The Evangelism of Indigenous Criminology

The following text laid the foundation of a presentation I gave at Indigenous Studies, Macquarie University, 2 November 2019, titled 'The Evangelism of Indigenous Criminology'

During a visit to New Zealand in June 2019 a friend of mine, a lecturer at an American University, told me he was 1 of 3 associate editors at an International publishing house that was considering a number of proposals for a series on criminology, one of which was the book - Indigenous Criminology - that Chris and I wrote. When considering the applications the two white criminologists questioned the need for 'another criminology like this one', and my friend responded by asking 'why not', partly in light of all the new criminologies that had been accepted into the club in recent years, including Peacemaking Criminology, Post-Colonial Criminology, Cultural Criminology, and the latest member, Criminology of the Global South (Southern Criminology). 

At first glance, mentioning all these new criminology's appears to support the argument of the 2 Pakeha (European) criminologists, but my colleague continued by making the point that all these 'new criminologies' had largely evolved from the same space, influenced by the same epistemological milieu as all previous criminologies, namely from the space created by the white, privileged academic community. And we can say with certainty that apart from  a few outliers, such as Chris Cunneen, Harry Blagg and Antje Deckert, that these criminology's had a lot to say about Indigenous peoples, about African American's and so forth, despite the fact that few of their adherents had lowered themselves to engage directly with us (with Cultural Criminology a notable exception), preferring instead to keep their distance and thus, their 'objectivity'. In other words, an Indigenous Criminology was necessary because of the lack of Indigenous input into the 'other criminologies' and the general reluctance of white criminologists to respectfully engage with us.

Thanks to the stance taken by my friend and colleague, the book Indigenous Criminology was published in 2016.

I submit that had the book proposal in question had been for 'a general theory of crime', or a 'post-modern criminology' and not one founded on Indigenous experiences, that the debate would have been very different, if indeed it would have occurred at all. At the very least the focus of discussion would have been very different; were the right authors and authorities present, did the perspective privilege white theorists and methodologies, that sort of thing. Of course, this is pure speculation on my part, but mainstream criminology, or perhaps more accurately whitestream criminology, has form in this regard, meaning a general disregard for the perspectives and experiences of Nga Morehu (the socially marginalised or unwanted), unless it is mediated and interpreted through their ideological and epistemological lens. Now, let me provide an example of what I mean when I say that mainstream criminology has 'form', by discussing the position of the English criminologist Pat Carlen on what makes for 'good criminology'.  

In a chapter entitled Against Evangelism in Academic Criminology: For Criminology as a Scientific Art, Carlen rails against what she sees as the proliferation of boutique criminologies, approaches she describes as "those academy-based criminologies which have variously self-branded as 'critical', 'cultural', or 'public'", accusing them of "at times revealing evangelistic tendencies that pose a threat to their capacity for the open debate that each of them espouses". And what exactly are these so-called evangelistic tendencies Carlen speaks of? It appears that Carlen's main issue is that these criminologies suffer from twin allegiances, to 'academic criminology' and all that requires in terms of supplication to the alter of the white theoretical Gods and the supposed rationality of empiricism, and 'criminology politics', by which she means adherence to the more leftist tendencies in ordert to critique state-centred/sponsored criminological work, and taking a proactive stance to talk with and then on behalf of Nga Morehu. Their socio-political commitments, so Carlen alleges, need to be reined in, meaning that "the evangelistic strains in these boutique criminologies need to be confronted" if criminology as a scientific art is to continue to have any social significance.

Carlen refers to these approaches as evangelistic because of a tendency to expect members to adhere to an orthodoxy, a set of principles that demand adherents demonstrate commitment to an orthodoxy, as opposed to one based on the practice of empiricism. In fact, of these supposed evangelistic criminological strains, Carlen contends:

"They are the least desirable and potentially most self-damaging, aspects of the best of contemporary academic criminology". 

As an Indigenous criminologist, nothing Carlen said about boutique criminologies is new. Her words mirror a common strain of epistemological bias and snobbery often directed from whitestream criminology, towards ‘other’ forms of knowledge, and in the settler-colonial context the ‘other’ is often Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous research. Which brings me back to Don Weatherburn’s flippant dismissal of Indigenous knowledge and experience, and therefore Indigenous scholarship, and that of our critical non-Indigenous collaborators, such as Chris Cunneen. In stating that there is nothing to be learnt from us about what causes crime, or how best or most effectively respond to it, Weatherburn is portraying non-Western knowledge as ‘subjective’, as ‘unscientific’.

Where have we heard this type of comment before?

Isn't that exactly how our knowledge, our epistemologies have been represented since first contact?

According to Canadian scholars Proulx and Woolford, every colonial epoch produces projects designed to support the settler-colonial states subjugation of Indigenous peoples. Therefore, let's refer to them as colonial projects. Woolford for one imagines the process of colonisation and subsequent settler-colonial government, as a highly sophisticated mesh made up of inter-locking meta, meso and micro levels.  Each level contains projects of varying complexity, interconnectedness and focus (meaning the specific role it plays in the colonial process, and therefore in the process of dispossession).

A whole series of inter-related projects were formulated across the mesh that were designed to extricate us from arable land, and to nullify our ability to impede the colonial enterprise. Key projects included Missionary, Research and/or Native schools, legislation banning our languages and specific cultural practices, such as the Tohunga Suppression Act in New Zealand. And then there were the nefarious colonial projects, such as the ideological destruction of the 'character' of Indigenous peoples, or what could be more accruately described as the 'Ideology of Race'. This was an important project for the establishment of colonial governance because it sought to discredit Indigenous language, knowledge, cultural practices and institutions. At the very heart of this project was the key ideological statement that underpinned so much of colonial policy, namely that 'Indigenous knowledge is folk-knowledge, based on myth and primitive religious belief and practice. Therefore, it is incomparable with western knowledge, which is derived from scientific inquiry and enlightenment thinking'. 

Now, at the macro, meso and micro levels we find key edifices that provide the superstructure upon which settler-colonialism was built and continues to thrive today. Here we find a project of especial potency, the criminal justice system, a ‘technology of oppression’ as Alison Young has described it, and Agozino, “a control freak discipline”, one that is ably supported by the academic discipline of criminology. The potency of this multi-level colonial project derives from the fact that it is the conduit through which the settler-colonial state can legitimately deploy violence against its citizens. 

As a sub-component of the law, criminal justice was, and still is, a powerful (civilising) colonial project in two significant ways:

i) it ensures that the definitions of what constitutes crime and social harm were based on Eurocentric understandings of those terms; and

ii) it provides a platform for the deployment of structural violence by the state against Indigenous peoples considered not to have adhered to Western standards of behaviour ala the ‘reasonable man of the law’, especially those who happened to be residing on good pastoral land or atop mineral deposits, or who dared directly challenge the hegemony of the colonial state, either through armed rebellion, or non-violence resistance.

And what of criminology? Social sciences like criminology placed in the hands of the settler-colonial state the tools to identify, name and (arguably) combat the moral sewage threatening to spill out from the geographic space of the (Indigenous) damned. And one of the key ‘sciences of morality’ was criminology, a discipline that’s conception, gestation and birth has been traced through the colonial epoch. Furthermore, criminology, joined at birth to the settler-colonial state, continues to thrive through a sustained focus on the behaviours and attitudes that fuelled its conception – emotionality, incontinence and contamination, and upon those sections of the community considered by the settler-colonial state to be most threatening to social order, the poor, the recalcitrant, and the Indigenous. 

How different are the views of Pat Carlen from those made by early Missionaries, or colonial agents denigrating Indigenous knowledge? Although to be fair, Carlen was not directly challenging the legitimacy of Indigenous Criminology, but nonetheless she disparages any new forms of the discipline that do not adhere to the precepts of scientific criminology, including objectivity and value neutrality. She intimates that the political posturing of said criminologies is 'damaging to the brand' that is (in my view) best understood as corporatised criminology. 

The Australian 'quantitative' social scientist, Don Weatherburn is a slightly different beast (or criminologist) than the Pat Carlen's of the white academy, appearing as he does - tiume and time again - less concerned with image politics and more with patch protection. He weaponises the veil of scientism, the ideological cloak that legitimises his knowledge and others like him, thus presenting their ‘science’ as the only legitimate source of criminological knowledge that can or should influence the development of crime control policies and interventions, especially when it comes to the ‘Indigenous Problem’.

The charge of evangelism brought against boutique criminologies like Cultural Criminology, or Indigenous Criminology, comes from the same well as the colonial project of ideology discussed earlier: it denotes a hierarchy of knowledge about crime and social harm. Those that cloak themselves in the cloak of scientism are therefore and thereafter, ‘scientific’ and thus legitimate; those that are not, are simply 'boutique'.  The former produces knowledge that is ‘solid’, factual and trustworthy’, the latter, knowledge that is unformed, subjective and untrustworthy. 

Let us return for a moment to Pat Carlen’s supposedly devastating critique of the new, boutique criminologies:

They are the least desirable and potentially most self-damaging, aspects of the best of contemporary criminology.

I argue quite the opposite - their focus on criminological politics, their willingness to take a stance, to speak to and of Nga Morehu, is the most desirable and powerful features of these contemporary, so-called 'boutique' criminologies. 

From the perspective of those who practice Carlen’s scientific criminology, it is the ‘science’ and the implicit objectivity and methods that establish ‘facts about crime’ that distinguishes it from these other, subjective approaches, and that should provide it a natural place at the policy table. But I say that these administrative, or perhaps more accurately, authoritarian criminologies, are distinguished by a number of other features other than their ‘science’, including:

i) their focus on research and social inquiry into actions the state defines as 'criminal';

ii) that they confine their critical gaze to issues related to those communities the state considers are 'problematic'; more often than not people of colour and working class youth, albeit minus any significant, meaningful engagement with these communities;

iii) confine their social inquiry to issues and questions that the policy sector deems important, for which they receive significant renumeration via the establishment of contractual, mutually beneficial relationships; 

iv) limit their critical analysis of state systems, policies and programmes to programmatic effectiveness via evaluations devoid of historical context, and the wider political economy of state domination of justice in the neo-liberal moment, and lastly

v) empower themselves through the veil of scientism I spoke of earlier, an ideological construct that privileges their approach to measuring the Indigenous life-world, whilst denigrating Indigenous (and other) forms of knowledge. 

And what has this criminology brought us?  More policing, and not of the communitarian kind sometimes enjoyed by white communities, but of the ‘hot spot’, militaristic tactics, violent style of policing that we have been subjected to for decades. Is it effective? Well, that depends on how you measure 'effectiveness'; if by effective we mean more Aboriginal people arrested and sent to prison, then yes.  If we mean more just and less violent, then no.

In comparison, Chris Cunneen and I envisioned an Indigenous approaches to criminological inquiry based on the following core principles:

1.   Taking a stance of committed objectivity.  This is as much a political stance as it is an epistemological one.

2. Carrying on the theme of ‘politics’, the second principle entails ‘speaking truth to power’

3. The third is to ‘give back to the communities who have privileged you with their knowledge and experience’, and not just in the form of sending them a copy of your journal article.

4. Indigenous criminological research should be ‘real’: Meaning it must come from within Indigenous peoples and their communities.

I would like now to propose a fifth principle: this principle will encapsulate all the others, an over-arching principle, if you like, and it is devised as a direct response to, rebuff the position taken by Carlen, Weatherburn and others like them; it is:

5.  That Indigenous Criminology should be evangelical; in the sense that it should strive to be subjective and biased; political, in that practitioners must take a stance that clearly aligns with the needs of Indigenous communities and not the state; and it should set firm boundaries regarding membership, by rejecting those unable or unwilling to adhere to the tikanga [philosophies] that form the basis of Indigenous knowledge. 

In response to Carlen I say that these are the most desirable and potentially most self-affirming aspects of the best of contemporary Indigenous academic criminology.

Lastly, one thing we must do is avoid wasting energy railing against the negative representations of Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous scholarship. The features that administrative and authoratarian criminologists offer as our weaknesses, are in fact what makes our work powerful, different and meaningful. In fact I would go further and argue that the reasons why our work is attacked for being 'too political' and 'too subjective', is because the richness of our research demonstrates the vacuous nature of the work of much of corporatist criminology. 

The Future of Indigenous Criminology?

What is in a name? Given criminology's role in the historical and contemporary subjugation of Indigenous peoples, the answer is 'everything'.

Recently, my colleague Chris Cunneen and I wrote a book called Indigenous Criminology, in which we discuss some useful principles upon which to build an Indigenous variant of the discipline. A full discussion of what an Indigenous criminology might look like is best discussed elsewhere. However, I can say with some certainty that it will not, or should not be primarily concerned with being 'of utility' to the policy industry. The fact that so much of what passes for Australasian Criminology is tethered firmly to the government teat (whether through contractual research contract arrangements, or that adherents often fail to ask critical questions of the institutions of crime control) belies the oft-made claim by practitioners that they are 'objective' in either the political or epistemological sense of the term.

They are not as they claim: the discipline and many of its adherents are 'political' by the fact that they prey on the bodies (theoretically, epistemologically and physically) of Indigenous peoples. They gorge on the wairua, the very essence of Indigenous peoples and their cultural context supposedly in the name of 'science', but more accurately for self-aggrandisement, and financial procurement for themselves and the academic institutions to which they belong.

In comparison, an Indigenous Criminology, or a Counter-Colonial Criminology, or an Anti-Authoritarian Criminology, whatever name you wish to give it, will be political in the sense that it will/should be part of the process through which Indigenous peoples seek self-determination. It will be an academic exercise undertaken with Indigenes, on their terms. It will privilege their voices and experiences. An Indigenous Criminology will be unaffected by the attitudes of the likes of Don Weatherburn and others and their fantastical belief that Australasian crime control and criminology has been too heavily focused on institutions and 'structure' re: Indigenous crime, and not enough on the 'individual indices' and causes of criminality. The 'individual' has a place in the Indigenous theoretical and research framework also, as do other 'units of measure' that facilitate understanding of social harm, such as family, community, gender and class.  But is it essential that a significant part of our activity focus on the institutions of oppression (Jackson, 1988), as Biko Agozino (2010: viii), in relation to the African context, writes:

"Since most of the crimes committed against Africa by imperialism are not crimes by isolated individuals but were structural wrongs orchestrated institutionally, the focus of African criminology is or should be on what is to be done about the unjust social institutions that have been used to facilitate genocidal policies for centuries".

Following Agozino's sage advice (2007: 3), an Indigenous Criminology should turn away from the historical, uncritical replication of western criminological practice. It should reject theories, research methods, crime control policies and interventions "that maximise the exploitation and repression of the masses". The emphasis of our criminological endeavour shall be (or should be) an aggressive form of academic activism, flavoured with an unflinching focus on state crimes in the historical and contemporary context of colonialism/neo-colonialism, seeking reparation for genocide (whether physical or cultural), revealing the rapacious behaviour of academics and globalised crime control corporations who seek to profit from Indigenous knowledge and Indigenous pain, "instead of following the Imperialist obsession with crimes of the poor" (Ibid).

We desperately need an Indigenous school of critical social inquiry that offsets the disempowering tendencies of the emerging globalising of contemporary crime control policy; a second phase of jurisdictional colonisation if you will (Tauri, 2014). Again, we turn to Agozino (2007: 3) who rationalises our need for self-determination in the criminological realm when he argues that:

"Criminologists in the Third World would make a greater impact by being sceptical of Western theories of punishment instead of agreeing with the Western scholars who, according to Cohen (1988) arrogantly boast that there is nothing to learn from the Third World and that all that needs be done is to apply the woefully failed theories of imperialist criminology to the rest of the world".

All is not lost though. There are those within Australasian criminology who we can work with and trust to behave ethically towards our communities - Chris Cunneen and Harry Blagg being two obvious examples. However, we should not forget that many of its practitioners have supported government policies and legislation that has delivered upon us more prison, more police violence and brutality, and more trauma.

In response I expect some of the practitioners will talk about how we would be better off being part of a public criminology, as opposed to becoming a boutique, sub-school of the discipline, or a fringe-dwelling, stone-throwing variant. I am certain that some of them will like nothing better than for us to add an Indigenous element to the discipline and work to 'correct it from within'. Unfortunately, given the pervasiveness of the paternalistic, colonising attitudes of the wider discipline, I fear that this approach is likely to become nothing more than the criminological equivalent of the state's indigenisation of youth justice, exemplified through the family group conference where we add a little 'colour' to the same tired old theories and methodologies, as opposed to the discipline taking a long, hard look at itself. Being part of an indigenisation program will allow many of the members of Australasian criminology to point to the Indigenous element, the 'add on' as 'proof' of their commitment to social justice, instead of focusing their attention on the significant overhaul that is required to cleanse it of the bias, racism and obstructive prejudice that currently pervades it.

Sadly, given the repetitiveness of the unethical, racist behaviour exhibited by some members of Australasian criminology that I and other Indigenous scholars have experienced over recent years, it is apparent to us that the discipline is not our friend. Nor is it likely to ever be. I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that it might be better for us to walk away and leave the discipline's members to continue to stink up their own tent.

References

Agozino, A (2007) Power: An African Fractal Theory of Chaos, Crime, Violence and Healing, paper presented at the Salises 8th Annual Conference, University of West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago, 26 March.
Agozino, B (2010) What is Criminology?  A Control Freak Discipline! African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies, 4(1): I-xx.
Cunneen, C and Tauri, J (forthcoming) Indigenous Justice.  Bristol: Policy Press.
Jackson, M (1988) Maori and the Criminal Justice System: He Whaipaanga Hou: A New Perspective.  Wellington: Department of Justice.
Tauri, J (2014) Settler Colonialism, Criminal Justice and Indigenous Peoples, African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies, 8(1): 20-37.

The Cultural Imperialism of Australasian Criminology

In a thought-provoking piece on the support her discipline gave to colonialism, Wendy James refers to anthropologists as ‘reluctant imperialists’, meaning that their support for the colonising enterprise was unplanned or unintentional.  James contends that any support was the result of anthropologists wanting to ‘do good’ by the colonised, and by doing so they inadvertently provided empirical support and intellectual sustenance for the colonial enterprise. Personally, I think that is a load of self-serving rubbish.  However, I am even more reluctant to accept similar arguments on behalf of criminologists, especially those who choose to support with the neo-colonial state, who avoid direct engagement with Indigenous peoples, and yet deem to speak with authority on ‘the Aboriginal/Indigenous problem’. 


Some Australasian criminologists might consider this position a little harsh. They might even attempt to argue that we should consider the contemporary situation facing the academy, the pressure of increasing class sizes, the continued retrenchment of teaching resources, and the impact of the managerialist movement and the commercialisation the academy over the past twenty years. All of which has resulted in significant expectation that academics will chase grant and contract funding. Undoubtedly, the recent hegemony of academic managerialism has had a demonstrable impact on the academy in New Zealand and Australia, especially as the primary source of external research grants for the social sciences is central government (Tauri, 2009). And so perhaps we shouldn't be too harsh on our hard-done-by criminologists if all they are doing is chasing the easy money, which is in the Australasian context, research that criminalises Indigenous peoples.  


However, what are we to make of the continued control-freak tendencies of Australasian criminology, especially its more authoritarian adaptations? It is far too easy to simply dismiss the recurrent focus on the individual native, someone divorced from their social, historical and structural context, as is often the case in the work of adherents like Marie (2010) and Weatherburn (2010; 2014), who then compound Indigenous subjugation by dismissing outright the validity of Indigenous forms of knowledge; and do so without demonstrating any meaningful engagement with it.  These actions, so common in Australasian  criminology, cannot be easily dismissed as 'accidental', unintentional incidents of cultural imperialism. These actions should be considered neo-colonial formulations of cultural imperialism, actions that have their antecedents in the technologies of social control utilised by colonial powers to subjugate Indigenous peoples (Tauri, 2014).


The tendency of some Australasian criminologists to ignore or misrepresent the Indigenous experience of crime control, or ignore the validity of Indigenous knowledge, whilst being blind to the racism and imperialistic tendencies of their own endeavours, has a long history in the discipline. It is a discipline that spends so much time with its nose stuck up the backside of the policy sector, and gazing with erotic fascination at the ‘Indigenous Other’ that it appears to have little time for self-contemplation; or as Biko Agozino (2010: i) puts it:


"... criminologists have routinely buried their heads in the snow of Europe and North America with hardly any serious attempt to understand the hieroglyphics of African (or any First Nation) reality except when they perceive threats to European comforts in the form of human trafficking, terrorism, piracy, dictatorships or the drugs trade".


The key to understanding Australasian criminology’s tendency towards extractive scholarship - let's call them the 'FIFO's of the academic world', as in 'fly in to Indigenous communities, extract data, then fly out and further their careers' - is that it is still very much an imperialist enterprise. Agozino (2003) describes imperialism as the exemplar form of all criminality since “every criminal act implies the violation of the spaces of others and attempts to colonise the spaces of the other and yet imperialism has the tendency to pose as the moral policeman of the world” (Agozino, 2010: ii-iii). In similar vein we might present much of the Australasian criminological musings on Indigenous peoples as imperialistic, due to the continued violation of the geographical and intellectual space of Indigenes, often without our permission, guidance or willing participation (Tauri, 2012). 


Perhaps Edward Said’s (2000: xxi-ii) critique of postmodern theory and “anti-foundationalist” positions can also be ascribed to Australasian criminology ,in as much the lack of attention to institutional classism, racism, structural, socio-economic impediments to a ‘a better life’ and individualistic focus of crime causation could only come from “minds so untroubled by and free of the immediate experience of the turbulence of war, ethnic cleansing, forced migration, and unhappy dislocation”. In the Australasian context we might add to the mix the lack of attention from so-called 'liberal' criminologists of the intergenerational impacts of colonial and neo-colonial policies such as the forced removal of children, stolen wages and the ghettoising of Indigenous peoples on reserves and in residential schools, the purposeful destruction of cultural practises and institutions and so forth.


With all this in mind, perhaps it is time to divorce ourselves from the abusive relationship wrought upon us by the discipline of criminology.

References 

Agozino, B (2003) Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason.  London: Pluto Press.

Agozino, B (2010) What is Criminology?  A Control Freak Discipline?  African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies, 4(1): i-xx.
Marie, D (2010) Maori and Criminal Offending: A Critical Appraisal, Australian New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 43(2): 283-300.
Said, E (2000) Reflections on Exile and Other Essays.  Cambridge (MASS): Harvard University Press.
Tauri, J (2009) The Maori Social Science Academy and Evidence-Based Policy, MAI Review, online.
Tauri, J (2012)
Tauri, J (2014) Settler Colonialism, Criminal Justice and Indigenous Peoples, African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies, 8(1): 20-37.
Weatherburn, D (2010) Guest Editorial: Indigenous Violence, Australian New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 43(2): 197-198.
Weatherburn, D (2014) Arresting Incarceration: Pathways Out of Indigenous Imprisonment. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

 

Eugenics as Crime Prevention

The following blog is the first in a series of guest commentaries by scholars working on issues of interest and importance to Indigenous communities. The author of this commentary is 

Dr Antje Deckert

who writes about the resurrection of eugenics as a policy (and practical) process for 'controlling' Māori.

The Commentary

In August 2015, the New Zealand Children’s Commissioner reported that Child Youth & Families (CYF) recorded around 16,000 substantiated cases of child abuse in parental care, and 117 cases while children are in CYF care.[i] Most abuse cases in CYF care were of violent nature (physical or sexual abuse), while statistics on abuse in parental care also include neglect and emotional abuse.

Abuse statistics demonstrate that Māori children make up 42% of violent abuse victims (49% of physically and 38% of sexually abused children), while Pakeha children make up 33% of violent abuse victims (29% of physically and 50% of sexually abused children). Compared to Pakeha children, CYF considered twice as many Māori children to have been neglected or emotionally abused, which leads to total abuse statistics of 49% for Māori children, compared to 29% for Pakeha children. Therefore, any claim about the gross overrepresentation of Māori in child abuse statistics depends significantly on which forms of abuse are included in the analysis, and, arguably, which cultural paradigm defines neglect and emotional abuse.

Over 16,000 abuse cases in a total population of 1,161,387 children, means that 1.46% of Kiwi children suffer abuse while in parental care, compared to 3.04% of children who are in CYF care. However, this comparison neglects that most child abuse cases while in CYF care were reportedly of a violent nature. When discounting cases of emotional abuse and neglect in parental care, 0.29% of Kiwi children suffer violent abuse while in parental care, compared to 3.04% of children in CYF care. Arguably, this contradicts CYF’s mission statement that:

“A fundamental expectation we have is that children who come into contact with CYF should be better off as a result. […] CYF’s practice framework talks about keeping children safe from abuse and neglect, providing them with secure care.”

Institutional abuse disproportionately affects Māori children since they constitute around 55% of all children in CYF care. However, reporting on abuse cases in CYF care lacks a breakdown by ethnicity and indigeneity. Therefore, it is impossible to determine whether some children may actually face a lower risk of abuse in parental care than in CYF’s care.

Despite, or maybe because CYF fails to keep Kiwi children safe, the government is now contemplating another avenue in order to shed its responsibility for the prevention of child abuse – eugenics.

On 27^th September 2015 NZ’s Minister for Social Development, Anne Tolley, was interviewed on national radio. The conversation revolved around the preliminary review, and recommended overhaul of CYF. The review was triggered by the 2014 Glenn Inquiry which had identified major shortcomings in CYF’s service delivery. Tolley was questioned about early intervention strategies, and specifically whether CYF considers stopping certain people from having (more) children. The Minister responded:

“That’s very difficult for the State to do. I certainly think we should be providing more family planning, more contraceptive advice to some of the families that we know […]. I mean I know of cases that CYF have taken a sixth and seventh baby from. […] That’s a big step when the State starts telling people [if they] can have another child […]. That’s a huge step for the State to take. […] I’ll wait and see what the panel reports. I expect that they will be saying that we should get much faster contraceptive advice in. We should be offering […] tubal ligations, all sorts of things.”

Since the Glenn Inquiry has revealed that CYF staff are “bullies” who interact with clients in a judgmental, punitive and disrespectful manner; one can only imagine how such contraceptive “advice” is going to be packaged. Tolley’s suggestion inspired at least one Kiwi blogger to consider possible delivery formats of such contraceptive advice, including “positive incentives (pay them not to have more kids or get sterilised) [and] negatives incentives (no further welfare if they have further children).” Since Māori dominate the statistics of households with four or more children, this eugenic crime prevention strategy would disproportionately be directed at women of Māori descent.

However, this is not the first time that a Minister of Social Development has considered eugenics as a form of crime prevention. Paula Bennett, then in office, suggested as recently as in 2012 that any children born to potentially abusive mothers could be forcibly removed, and that the Family Court could have the power to prevent abusive women from having any more children.

Throughout New Zealand history, eugenics have provided middle-class Pakeha women with a discourse of social reform that neatly tied into the ideals of colonialism and therefore enabled these self-proclaimed ‘feminists’ to participate in the national debate about ‘racial health’. They portrayed themselves as the ‘mothers of the race’ while prescribing eugenic solutions for ‘deviant women’. Without hesitation, Tolley is stepping into the footsteps of her ancestors.

Considering that around 3% of Kiwi children in CYF care suffer violent abuse compared to 0.3% of children in parental care, the first Family Court order for tubal ligation should be addressed to the State. Especially because the State is unable to act as a role model in keeping children safe from abuse, the government should scrutinise both its ethical stance , and historical practices of abuse before directing eugenic solutions disguised as ‘early intervention strategies’ at its citizens, and disproportionately so at Indigenous women.

References

Children’s Commissioner (2015). State of Care: What we learnt from monitoring Child Youth and Family. Retrieved from http://www.occ.org.nz/assets/Publications/OCC-State-of-Care-2015.pdf

Farrar, D. (2015, September 28). How to encourage bad parents to stop having kids. [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://www.kiwiblog.co.nz

George, P. (2015, September 28). Why did Tolley talk about contraception? [Blog post]. Retrieved from http://yournz.org

Merchant, R. S. (2010). Who are abusing our children? An exploratory study on reflections on child abuse by media comments [MA thesis]. Massey University: New Zealand. Retrieved from http://mro.massey.ac.nz/bitstream/handle/10179/1612/02_whole.pdf?sequence=2

Ministry of Social Development (2015). Modernising Child Youth and Family: Expert panel interim report. Retrieved from https://www.msd.govt.nz/documents/about-msd-and-our-work/work-programmes/cyf-modernisation/interim-report-expert-panel.pdf

Raumati, G. H. (2009). “Warrior genes” and the disease of being Māori. MAI Review, 2, 1-11.

Statistics New Zealand (2013). Quick Stats on Māori. Available from www.stats.govt.nz

Wanhalla, A. (2007). To ‘better the breed of men’: Women and eugenics in New Zealand, 1900-1935. Women’s History Review, 16, 163-182.

Wynd, D. (2013). Child abuse: An analysis of Child Youth and Family data. Auckland: Child Poverty Action Group.

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[i] For the purposes of this analysis, it is assumed that abuse statistics affect the age group of 0-19 year olds, since CYF does not provide demographic details.

Crime Control Policy and the Demonisation of Indigenous Youth

The attached link is a video recording of my keynote address to the 1st Australasian Youth Justice conference, hosted by the Australian Institute of Criminology, in May of 2013.

Enjoy

Juan

‘If You’re So Good, Why is Your Policy so Bad? A Maori Critique of Crime Control in New Zealand

Notes from my presentation to the Australia New Zealand Society of Criminology Conference, 22-25 November 2012.

Opening Statement

In case anyone is wondering, the first part of the title of the paper was a comment uttered by a participant during a consultation hui (meeting) with Maori service providers organised by the Department of Corrections in 2001 in Invercargill.  The purpose of the hui was to inform the development of the Department's Treaty of Waitangi Strategy.  

I heard this and many similar comments from Maori service providers, ex and current offenders, practitioners and even policy workers, during my ten years working in the Policy Industry from 1999.  It is a phrase that nicely frames the focus and content of this paper, mainly because it invokes a fundamental tension between the rhetoric and ideology of crime control policy production, and the impact such activity is having on the everyday lives of individual Maori, whanau, Maori communities and Maori service providers, tension that results from the Industry’s continuous exaggeration of the efficacy of its activities and its value to Maori.  The tendency of the Policy Industry to exaggerate the efficacy of its well-resourced activities is made obvious by decades of catastrophic failure of the Industry’s policy approach to social harm to have any meaningful impact, especially for Maori.   

Before I discuss why I believe that, overall, crime control policy making in New Zealand is an abject failure, especially for Maori, I first want to make the following statement to lay the contextual framework for what follows:

Arguably, Indigenous peoples residing in settler colonial societies experience a number of ‘truths’ when confronted by imposed, Eurocentric criminal justice systems; including that:

• the ‘system’ plays a significant role in bringing about the ongoing problem of Indigenous over-representation;

• the role the ‘system’ plays, especially the Policy Industry, goes largely unexamined and unchallenged (more on why this is later in the paper); and

• the Policy Industry is ably supported by administrative formulations of the discipline of criminology, in particular a virulent form that appears in the settler colonial context – Authoritarian Criminology; a relationship that is most accurately described as parasitic.

This commentary focuses on two critical questions:

• why are the ‘Maori strategies’ and policies of these agencies so ineffective, and largely irrelevant to the Maori communities they are designed to serve?  And

• why are policy workers and criminologists blaming Maori for the current levels of Maori over-representation?

The following commentary is based on empirical analysis derived from a range of qualitative research engagements with Maori cons, ex-cons, service providers, practitioners, social and youth workers, youth, youth gangs, discussions with researchers and academics over the past 18 years, including (importantly) 10 years analysing and developing policy as a member of the Policy Industry.

What is the Crux of the Problem?  The Policy Bubble

There are a number of issues/factors that play a role in the overall poor quality of Maori-targeted policy and interventions produced by the Policy Industry: combined they construct what I refer to as the Policy Bubble.  What is ‘the bubble’?

Exaggerated claims of success in the face of the inevitable, catastrophic failure of policy, and interventions.

How does the bubble manifest?

Through planned, purposeful build up of pressure relating to moral panic and political rhetoric relating to a) a particular form of social harm, and/or b) problem population (such as Maori).

Supported by:

Utilisation of managerialist policy development tools underpinned by core procedural concepts (which are in fact meaningless rhetorical devices) like ‘international best practice’, ‘evidence-based policy’, ‘scientific interventions’.

Underpinned by: 

The cherry picking of empirical evidence by policy workers to support preconceived, politically-driven policy, resourcing, legislative decisions:

All this activity is carried out with the full knowledge of the Policy Industry that the efficacy of said policies and interventions will have little positive impact on Maori - the exaggeration of its impact is intentional.

Case studies
Readers who are interested in this issue should engage with the following crime control policy projects; material for each one is readily available via the relevant government agency's webpages, or through submission of a Official Information Act request:

Dept of Corrections Integrated Offender Management.

Interdepartmental Organised Crime Strategy.

Ministry of Justice-led Crime Reduction and Youth Offending strategies.

Bursting the Bubble

Catastrophic (policy) failure occurs because of:

• an over-reliance on external interventions lacking coherence to the NZ social context;

• the a-cultural, a-theoretical nature of policy making;

• policy making is part of a ‘political service’ and not the public service; and

• ignorance of contemporary lived experience/social context of Maori.

Exaggerated claims made in the face of inevitable, catastrophic failure occur BECAUSE of the political nature of policy making, and because policy development is about control and manipulation of individuals and populations, and NOT the reduction of social harm

Case studies

Two excellent case studies that demonstrate the Policy Industry's purposeful use of interventions or policy levers to which they attach exaggerated claims of probable success include:

• Boot camps, and various high level, inter-agency projects such as

• Re-offending by Maori (RoBM)/Effectice Interventions/Drivers of Crime.

The criminal justice system and the policy sectors contribute to the problem of catastrophic failure in a number of ways, including:

• the ongoing utilisation of militaristic-style policing strategies for ‘brown fella's’,

• the Policy Industry's over-reliance on imported, socially inappropriate western crime control interventions, and

• 'consultation' processes that marginalise non-Western knowledge and experiences from the act of policy making.

How Should We Respond to This Situation?  

By organising a multi-pronged, organised approach.

By all means carry on working ‘in’ the system, as policy workers, external advisors and such like, but be realistic and recognise that our ability to significantly alter current poor, racist practices of the Policy Industry is negligible without the dual strategy of 'good Maori'/'bad Maori' (critics).

Build a Maori-centred Congress focused on a) critiquing the Policy Industry, media, politicians and Authoritarian Criminologists and their activities to hold them accountable for the impact of their work and b) developing our own knowledge, empirical evidence and theories on the impact of policies and interventions to ensure our voices and experiences are ‘known’. 

The proposed Congress needs to involve researchers, academics, social service providers, cons, ex-cons, politicians of the ‘right’ ideological bent.  Furthermore, with regards the academy, it is imperative that we construct and employ an Indigenous Criminology, perhaps a Warrior Criminology focused on supporting our peoples endeavours to construct and practice meaningful interventions for social harms.  Our Warrior Criminology should aggressively pursue and combat racist criminologies and the Policy Industry, in order to nullify the negative impact their activities often have on Maori.

At present we have an interesting coalition forming that is seeking, as one of its key aims, to silence Indigenous critique of the policy sector and our challenge to the hegemony of administrative criminologists as the states principal 'advisors'.  Members of both groups, the Policy Industry and conservative, Authoritarian criminologists, are pointing the finger at Maori for the failure of New Zealand's crime control policy.  They are exaggerating the extent to which we influence the Policy Industry, as manifested in the proliferation conferencing programmes, Maori prison units, 'tikanga' programmes in corrections, Maori justice strategies and the like.  

This attack is fundamentally flawed because it ignores significant empirical evidence that a) these interventions are manifestations of public service/state indigenisation of Eurocentric (and often imported) policies and interventions.  Few, if any, are actually based on tikanga; b) so-called 'Maori interventions' receive less than 10% of the country's spend on crime control interventions; and c) Maori are far more likely to be subjected to imported, Eurocentric crime control interventions than they are to participate in tikanga-based programmes.

Globalisation of Crime Control: Restorative Justice and Indigenous Justice

The following text is based on my notes for a presentation at the European Criminology conference, held in Budapest 3-6 September, 2013.

Introduction

Firstly, I want to articulate my 'position' to the audience, in others words expose both my purpose and my prejudice: this presentation is not the 'scientific observations of an Administrative Criminologist', but rather the subjective, grounded observations of an Indigenous activist.  My first, and primary goal is to articulate the Indigenous experience of the activities of criminologists, policy makers, and the restorative justice industry; to expose our concerns with how the activities of these crime control 'players' are exacerbating the neo-colonialism of First Nations through their ongoing use of Indigenous cultural artifacts in support of the inter-jurisdictional transfer of their crime control products.  My focus on expressing the Indigenous voice and experience enables me to meet the challenge laid down by First Nation leaders to further the cause of Indigenous justice, and also that of a small number of Western criminologists, such as O'Malley, Muncie and Stenson for criminology to move on from obsessive theorising about the shape and depth of contemporary globalising of crime control, and instead (my interpretation of what they were asking for) 'get real' and start analysing the micro-level impact all this 'globalising activity' is having 'on the ground' and with specific communities - in this case First Nations residing in Settler Societies like New Zealand and Canada.

I became interested in the globalisation of crime control as a criminological topic in the early 2000's, as a result of critical research into family group conferencing (see Tauri, 1998; 1999).  My interest was fuelled by a) engaging with the then growing criminological literature on the seeming increasing global transfer of western crime control policies, as a way of understanding how the FGC forum had moved from New Zealand to other jurisdictions; and b) because of a curious incident that occurred at an Indigenous justice conference I attended in British Columbia, Canada, in March of 2004.  The 'incident' went something like this:

Marketing restorative justice
At one point I was sitting working on my notes for my keynote address, when 2 delegates came to me and handed me a document, saying that I should read it and perhaps even comment on it later.  The document was a glossy, A4 marketing booklet for an RJ franchise (private) company.  The 'product' being spruiked was the company's franchised version of the FGC forum.  But that wasn't the really interesting part of the document (although finding out, at that time, that FGC had been privatised, certainly was revealing), it was the cover, and the language being used to 'sell' the product that really caught my attention. 

The script on the cover talked about 'real justice for Aboriginal peoples' and included a Koru motif, a well known 'Maori' art symbol, and the primary colours were Black, Red and White, the well known colours of the Maori sovereignty movement and its flag.  On opening the document I was confronted by  the usual over-the-top spiel associated with marketing materials, but in summary it went something along these lines:

'do you have an Aboriginal justice problem?  Are your Aboriginal peoples significantly overrepresented in the the criminal justice system?  If so, we have the deal for you, FGC's, a Maori (Aboriginal) justice initiative'... etc.etc

The Restorative Justice Industry and Indigenous Peoples
So, we might ask ourselves'what is wrong with this story?  What is concerning about this particular private company spruiking its wares on the international crime control market utilising the symbols, language and art of Maori? 

From an Indigenous perspective the answer is... everything, because a) the company in question certainly had not engaged with Maori to discuss using this material (evident from the script and work cited in the document), or sought permission to utilise it (more about that issue, and 'ownership' of culture in a postscript on responses to my presentation to be discussed in the next blog), and b) what was in fact being marketed, the FGC product, was not an Indigenous justice forum, at least not to the extent the company was claiming.  What the company was doing was simply repeating the oft-told, exaggerated claim of certain Australasian Administrative Criminologists, what I call the 'Origin Myth of the FGC', namely that the FGC forum is heavily imbued with 'Maori cultural practice', or is indeed an 'Indigenous forum'. 

Let us be clear - these claims are exaggerated: the forum is in fact much more heavily imbued with Western 'cultural artefacts', having its 'biological genesis' from the then growing mediation/western communitarian crime control response at the heart of its (heavily institutionalised) practice.  It is a Western policy/criminological invention on to which Administrative Criminologists and policy workers have grafted bits of Indigenous philosophy and practice.  At its philosophical heart the product is less about 'our ways of justice', and more a reflection of the then growing policy focus of responses to Western youth justice - the 'responsibilisation' of youth offenders and their families. 

From an Indigenous perspective, the activities of certain Western criminologists, policy-makers, and private franchise companies, spruiking certain RJ products, like FGC and Sentencing Circles - Western crime control models replete with bastardised Indigenous components - represents one of the biggest and most serious Criminological shams of the past 50 years (others include claims that 'more police = less crime', or that 'prisons are/can be therapeutic environments'). 

These are the products that are all too often valorised in the RJ literature; offered up as evidence to support the social movements claim to be significantly different to the brutalising, violent state justice system, and to its commitment to cultural sensitivity and empowerment of Minorities.  In fact the movement needs to wake up to itself and realise the following uneasy truths that all this activity:

a) is playing into the hands of government and policy makers - enabling them to offset the Indigenous challenge to the legitimacy of the formal justice system by providing it with artifacts that enable the appearance of cultural sensitivity and responsivity, in place of a genuine critique of the genocidal practices of state dominated crime control;

b) is more about fuelling the careers of criminologists and profits for private RJ companies, than empowering First Nations and furthering their desire for judicial autonomy.

Apart from a few well known exceptions (Kath Daly, Harry Blagg and Chris Cunneen, in the Australian context), the the acceptance of the Origin Myths associated with FGC and Sentencing Circles (re: their Indigenous foundations) within the RJ Academy, policy making, etc, is almost total, and goes largely unchallenged in the criminological and RJ lexicon.  This situation is a disgrace and there is no excuse for it, especially since publication of the Indigenous critique of all this activity has been steadily growing since the late 1990s, including my own work and that of Wenona Victor and Gloria Lee, to name a few.  And yet if you look at any bibliography on these artifacts published by the Academy you rarely find any reference to these publications, or meaningful engagement with the Indigenous issues and experiences they offer.  And what discussion there is, is more often than not highly superficial and dismissive.  For Indigenous criminologists like myself the situation is fuelling our discontent with the wider discipline of Criminology as it yet again demonstrates its willingness to support the neo-colonial subjugation of First Nations, just as it did during the colonialism, a fact eloquently exposed by Biko Agozino in his 2004 book Counter-colonial Criminology.

As an Indigenous person I find it easy to understand why Western criminologists, policy makers, private RJ companies and the like, are drawn to using Indigenous culture to sell their wares.  After all, one of the fundamental 'rules' of modern marketing is that 'sex sells', and let's face it, the Indigenous life-world is very sexy and very exotic.  This process - the Western criminological enterprise using, even stealing our 'stuff' - let us call it what it really is, namely the Eroticisation of Western crime control; a process driven by the desire to strengthen the marketing of Indigenised products on international markets.  But let's be just as clear about what it is not - the empowerment of the Indigenous Other.

And what may we ask, is the philosophical basis to all this marketing activity?  Well, one fundamental driver is the belief amongst many Western crime control 'experts' of the universal appeal of their wares; that Western crime control 'culture' can be universally applied anywhere in the world so long as you indigenise and eroticise for local consumption.

In 2001 Susanne Karstedt wrote that criminology was moving towards Indigenisation; rediscovering 'traditional' communitarian practices, but utilising Indigenous modes of crime control due to the Wests loss of their own practices over time; importing our practices from the Periphery to inform justice practice at the Centre.   Susanne was right to a point, because what was being imported were not Indigenous wares but Western responses, eroticised 'packages of political subjectivity' that met Western needs to 'get in touch with their historical, communitarian selves'.  In other words, you were all 'had' by a wonderfully effective marketing strategy.

The Impact of RJ Marketing on First Nations
The impact on First Nations of all this activity is very real, and very concerning.  Over the past 3 decades First Nations around the world have been resisting colonialism and neocolonialism by attempting to create for themselves some form of jurisdictional autonomy.  In response to these activities, and at the forefront of state resistance, have been globalised RJ products that are used as offerings of appeasement in place of real change to the racist, brutalising practices of crime control agencies.  Returning now to the story I used to open this presentation, the use of Indigenous cultural components to sell RJ products was a standard practice of companies operating in the North American jurisdiction.  And it had a very real impact as the Royal Mounties began utilising the forum as a standard response to youth offending.   

Dr Wenona Victor, a criminologist from the Stolo Nation of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, underlines the successful transfer of FGC’s to Canada through the targeting of First Nations as recipients of this particular form of neo-colonial crime control product, and of the impact it had on First Nation moves to empower themselves.  By the late 1990s the Stolo First Nation of the Fraser Valley had begun the process of reinvigorating their own justice processes.  During that process they were informed that to 'receive' referrals of their youth (offenders) they would need to use FGC's.  Dr Victor describes receiving training on implementing FGC within Stolo territory, a process that had been sold to them by justice officials as “…developed by the Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand”  She recounts the Stolo experience of receiving this training thus:

On the first day we all eagerly awaited her [the trainer’s] arrival.  We were somewhat surprised to see an extremely “White” looking lady enter the room; however, we have blonde blue-eyed, even red-headed Stolo among us, and so, too, we presumed, must the Maori.  However, it did not take us long to come to realise this lady was not Maori and was in fact Xwelitem [European].  Ah, the Maori had sent a Xwelitem; okay, we do that too, on occasion.  It is one of the many ironies of colonisation whereby Xwelitem often become our teachers….. [t]here are times when it is an Xwelitem who is recognised as the Stolo ‘expert’ and therefore, is the one talking even when there are Elders present.  But by the end of the three day training course I was convinced the Maori had lost their minds!  There was absolutely nothing Indigenous about this [FGC] model of justice whatsoever! (in Palys and Victor, 2007: 6)

Let me finish by reiterating what is going on here: the Stolo First Nation is attempting to empower themselves in part by resurrecting their own, tradition-based justice processes. While doing so government agents inform them that to be able to 'practice' Stolo justice with their own youth they would need to practice the 'justice' of another group of First Nations. Except that what they were expected to use was not Indigenous. The Academy, the RJ movement has a lot to answer for.