition policy builds directly on these recommendations._

What the Turuki report found — key statistics

The advisory group's 2019 findings establish the scale of systemic failure that underpins TPM's argument:

• 61% of those imprisoned are reconvicted within two years of release — prisons are not reducing reoffending
• 83% of people who began a prison sentence before age 20 had prior Child, Youth and Family (now Oranga Tamariki) involvement — the care system and prison system are deeply linked
• One in five Māori men born in 1981 has spent time in prison — a lifetime probability far exceeding the point-in-time 52% muster figure, and compared with one in twelve for all men born that year
• 67% of youth in justice custody are Māori; a further 13% identify as Māori and Pacific — 80% of all detained youth are Māori or Māori/Pacific
• Māori are 5.7 times more likely to have police contact than non-Māori, and that disparity compounds at every stage: arrest, conviction, sentencing, imprisonment
• 60% of prisoners have literacy or numeracy below NCEA Level 1
• 77% of prisoners have previously experienced violence
• 91% of prisoners have been diagnosed with a mental health or substance use disorder at some stage in their lifetime; of those, only 46% had received treatment in the prior 12 months
• 80% of children and young people who commit offences have experienced family violence
• 53% of women entering prison, and 15% of men, reported experiencing sexual violence as children

The report noted that "To a very considerable degree, demand on New Zealand's justice system is a product of unmet mental health needs." And: "We cannot continue with the same approaches and expect different outcomes. We cannot afford another generation of hurt."

Researchers, Waitangi Tribunal findings, and cultural historians trace the chain of causation back further — to the Native Schools Act 1867.

The 1867 Act and the erasure of te reo. The Native Schools Act 1867 established a national system of English-only village schools for Māori children, prioritising English instruction from the outset. While no explicit legislative ban on speaking Māori appeared in the 1867 Act itself, the Critic Te Ārohi history of the Māori language documents that by the early twentieth century, education authorities had hardened: "the Māori language, which was forbidden even in the playground. Physical punishment was given to children who disobeyed." Former MP Dover Samuels gave specific testimony to the NZ Herald about conditions at Matauri Bay in the late 1940s: students caught speaking te reo "were sent out to cut lengths of supplejack and whipped with it — at times until they bled." University of Waikato lecturer Dr Ēnoka Murphy documented the psychological legacy: parents who were beaten for speaking te reo then deliberately chose not to teach their own children the language, seeking to protect them from the same shame — a pattern Murphy described as "near universal" among older Māori. That dynamic is now described by researchers as *reo trauma*, the transmission of cultural silence across generations without the next generation ever experiencing the original punishment directly. Fluent te reo speakers dropped from an estimated 95% of the Māori population around 1900 to fewer than 25% by 1960. The 1985 Waitangi Tribunal (Wai 11) found the Crown had breached its Treaty obligations, noting the number of Māori speakers had collapsed and that Crown policy had contributed to Māori educational failure. Te reo was not given official language status until the Māori Language Act 1987, meaning the policy erasure operated for roughly a century.

Intergenerational trauma: the mechanism. The He Kokonga Whare research programme — a six-year Health Research Council-funded study led by researchers including Leonie Pihama, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and Paul Reynolds at Te Atawhai o Te Ao — is the most substantial NZ-specific investigation into the intergenerational transmission of trauma among Māori. The programme found that trauma events experienced by one generation (land loss, language stripping, child removal, institutional abuse) shape the psychological landscape — parenting styles, emotional regulation, attachment patterns, self-worth — inherited by the next generation, without that generation experiencing the original event. The New Zealand Family Violence Clearinghouse has documented the downstream expressions: family violence, substance use, mental ill-health, and ultimately disengagement from education and employment. Alan Duff's 1990 novel *Once Were Warriors* and Lee Tamahori's 1994 film adaptation are widely acknowledged — including by Māori advocates and researchers — as culturally representative of this cycle, even if not documentary evidence. The mechanism, as researchers including Cherryl Smith and John Reid have described it, runs: cultural stripping and shame → damaged identity and self-worth → family dysfunction and violence → poverty → educational disengagement → unemployment → offending → prison.

The school-to-prison pipeline in data. The University of Waikato has documented the school-to-prison pipeline as a live research area specifically for Māori. Ministry of Education data shows Māori and Pasifika students consistently have the highest stand-down and suspension rates of any ethnic group, with MBIE research finding that school suspension and stand-downs are "most associated with Māori and Pacific NEET outcomes among 15–19 year olds." Stats NZ Household Labour Force Survey data shows Māori youth aged 15–19 had a NEET rate of approximately 16% in 2025 (those not in employment, education, or training), while those aged 20–24 ran at nearly 26% — rates consistently above the national average. Research by the MBIE traces the higher Māori NEET rate to structural factors including lower NCEA attainment and higher school exclusion rates, not to individual choice. The chain from NEET status to unemployment to poverty to offending to imprisonment is well-documented in international criminological literature; in the NZ context, the Waitangi Tribunal findings, the He Kokonga Whare programme, and the Māori criminology scholarship of researchers like Juan Marcellus Tauri all point to colonisation's effects as a major structural driver of where that pipeline begins.

What the evidence shows about breaking the cycle

Kaupapa Māori programs inside prisons. The Department of Corrections (Ara Poutama Aotearoa) has run tikanga-based programmes for decades, and has expanded them under the Hōkai Rangi strategy (2019–2024). Named initiatives include the Whare Oranga Ake reintegration units (established 2011, operating at Hawke's Bay Regional Prison and Spring Hill Corrections Facility, 40 places for men), the Te Ara Māori units providing tikanga-based environments across multiple prisons, and the Tēnei Au programme targeting Māori men under 30 in high-security settings who "have the highest recidivism rates." The Te Piriti programme — combining tikanga Māori with cognitive behavioural therapy for those convicted of sexual offences against children — has been evaluated and showed a recidivism rate of 5.47% compared to 21% for an untreated comparison group, a result Corrections has cited as evidence that kaupapa-grounded programmes can outperform mainstream approaches. Inter-prison kapa haka competitions now run across nine prisons as part of the Hōkai Rangi strategy, with NZQA credits awarded for participation. Tāpeta Wehi, a judge at these competitions, has noted publicly that kapa haka successfully brings together prisoners from rival gangs — a social cohesion outcome that the clinical literature on identity-based rehabilitation suggests has significance beyond the performance itself. However, a December 2025 kaupapa Māori study led by Associate Professor Paula King (University of Otago, Wellington) exposed a persistent data problem: because Corrections records only primary ethnicity, Māori are undercounted by approximately 6% (around 405 people), making it harder to evaluate what these programmes are actually achieving. The study also found that 24% of Māori released from prison are not enrolled with a Primary Health Organisation, cutting them off from subsidised healthcare in the months when reoffending risk is highest — including the first month post-release, when released prisoners face a mortality rate three times the general population.

A bigger idea: an all-generations kaupapa Māori wellbeing programme. One comparison point for thinking about upstream intervention is the MITEY programme (Mental Health Education In Their Years), run by the Sir John Kirwan Foundation. MITEY is an evidence-based, school-wide approach to mental health education, embedded in the NZ Curriculum and delivered through trained school coaches to more than 277 schools and 75,000 students aged 5–13. A 2022 evaluation described it as "cutting edge" and found it initiated "meaningful and significant change" in school mental health culture. MITEY is not a kaupapa Māori programme and it does not specifically target intergenerational trauma — but it offers a structural template: a professionally designed, nationally scaled, coach-delivered programme that embeds into existing institutions. What if something analogous existed for Māori intergenerational trauma recovery — not school-based but Iwi-based, and designed to reach all generations simultaneously? The He Kokonga Whare research identified a core challenge: healing the children while adults around them are still carrying unprocessed colonial trauma is structurally incomplete. A structured, Iwi-delivered, psychologist-supported programme engaging children, teenagers, young adults, and grandparents in parallel — built around te reo, whakapapa, tikanga, and trauma-informed psychological support — does not currently exist at scale in Aotearoa. Canada's Truth and Reconciliation process has generated some analogous community healing frameworks for First Nations communities; researchers there have found that integrating Indigenous cultural practices with trauma-informed clinical support produces outcomes that neither approach achieves alone. This framing — an all-ages, Iwi-delivered kaupapa Māori healing programme as a structural alternative to prison expansion — is an emerging idea in NZ policy discussion, not an established or costed proposal.

The cost-benefit case

The arithmetic of incarceration in New Zealand is stark. At $201,408 per sentenced prisoner per year, multiplied by the current muster of 11,255 people, the direct cost of incarceration alone runs to approximately $2.27 billion annually. That figure is only the operational cost: it excludes capital expenditure on prison infrastructure, the courts and police costs that precede incarceration, and the ongoing social costs that accompany it.

Former Finance Minister Bill English's social investment analysis — now the intellectual basis for both the current National-led government's social investment agenda and Te Pāti Māori's structural argument, from opposite directions — found that the approximately 1% of five-year-olds with the highest risk profiles would cost the state an average of $320,000 each by age 35, with some individuals exceeding $1 million. Among that cohort, 25% were projected to experience imprisonment by age 35 and 40% to receive a benefit for two or more years before age 21. English described these children as "million-dollar kids" and argued that early intervention, if it could divert even a fraction of them from these pathways, would pay for itself. That fiscal logic applies with additional force to Māori, given their structural overrepresentation at every stage of the pipeline — from school exclusions to NEET status to imprisonment.

The compounding costs extend further. Released prisoners face a mortality rate three times the general population in the first month post-release (per the 2025 University of Otago study), driving emergency hospitalisation costs. Family violence — itself a documented downstream expression of unprocessed intergenerational trauma — generates further healthcare, justice, and social welfare expenditure. Welfare dependency and lost economic productivity from a generation cycling through incarceration represent costs that do not appear in the Corrections budget but fall on Treasury nonetheless.

The policy question Te Pāti Māori poses — even if their specific 2040 abolition timeline is contested — is whether the compounding, multi-agency cost of the existing cycle is greater than the upfront cost of the intervention programmes they propose. No independent cost-benefit analysis has yet modelled a full kaupapa Māori alternative system against the status quo. The New Zealand government's own social investment framework acknowledges the logic of the argument; the gap in the evidence is the absence of a costed, evaluated alternative at the scale Te Pāti Māori envisions.

The impacts to watch:

• Whether any realistic alternative could safely house the small number of high-risk offenders — Te Pāti Māori concedes some secure, supervised facilities would remain even under its model.
• Fiscal trade-offs: diverting Corrections, Police and Courts funding to a new authority would be one of the largest justice-sector reallocations ever attempted, with contested savings.
• Constitutional and equity questions raised by a parallel, ethnicity-based justice system, which critics say cuts across equal treatment before the law and supporters say is required by Te Tiriti o Waitangi.
• Pressure on the existing Hōkai Rangi strategy, whose more incremental "52% toward 16%" target offers a benchmark against which any faster abolition pathway will be judged.