The following blog is based on notes from a presentation given as part of the University of Wollongong Tauranga campuses public lecture series for 2018:
Introduction
Earlier this year the
Minister of Justice, Andrew Little announced the latest in what has been, since
the late 1980s, a long line of reviews, tax payer-funded summits and
inter-agency, ‘whole-of-government’ projects aimed at making the criminal
justice system work more efficiently and effectively.
Officially launched at a
summit held in Porirua in October, the stated aim of the review is to reduce
New Zealand’s prison muster by 30 percent over the next 15 years. And a specific focus of the review is on the significant
over-representation of Maori in the prison population specifically, and in the
criminal justice system overall.
This presentation
represents a modest offering in response to the current government’s attempt to
make the justice system more effective, and just.
Before I move into the
main part of my presentation, I want to say something about the focus and
intent of my commentary:
There are two key themes
that both run thru my presentation and join the elements together:
The policy
sector/political class has had the lead for decades in developing and
implementing responses to social harm.
It is fair to say that its impact has been mixed, with as many failures
as successes, although given the lack of independent scrutiny of its
activities, this is a subjective proposition I make, rather than an empirical
one. However, regardless of its many
failures, it is a necessary part of any attempt we make to reduce the prison
population, and so reform of the policy sector and the political context of
crime control policy development is an absolute must if we are to meet the 30%
reduction target set by Minister Little.
Any substantive move to
reduce the prison population requires a significant increase in the role of
communities, including community-based service providers, in the development
and delivery of policies and interventions.
The days of the wholesale importation of policies and interventions from
other high crime jurisdictions need to be a thing of the past.
PART I
Overview of Past Attempts to
Review Criminal Justice
By way
of background and to add context to my commentary, it is based on 10 years working
in the policy sector, the majority spent analysing crime control policy), and
some 15 years carrying out research on crime control in settler-colonial
jurisdictions.
I will
use examples and case studies gleamed from my policy and research experience to
a) highlight reasons why we have failed to arrest the rate of imprisonment, to
reduce the harm that occurs in our communities, and to eradicate bias and
racism within the criminal justice system, and b) evidence my key argument for
a significant overhaul of the policy industry and the political classes’
influence on crime control policy, without which any significant reduction in
crime, social harm and use of imprisonment is impossible.
Failures
and Examples
When I
arrived at Corrections in early 2001, the agency was in the process of
implementing the Integrated Offender Management (IOM) initiative.
Imported more or less wholesale from Canada, IOM was intended to
streamline the delivery of prison-based services to inmates to ensure their
'sentence plans' matched their 'criminogenic needs', such as anger management
and alcohol and drug dependency.
The
importation of IOM provides a case study that encapsulates all that is wrong
with the crime control policy sector in New Zealand:
It was evident that senior management was hell-bent in introducing
the process, regardless of criticism or dissent: For that reason ‘consultation’
with internal and external stakeholders was superficial, a tick-the-box
exercise. I personally attended 3 so-called consultations, and read the reports
written thereafter, in each one any criticism or difficult question had been
either not included, or re-worded to enable the department of answer from a pre-conceived
suite of answers.
The importation exercise involved liberal use of what is most
accurately called the orientalisation of
the social context with regards the potential impact of the process on
Maori. Orientalisation here refers to the tendency of the policy sector to justify importing policies and interventions on the basis that they 'work for African Americans' so will work for other people of colours, like Maori.
The hegemony of policy-based evidence: a few years after the
implementation of IOM and its suite of criminogenic interventions, time came
for the analysis and release of the first tranche of outcome-based data,
meaning the impact of the programmes on recidivism. The results were, to say the least, not what
the department had predicted. For some
interventions – such as Straight Thinking - Maori who did not attend had lower
recidivism rates than those that did.
The ‘report’ was suddenly taken from the primary author to be ‘edited’,
due to the poor results of the programmes.
The implementation of IOM by Corrections highlights a number of
failings across the criminal justice sector that explains its poor record of
impacting crime rates, a number of which I will return to throughout this
presentation namely that:
The propensity
for the sector to rely on importing crime control policies and interventions
from other high crime, western jurisdictions.
Retrofitting
crime control policies and processes to the New Zealand context without the
requisite engagement and research work required to ensure effectiveness and
‘fit’.
An aversion by
the major criminal justice agencies to admit mistakes, release information that
does not portray them in a good light.
An
unwillingness to trust the ‘community’ here to assist in development effective
responses to social harm.
Science
and Evidence-Based Policy are Not King
The
rise of IOM coincided with a revolution within many of the crime control
agencies wherein 'science' and 'evidence' became the basis of policy-making,
the development of interventions, and allocation of resources. At least
that is what the policy sector told itself and the public from the early 2000s
onwards.
Quite
often this was not the case, with pertinent evidence being totally ignored, or
the evidence that suits a predetermined policy outcome favoured over the messy
stuff, like evidence that contradicts a Cabinet Minister's pet project, or that
highlights the negative impact of government’s social and economic policy.
A recent, classic example of policy implementation that ignored available evidence was the government's decision to introduce boot camps. No firm evidence existed to indicate that this intervention would result in positive outcomes for youth, but it was implemented regardless. Why? Well, there are a number of reasons but in this particular case the answers are 'populist politics' and 'ideology'.
To
understand how such a poorly performing crime control intervention could be
introduced, you have to ignore the rhetoric that New Zealand's policy sector is
apolitical (as in neutral) and that policy decisions are based on
scientifically-derived evidence.
This
is often not the case in the crime control sector. The introduction of boot
camps was purely ideological - of the 'get tough on crime and bring back
military-style discipline for those young thugs' type you will often hear in
RSA bars; the 'a good thrashing never did me any harm' approach to social
policy.
To their credit Ministry of Justice officials provided their Minister with a thorough briefing, one that highlighted the lack of evidence that the intervention would in fact, reduce youth offending. The Minister moved forward with the policy, simply noting that he had “received, but not read the briefing”. Let me repeat that, he had “received but not read” a briefing. I will come back to this ‘attitude’ soon.
I wish to be clear about one thing - sometimes
evidence has a significant impact on policy development and implementation.
My argument here is sometimes it does not. The policy process can
be, and often is, highly political and ideological, with interventions and
policies influenced as much by who a Minister was drinking with last week, as
it is on independent, empirical evidence.
So in this example, this case study, we see the impact on crime control
policy, of ideology, of political ideology, of the need to secure votes,
resulting in tax payer’s money being squandered on a failed intervention and
political decisions being made in the face of overwhelming evidence that
contradicts the political and ideological position. But it is not only the political class that
is guilty of what is best described as Policy-based Evidence, as opposed to
evidence-based policy, which can be defined as:
Crime control policy
based on the ideological and theoretical bias of the Policy Industry and
politicians.
PART II
Strategies for Reducing the
Prison Population
In this
last section I will set out a number of strategies that will enable Minister
Little and his officials to meet their stated target of a 30% reduction in the
prison muster. Because of time constraints they are offered in a
very simplistic, largely unevidenced manner; that I admit. They are designed to
become part of the general discussion occurring right now,
Depoliticise
Crime Control Policy
The first
strategy I advocate appears on paper the easiest, but in fact is probably the
most difficult to implement: we need to put a stop to the impact of political
ideology on our response to social harm. We need to depoliticise crime control
policy in much the same way Finland has done. We need a cross-party
agreement to stop the juvenile nonsense we suffer every three years where
politicians try to out macho each other to see who can be the 'toughest on
crime', resulting in increases in police (with the usual unrealised promises of
a reduction in crime), more prison beds, longer sentences, and so forth.
This has been the standard political response to social harm for the best part
of three decades: has it made us safer (or, more accurately, to 'feel'
safer)? The answer is no. The way forward is to develop a policy
process based on the needs of community, and one less concerned with the needs
of politicians.
Get Over
the Policy Cringe and Empower the Community
Those who
work with victims and offenders invariable know what is needed to respond
meaningfully to the social issues arising from social harm. We need the
policy sector to work with them more directly (and respectfully) as partners to
develop effective, socially grounded solutions. In order to do so we
need to move away from the policy cringe that too often afflicts the Policy
Industry in Wellington. Much like cultural cringe, the policy cringe is
based on the erroneous belief that 'things are done better elsewhere', and that
successful responses to social harm must be imported from other jurisdictions,
usually from jurisdictions with high crime rates! Go figure. So we
import crime control policies from other jurisdictions, invariable do little to
alter them for the New Zealand context, and then place them over the top of
community-centred practise... and watch them crash and burn. the classic example
of this process was the importation to New Zealand in the mid-2000s of
Multi-Systemic Therapy from the U.S, as` part of the new youth residential
programme that was trialed in Hamilton. Officials from a number of
agencies, including Te Puni Kokiri stated serious concerns at the suitability
of the programme for Maori youth; concerns that were ignored. The
result? The programme, and MST especially, was a failure, while at the
same time a number of existing home-grown wrap-around, social support programmes
for Maori youth, were ignored.
Treatment
and Social Support, not Criminalisation and Imprisonment
There is
a simple response that will reduce the prison population quickly and enable
Minister Little to meet his 30% objective, stop sending people to prison!
Stop
arresting people, charging them, sending them to court, sentencing them to
imprisonment for victimless crimes, like some drug offences.
Stop
sending people to prison who are addicted or mentally unwell – increase
significantly our reliance and focus on therapeutic jurisprudence.
And here
is a suggestion that will likely anger some, perhaps some of you here –
recognise the reality we are dealing with regarding our prison muster – a
significant number of them are addicted, are mentally unwell, and many have
long histories of trauma – of domestic violence, or sexual
victimisation.
To stop
them from victimising others, then we need to deal with their trauma, and if
you want evidence of the sorts of victimisation and trauma that some of our
past and present prison muster are dealing with, then I recommend you read Dr
Liz Stanley’s 2016 publication The Road to Hell: State Violence Against Children in Postwar New Zealand.
Alluding to the trauma suffered by offenders is unpopular for some people, and inevitably results in statements that 'you are making excuses for serious crime': no, I am not. I am though highlighting a reality that we need to deal with if we are to create a safer, more just society. By focusing on their trauma of experienced by offenders I am offering one explanation for their behaviour, and not a reason to ignore the harm they cause others.
Let Us
In!
The crime
control sector needs to let go, it needs to grow up, it needs to stop being so
risk adverse, and allow independent researchers like myself and others to
undertake critical, independent research.
The
principal crime control agencies have for some time now been making it very
difficult for independent, critical researchers to scrutinise the performance
of the ‘system’.
Oh, I
know they will be able to cite a few examples since 2001 where they have allowed
PhD students or other researchers 'in' to prisons to do research, for
example... research that is likely contracted by the agency or heavily vetted
to ensure it serves the needs of the agency, and is unlikely to result in
critical findings that might embarrass Corrections, or Police, or Justice, or
worse, their Minister.
I am
talking about the strategy that the sector appears to be following the past few
years of blocking critical research that does not suit agency needs. And
it is blocking independent researchers from going about their business, by
using excuses like 'the information that will be gathered doesn't match with
our trending data' or with 'our strategic priorities', or some similar
nonsense. And if that fails Corrections and others can fall back on
well-worn excuses such as potential 'safety' issues for both inmates and
researchers, or muster issues or whatever else they can think of.
And yet
other jurisdictions, most notably the United Kingdom, have in the past had few
issues with allowing researchers to enter prisons to carry out their work. The
evidence for this is the significant amount (comparatively speaking) of
independent research materials published in academic journals on prisons and
corrections policies in that and other comparable jurisdictions. The
problem in the New Zealand context seems to grow from the intersection- a
dangerous combination - of three factors: 1) a policy elite who appear to
believe themselves above critique, 2) a policy elite who believe they are not
answerable to the public, and 3) who are supported by a political elite who
share the same arrogance and aversion to independent scrutiny.
Let me be even more frank, policy workers and government agencies do not always have the answers and, more importantly because they are so close to their own work they often can't see the wood for the trees. In other words it is sometimes very difficult for them to step back and critically analysis the impact or their work or identify the questions that need to be asked and answered by research. Sometimes the questions and topics 'the community', which includes independent researchers, inmates, ex-inmates, inmates and ex-inmates families, victims and service providers, believe are important will not match those of the policy sector; and sometimes the communities questions are the right ones to be asking. Remember, a government agency is part of the public service and derives its resources from the public purse. Therefore, it is time for policy practitioners to stop acting as though they are not answerable to the public.
Bias and
Racism
And
lastly, specifically on the issue of Maori over-representation in the criminal
justice system:
In answer
to the oft-heard statement that we Maori should step up and take responsibility
of the offending and victimisation that occurs in our communities:
Yes we
should, and we already are: from time to time we hear this comment from social
commentators, shock jocks and the like, such as Mike Hoskins, Paul Henry, you
know when some shocking incident takes place and invariably we hear ‘where are
the Maori leaders? Why aren’t they saying anything? Why
aren’t Maori doing anything, etc, etc. The ready answer is a) is
because they are busy doing the mahi (work), b) you (shock jocks and the like)
are not exactly that important to us in terms of reporting what we are doing,
c) such commentators appear to never go and find out for themselves what we are
doing. I’ve not once heard of them going to say Te Whakaruruhau, Maori women’s refuge
in Hamilton to look at their anti-violence work with Maori men in Waikeria
Prison, or the numerous other Maori-run entities working with youth and adult
offenders and victims, often with far less government financial support per
client than mainstream service providers. Such comments are
therefore, uninformed and biased.
If you
want us to do more then get out of our way: stop putting policy and financial
barriers in our way to developing more effective interventions for
our own. And while you are doing that, do something about the racism
and bias that exists in both the frontline crime control agencies and also in
the policy sector. The claim by the Police Commissioner that there
is no racism in police, only that some officers have ‘unconscious bias’ is
nothing more than a political ruse designed to ignore the truth of racism
within the force. The existence of racism and bias in police and
other criminal justice institutions in other western jurisdictions is
well-evidenced, jurisdictions by the way that we regularly compare ourselves
to. What makes the Commissioner and his supporters believe our force is
any different? Perhaps it is because they continue to believe in the
myth of New Zealand having the best race relations in the world? Bias
does exist in our system, and despite the best attempts to block independent
research that I spoke of earlier, we do have empirical evidence that
demonstrates this, starting with Moana Jackson’s 1988 report, 2 MRL attitudinal
surveys in the 1990s, Roguski and Te Whaiti’s Police Perceptions of Maori
research published in 2000.
If we
Maori are to take up the challenge to do more, as we should, then just as
importantly, crime control institutions and the policy sector in New Zealand
need to be more open and honest about the bias and racism that exists in our
institutions and do something concrete about these issues. And if they
do, perhaps then, together, we can change the landscape of criminal justice in
this country, and Minister Little can not only meet his 30% target, one that
becomes sustainable over time.