After successive governments campaigning on and then implementing “tough on crime” policies, New Zealand has achieved one of the highest per-capita incarceration rates in the developed world, second only to the United States. While crime rates have remained steady, the prison population continues to rise, increasing by 700 so far this year.

Corrections Minister Judith Collins told the Sunday Star Times “We are getting dangerously high in our capacity. We will not have the capacity by the beginning of next year to house all the prisoners that we will have.” with the economy in the state it’s in, the government can not afford to build new prisons in the short term. As well as involving the private sector, Collins’ plan is to keep prisoners in shipping containers, which they will fashion into cells themselves. She called this “a great idea” and said it was “a lot better than being locked up all day in a cell” (which is, presumably, the outcome of building one for yourself)

Kim Workman, the director of alternative justice thinktank Rethinking Crime and Punishment, said the government was going “one step too far” calling the idea of housing prisoners in shipping containers inhumane. According to Workman forcing prisoners to fit out their container cells was asking for serious trouble.

[T]his is a little bit like asking a person who’s been sentenced to hanging to build their own gallows. You can imagine how they would feel, building these atrocities and then being expected to live in them you might get a very negative reaction from prisoners. I think she [the minister] is on the verge of creating a situation where there will be major riots and people will die.

Collins claimed the shipping containers would provide a better standard of housing than some of the country’s older prisons, whch says more about the state of New Zealand’s prisons than it does about the comfort of shipping containers.