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. 

Old Wine in an Old Bottle? An Indigenous Commentary on the Criminology of the Global South

The idea for the title of this presentation came from a discussion I had in early 2019 with a prominent Australian Aboriginal scholar regarding the Criminology of the Global South (from here-on-in Southern Criminology), during which he described engaging with material produced by Australian members of this ‘new’ criminological movement, as akin to drinking ‘old wine out of a dirty bottle’.  The old wine refers to the rehashed Eurocentric theories and focus of the new criminology, while the dirty bottle referred to the fact that Southern Criminology arose from the same bastion of white privilege, the neo-liberal university, as had most of the schools of criminology that have existed previously.

According to advocates, Southern Criminology is the latest criminological project seeking to ‘decolonise’ the discipline, removing it from its ‘Northern’, Eurocentric foundations and theoretical bias.

The esteemed British scholar Matthews, described Southern Criminology as “probably the most significant theoretical development in the recent period”, and just recently Fonseca described the movement as “a gush of fresh air in the debate involving studies of crime, crime control and punishment” (quoted in Moosava, 2019).

I agree with the gush of air part of that last quote, but I not as yet convinced of its freshness, given the conduct of some of its Australian adherents towards Indigenous scholars and scholarship over the past decade, and the lack of meaningful engagement with our work and with Indigenous peoples in general.  

Unlike Leon Moosavi’s paper published in the British Journal of Criminology in 2019, I will not be offering a ‘friendly critique’ of this supposedly ‘new’ criminological movement.  If you’ve read Moosavi’s paper you will recall that he chose to offer a friendly critique Southern Criminology because he wanted to enhance the project due in part, to a belief that it has a solidarity with the principles of decolonising criminology rather than scepticism about its necessity or potential worth to the cause of social (and especially to Indigenous) justice. Well right now I am sceptical not so much of the intent of Southern Criminologists, because thus far they are saying pretty much all the right things - racism bad, inequality bad, free us from the shackles of ‘Northern’ theory, ‘decolonise the discipline’, and speak for the disaffected - etc, etc.  However, demonstrating support for decolonisation required much more than a few statements included in an article here or there, or collected edition/handbook.  We, and by that I mean Indigenous peoples, have heard it all before, so we tend to judge those who claim to be our ‘allies’ on their actual conduct, or, as this is an academic exercise, on the content of their research (and their conduct during and after it), what they say about us, who they have invited to speak about us, and if they are engaging respectfully and meaningfully with us. 

The theorist who appears to have greatly influenced the idea for a Southern Criminology is Raewyn Connell, author of that well-known work Southern Theory (2007).  In that work Connell advanced the argument for the ‘South’ to create its own body of theory and knowledge.  Her reasoning for offering this proposition: because of the orientalist attitude that pervades the social sciences that views academic scholarship and knowledge emanating from the South as of poor quality and not worth consideration.

As an Indigenous person, and researcher, I do not entirely disagree with Connell’s assessment of the social sciences. In my experience this attitude is pervasive within the discipline of criminology; for example when a scholar like Don Weatherburn write as recently as 2014, that there is nothing for us to learn from Indigenous knowledge about the causes of crime, because all we need to know we can get from western science (a not uncommon sentiment amongst Australian criminologists in my experience), then Connell is clearly onto something.  But she, just like many of the scholars involved in Southern Criminology in my part of the world, are talking about a situation and an issue that we Indigenous people have long known about, have been researching, and actively seeking to address.  One must wonder to what extent Southern Criminology is yet another example of a bunch of (predominantly white) criminologists turning up extremely late to our party…. largely uninvited.

The idea that Australian criminology is part of the periphery – a central platform of the rationale for Southern Criminology - greatly amuses me.  Why?  Because of the long and ongoing history of bigotry within Australian Criminology and the paternalistic and colonialist attitudes towards Indigenous people and our knowledge.  I’ll return to this idea of Australian criminology as some backward, ignored, lonely bunch, looking with longing to the Great North just to be recognised, like some teenager at the school dance hoping someone, anyone, will ask him or her to dance, a little later.

So, let us briefly discuss this project, this Southern Criminology and in so doing I am going to skim briefly and broadly over the main arguments (for its existence), etc, for a detailed understanding read the extant literature:

It starts with the observation that criminological theories and concepts have largely been produced in ‘the West’, meaning Europe, the North America.  It is also assumed that the ‘knowledge of the North’ can be readily transported to the periphery, and that this knowledge will be relevant anywhere (Moosavi, 2019), whether psycho-therapeutic programs or policing tactics, or entire prison regimes, as in the case of New Zealand’s importation the Integrated Offender Management system from Canada in the early 2000’s. 

Let me just pause here for a moment because I need to say something about this portrayal of the ‘North’.  As an Indigenous scholar I need to say that when we hear or read the term criminology of North American and Western Europe, the moment it hits our brain it is translated into White Criminology: criminology by and for white people who then do us poor natives a huge favour by offering us their gift of criminological knowledge to fix crime problems generated mostly from the colonising behaviour of their ancestors, or indeed themselves, if my experience of Australian criminologists is anything to go by.

Moosava (2019) also reports that Southern criminologists are motivated by the need to challenge the largely one directional nature of knowledge flow (North to South) in order to attain a more rounded criminological knowledge of crime and social harm.  In this regard, much of what I have read thus far from the Australasian practitioners of Southern Criminology leads me to believe that what they are doing or intend to do is privilege the knowledge and experiences of marginalised communities.

Any attempt by members of Southern Criminology to prioritise the experiences of the marginalised, if this principle were to result in concrete action on their part, would indeed be welcomed by Indigenous communities.  But of course, some of us are already doing just that.  And so to presage one of my critiques of Southern Criminology - at least the Australian variant - nothing I’ve read so far about their motivations or the core focus of their work is in fact new, as I stated previously, Indigenous scholars have been doing it, and not just saying it, for decades.

I agree with Moosava’s point that so far Southern criminologists have not offered enough reflection on whether the decolonisation of criminology is even possible given the discipline’s Western origins, and its long and continuing parasitic relationship with the state.  The difficulty of that disentanglement from the colonialist and paternalistic mindset of criminology I will highlight with a couple of examples below.

Secondly, I also agree with Moosava’s contention that the Australian branch of Southern Criminology is highly Eurocentic in terms of theory and personnel.  He rightly points out that in the Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South released in 2018, almost half of the 79 contributors are based in Australian institutions, and the vast majority were white.  This is reflective of the way in which Southern Criminology is dominated by Australian criminologists to such an extent that Moosava writes that it may be more accurate to describe it as ‘Australian Criminology’.

At this point Southern Criminology is not representative of the disaffected communities who truly represent the South, such as the Indigenous peoples residing in settler-colonial jurisdictions. For this reason, its claims to be a decolonising project are groundless, unless of course they mean they are decolonising themselves, in which case we wish them all the best.

This brings us to the inevitable question: how far ‘South’ do you need to be, to be able to truly, accurately call yourself a ‘Southern Criminology’; how disaffected, ignored or marginalised?  Well, I put it to you that I needs to be a lot further south than the comfortable, privileged position of academics in the wealthy academic institutions of Brisbane, Sydney or Melbourne.

Right now, I am extremely pessimistic about Southern Criminology, especially the leadership of its Australian branch, can engage with our experiences in a meaningful way.  For example, comments by one of the founders of Southern Criminology during a keynote speech at a recent, major criminology conference, draw attention to the continued prevalence of ‘old school’ attitudes towards Indigenous scholarship within the ‘movement’.  During question time they were asked what made this ‘new criminology’ different from others that seek to decolonise the discipline, such as post-colonial criminology, peacemaker criminology, counter-colonial and Indigenous criminology’s, to which they answered: ‘these criminology’s romanticise the other’, meaning they mythologise our old ways of doing justice and misrepresent the causes of Indigenous offending.  As I have said in an earlier blog, this portrayal of ‘our criminology’ does not reflect the research and publications we have produced about Indigenous peoples and crime.  How is this attitude any different from Don Weatherburn’s ignorant dismissal of Indigenous knowledge?  I put it to you all that it is not.

I want to finish on one last point: in a 2016 article, Carrington et al, all leaders in the development of Southern Criminology, stated that “[t]o be clear… our purpose is not to add to the growing catalogue of new criminology’s... [Southern Criminology] seeks to modify the criminological field to make it more inclusive of histories and patterns of crime, justice and security outside the global North... [It] seeks to work with and complement—to Southernize—other established and emerging fields in criminology: feminist, green, postcolonial, queer, rural, cultural and Asian. (2016: 11; emphasis mine).  The wording is unfortunately, because it leads one to ask, are they seeking to Southernise, or Colonise these other criminology’s?  It also gives the impression that something vital is missing from them, without clarifying exactly what ‘it’ is, and what they offer that is better.  And so, when Southern Criminologists call for ‘the periphery to invade the centre’ (Brown 2018: 96), some may recoil at what they might feel is imperialist language.  Again, I ask are they trying to decolonise or colonise?

Ok, so, how do we explain the strange conduct of some of the Australian contingent?  I think that Leon Moosavi, in his article from 2019, hits the nail on the head when he wrote that one of the most urgent matters for Southern Criminology to address is whether Australia should be considered as part of the Global South.  Mark Brown (2018: 93) has also identified this as a concern, stating that ‘Southern criminology faces its own existential question: what makes you Southern?’  This question divides opinion amongst proponents of Southern criminology. Some believe that Australia is one of the ‘selected enclaves of the symbolic north located south of the equator’ (Donnermeyer 2017: 128), whereas others emulate Raewyn Connell’s view that Australia is marginalized in similar ways to other Global South countries (Connell 2007: 212).

Australian scholarship may often be ignored by those in the United States and the United Kingdom, and Australia’s geographic location may make it harder for Australian scholars to participate in international academic events, but Australia is still a country that is developed, wealthy, stable, autonomous and privileged, meaning that suggesting that Australia is part of the Global South is problematic. At best, Australia may be part of the ‘semiperiphery’ (Medina 2011), but it still does not share the same hardship as the Asian, African and Latin American countries that are typically considered as part of the Global South, which is noteworthy because it has been suggested that a key component of ‘epistemologies of the South’ is that they comprise ‘knowledge born in struggle’ (Santos 2014: x).

The idea that Australian criminology is isolated from its Northern counterparts is nonsense.  Overall, their knowledge is not borne of struggle as Santos contends is a key marker of Southern Criminology, unless you define ‘struggle’ as receiving a lukewarm coffee from a café on the way to work.  If you want to see knowledge borne of struggle then go talk to Indigenous and African American scholars and we’ll tell you about our experiences of dealing with racists in the academy, of having our knowledge denigrated, our cultural practices and languages incorporated into departmental and institutional strategic plans (without meaningful funding attached); our people used as fodder as members of the academy work to credentilise themselves to move up in seniority.

The truth is we are already ‘Southern’ and we don’t need a bunch of white criminologists to show us what is required to decolonise the discipline; we’ve been doing it for a lot longer than this latest criminological fad was conceived.  Therefore, I do not advocate for the decolonisation of criminology; instead I call for the formulation of our own social justice-oriented discipline.  Why?  Because I believe our energy is best directed at the needs of our own communities, rather than wasting it on showing white academics how to behave more ethically.  In the end, it is not our job as Indigenous scholars to fix the problems of whitecentric criminology – let’s leave them to ‘southernise’ themselves.

References

Brown, M (2018) Southern Criminology in the Post-colony: More than a ‘Derivative Discourse?, in K. Carrington, R. Hogg, J. Scott and M. Sozzo (Eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan: 83-104.

Carrington, K; Sozzo, M and Hogg, R (2016) Southern Criminology, British Journal of Criminology, 56: 1–20.

Connell, R (2007) Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Donnermeyer, J (2017) The Place of Rural in a Southern Criminology, International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy, 6: 118–32.

Medina, J (2011) Doing Criminology in the ‘Semi-Periphery’ and the ‘Periphery’, in C. Smith, S. Zhang and R. Barberet (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of International Criminology. New York: Routledge: 13-23.

Moosavi, L (2019) A Friendly Critique of ‘Asian Criminology’ and ‘Southern Criminology’, British Journal of Criminology, 59: 257-275.

Santos, B (2014) Epistemologies of the South: Justice against Epistemicide. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.

Weatherburn, D (2014) Arresting Incarceration: Pathways Out of Indigenous Imprisonment. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies Press.

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.

On Adam Goodes, Expressions of Aboriginality and Racism

I have a confession to make: since moving to Australia in early 2010 I have fallen in love... with Australian Rules (AFL).

Now, I am a New Zealander, a 'Kiwi', and the unwritten rules of masculinity in that country - actually, it probably is written somewhere, most likely in the fine print on our birth certificate, is that we a) must love rugby, b) to be a real man, must play rugby, c) if we are not good enough or able for some reason to play rugby, we must love it above all other things, and believe that All Black's are God's, and d) if you don't love rugby then at least you should support rugby league.  I use to play rugby at school, and league when I was older; neither of which I was any good at - my true loves were, and remain, athletics and football (the real football, with a round ball), and now AFL.

Anyway, to the point: I moved to Australia and saw this weird game in TV, Australian Rules, or aerial ping pong as its detractors sometimes refer to it, and I didn't understand it at all but grew to love the skill and athleticism of the players.  And, in a nod to my changing sensibilities about violence in sport, there was none of the 'bring back the biff' bullshit that periodically arises from the mouths of retired league and rugby players who lament their precious game going 'soft', of becoming 'feminised'.  

Another reason I now watch AFL, is because of all the fantastic Aboriginal players in the sport, and the way, at least outwardly, the 'game', the clubs and supporters appear to appreciate them, and make room for them to express themselves as Aboriginal men.  I say outwardly because of course, as with any issues relating to 'race' and ethnicity in Australia,the 'truth' is somewhat different.

Cue last weekend and what is called the 'Indigenous round' of the AFL; cue Adam Goodes, a fantastic Aboriginal player for the Sydney Swans (and in case anyone dismisses this blog because I am 'probably a Swans fan', I support Carlton, and yes, we are having a crap year), and the 2014 Australian of the Year, scoring a goal and doing what was variously described as an Aboriginal war dance, a challenge; what we'd call in New Zealand a haka.  Cue the usual dickheads, mainly white, middle class male media and sports commentators going nuts, accusing Goodes of behaving inappropriately, of goading opposition supporters (from my club, Carlton).  Cue the village idiot of Melbourne, Andrew Bolt crying about how he'd get in trouble for making such gestures: actually, his reenactment of Goodes' 'war dance' made it look like he was trying to have a crap rather than making threats; but I digress.  And cue the usual over-the-top sulking by many non-Indigenous Australian's whenever a 'person of colour' - they don't need to be Aboriginal - take it upon themselves to express their Indigeneity, their culture in a way they deem appropriate, and not at a time and in a way that non-Indigenous peoples consider 'appropriate'.

I've been thinking all week about writing this blog, on this topic, and thinking about how I would express my feelings about Goodes' action and responses to it.  Then I read the Sydney Morning Herald as I always do on Sunday morning (hint to anyone reading this; of all the mainstream papers here in Australia, the Herald is in my view the best in reporting Aboriginal issues, although it isn't hard to win that award here, given the white privileged rubbish that gets printed in most of the others), and got to Peter Fitzsimmons' column in which, rather than express his own views on the issue, ceded the ground to a higher authority, the political commentator Waleed Aly who in Peter's estimation said it "better and more eloquently than the rest of us could dream of...."; and since I agree I am going to follow Peter's path and give the floor at this point to Aly, who stated the following about the reaction to Goodes':

'The thing about it that has mystified me all week - people talking all week about , 'Why are people booing Adam Goodes?' as though there is some mystery about it - there is no mystery about this at all.  And it's not as simple as it being about race - it's about something else. It's about the fact that Australia is generally a very tolerant society until its minorities demonstrate that they don't know their place'.

'And at the moment, the minute someone in a minority position acts as if they're not a mere supplicant, then we lose our minds.  And we say, you gotta get back in your box here,  And that's why Adam Goodes ruffles feathers - its not because he's controversial, not because he's a provocateur, none of that.  It's because he actually says I'm going to say something and I'm going to express Aboriginality and I'm going to do it at a time and a place in which sort of the vanilla velour cover of Australian society doesn't cope well with it very well....'.

'We have seen this before.  What happens is that the minute an Indigenous man stands up, and is something other than compliant, the backlash is huge and it is them who are creating division, destroying our culture, and that is ultimately what we boo.  We boo our discomfort....'.

Beautifully said.

Cue the Australian/New Zealand criminology conference in Auckland in 2012 and an incident between myself and a professor from an Australian university I have written about in a previous blog who, when criticised by me in a forum where he made uninformed comments about the status of Maori in New Zealand, told me and others that I had played 'the race card'.  In doing so he was implying that I had used my Aboriginality to silence his views simply because he was white, when in actual fact I would have slapped him down regardless of his colour; when you start by saying 'I don't know a lot about Maori', and then proceed to talk crap, you deserve to be challenged.  In the previous blog I tried to explain this guys behaviour in terms of an attempt to force attention away from his stupid, uninformed comments and back on to me as the 'unreasonable' Maori critic.  

The Goodes incident, and in particular Waleed Aly's wonderful commentary, has made me think that perhaps there was more going on here than diverting attention: what our privileged professor was doing was railing against an Indigenous man ignoring the conventions of the profession, the discipline and the academy, that we defer to professors as though they are faultless and  all-knowing.  In other words, in speaking up in an open forum and challenging his perspective, I moved outside of that comfortable box so many white privileged academics in Australia like us to be in - as supplicants to their uninformed comments on the 'Aboriginal context', as names on their crap ARC grants, and so forth.  The individual concerned played the 'race card' because I had not played 'the race game'; I was an uppity Maori boy who acted above his station and needed to be slapped down.  This I can tell you will never happen, and long may Adam Goodes express himself as he sees fit, although I'd really like it if he could stop playing so well against my beloved Carlton.  

Postscript to Hungary:

A Commentary on Tacit Racism within Eurocentric Criminology

Background

In the blog I released on 10 September, based on my presentation at the 2013 European Criminology Conference, I said that I would add a postscript focused on feedback I received during the session.  So here it is:

During question time two members of the audience took exception to my critical commentary on the Restorative Justice (RJ) industry's use of indigenous artifacts to construct and market their products.  The first made an exaggerated claim that I had accused ALL RJ theorists, writers, etc, of doing this; when clearly I was referring to many who write about FGC, sentencing circles, etc, and so his criticism was easily dismissed as nonsense.  The more interesting response was the second, and I want to highlight this individuals statements as I believe they are representative of the kind of lazy, prejudiced, sometimes even racist attitudes I've experienced in the last 15 years: they beautifully illustrate the 'tacit racism' and Eurocentrism that is never far below the surface of certain forms of the discipline of criminology.

In response to my commentary the individual in question countered with 2 comments:

"Who really owns culture; do you (Maori) have intellectual property rights over your culture"; and

"When I was in New Zealand I found out that the word 'Maori', means 'other person', so, I can call myself Maori...."

The first comment is typical Eurocentric bullsh*t: the line of argument is that unless we have a piece of paper saying 'we own these elements of our culture', as understood in Western legal terms, our culture, or anyone else's for that matter, is fair game.  In response; it is intellectually lazy to see these issues simply in terms of Eurocentrically-derived understandings of ownership of culture, and the racism inherent in these understandings are well documented in critical literature.  The issue for me was not 'ownership' per se, but the way in which European criminologists, RJ practitioners, policy entrepreneurs and RJ franchise companies are utilising Indigenous 'cultural artefacts' in ways that are unethical, such as exaggerating the 'Maoriness' of certain products in order to sell them on the crime control market.

While the first comment was intellectually lazy, the second was outrightly racist and offensive: first of all the word 'Maori' means different things, depending on dialect and socio-historical context, but was interpreted in the early to mid-19th century by Europeans to refer collectively to the various members of iwi (tribe), hapu (sub-tribe), whanau (family) etc.  There is no debate about it; to be 'Maori' you must be able to trace your whakapapa (genealogy) to these entities. 

What this individual was doing was taking one translation of the word from sometime in the mid-19th century to make the argument that he was 'Maori' in order to justify being able to 'take' whatever cultural artifacts he wanted to.  Now, in all my years of working in criminology and policy, I've come across some really obnoxious, Eurocentric assh*les, but never have I encountered this level of racism before, and never in an academic setting.  Since returning from Budapest I have pondered this response time and again, trying to make sense of it.  So far my only conclusion is that this individual, and the other person who's comments I discussed above, belong to that small group of Western academics who have been utilising First Nation cultural artifacts, as and how they wish, without ever having been challenged.  Well, they got challenged, and their responses revealed much about themselves AND the wider discipline they are members of.  

The Eurocentrism of the 'Liberal' Academy
Lately, I have been asked by a few colleagues whether we can/should develop an Indigenous Criminology as a sub-set of the broader discipline.  Those asking this question make the assumption that an Indigenous component to the discipline is required, and that staying 'in house' is the most effective way of challenging the issues I and other Indigenous criminologists have expressed about the discipline.  Looking at this question from inside the discipline, this makes sense, for as the saying goes 'how can you effect change if you are sitting outside the tent'.  Well, some tents you simply don't want to be sitting in, especially when it stinks of the racist paternalism, faux 'liberalism' and Eurocentrism that pervades certain portions of the discipline.  

Of late, the behaviour of members of the Eurocentric Academy such as the two individuals at the Budapest conference discussed above, and the behaviour of the two professors at the 2012 Australian and New Zealand criminology conference I dealt with in a previous blog, has me thinking that we are perhaps better off leaving the tent and thereafter applying a liberal dose of anti-bullsh*t spray.  My drift to this position has been propelled lately by the behaviour of a bunch of criminologists who seem to think that being obnoxious covers for being 'ethical'.  Their behaviour matches many of the concerns held by the Indigenous Academy, most particularly their preference for responding to the critical Indigenous voice by personalising issues and demonising the Indigenous Other who dares express a different point of view to them.  When you dovetail those issues with the inability to develop different (meaning respectful, collaborative) ways of engaging with the Indigenous academic community, then yet again we are faced with concluding that if you scratch the surface of Eurocentric criminology hard enough, the shiny, thin lacquer of liberalism falls away and the same tired old paternalistic odour is released that has permeated Criminology since its birth in colonial times. 

But all is not lost: there are those within 'White' Criminology we can work with and trust to behave ethically towards ourselves and our communities.  Presently, we are most likely to find these individuals within Cultural Criminology, Peacemaking Criminology, and the developing schools of Post-Colonial and Queer Criminology.  However, we should not forget that we owe the wider discipline of criminology nothing, especially as its practitioners have given us very little, except more prison, more brutal policing, more trauma. In response I expect some of its practitioners will talk about how we would be better off being part of a public criminology as opposed to becoming a boutique sub-school.  I'm also certain that some of them will like nothing more than for us to add an Indigenous element to the discipline, thus 'correcting the discipline from within'. Unfortunately, given the pervasiveness of the paternalistic, colonising attitudes of the wider discipline, I fear this approach will end up as nothing more than the criminological equivalent of the state's indigenisation of youth justice, where we 'add a bit of colour' to the same, tired old epistemologies, methodologies etc, as opposed to the discipline taking a long, hard look at itself. Sadly, given the repetitiveness of the unethical, racist behaviour of members of the Academy that I and other Indigenous scholars have experienced over recent years, it is apparent that the wider discipline is not our friend, and nor is it ever likely to be: I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that it might be better for us to walk away and leave it to stink up its own tent.

But if we do walk away, what then?  I don't know, I haven't really thought that question through in detail.  We could walk back into the Indigenous/Maori/Aboriginal justice fold and become a justice/human rights component of that discipline.  We might look to the growing, sophisticated school developing in Australia called Settler Colonialism, where Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars engage in critical analysis of the strategies used by neo-colonial states to subjugate First Nations.  Or we could become part of the growing Postcolonial studies movement, or even dovetail with our colleagues working in law and International relations to construct a broad 'school' of Indigenous Justice.  

A lot of food for thought and definitely the topic of a future blog.

A Critical Response to Advocates of Restorative Justice and Family Group Conferencing

The following blog seeks to answer some of the comments made in recent time by advocates for restorative justice, and in particular of the Family Group Conferencing (FGC) forum in response to the Indigenous critique.

Background

From its inception via the Child, Young Persons and their Families Act of 1989, until the late 1990s, advocates of FGC and the wider RJ context, and the policy sector responsible for its implementation, dominated commentary on the forum (Tauri, 1999).  The commentary was universally positive, but theoretically 'light', and lacking in data derived from independent research (as opposed to that supported by government agencies).  There was little in the way of critical commentary from within government circles, and dissenting voices from without were more often than not ignored, and sometimes vilified.  In the case of the author, the latter came in the form of a phone call one day in late 1999 from a senior Judge and noted advocate of FGC who bleated that he had heard I had criticised FGC's during a presentation at a conference in Canberra earlier that year and asked "how could you say such things".  Apart from the fact that what he had been told 2nd hand I had said being wrong, I also stated that the FGC was not a sacred cow and I was entitled to make critical comments if I wish.

Except I was wrong: the FGC had by then become a sacred cow.  It had also become a cash cow for some criminologists, policy entrepreneurs and ex-policemen from New Zealand and Australia in the decade since its inception.  By the early 2000's FGC of some form or other had 'travelled' from New Zealand to Australia, from Australia and New Zealand to North America, and from New Zealand to Germany and from there to other Western European jurisdictions.  The FGC had gone global, and the forum, at the time and ever since New Zealand's only original crime control idea/policy, had made the country the darling of the then developing restorative justice industry.

Now, since the late 1990s I and a whole host of other critical criminologists have critiqued the FGC from various angles, including Kathy Daly, Harry Blagg, Chris Cunneen and Kelly Richards on the Australian perspective, Wenona Victor, Jonathan Rudin and Gloria Lee on the Canadian context, and myself and Cath Love on the New Zealand context.  Within this growing body of critical literature has been identified a number of issues with the FGC forum, far too many to discuss in detail here.  But one that is key to our understanding the importance of the FGC to the ever-expanding globalised RJ industry, is the constant exaggeration of its Indigenous (read Maori) foundations; what Daly (2002) would probably (and accurately) call one of the key Origin Myths of restorative justice.  

In short, the origin myth goes something like this: in the mid-1980s a Maori-led committee produced a critical review of social policy/care and protection practices as they impacted Maori (known as 'Daybreak' - see Ministerial Advisory Committee, 1988); that this report recommended that a Maori-centred justice process be developed, that the report and this recommendation lay the foundation for the FGC, and finally, that because of all this, the FGC forum was 'Maori inspired'; a 'Maori process', and/or 'rich with Maori philosophy and justice practice', etc.  Certainly, the forum developed out of Maori concerns for government responses to youth justice (amongst a number of issues), but as one of the key architects of the 1989 legislation, Doolan (2005: 1) “those of us who were involved in the policy development process leading up to the new law had never heard of restorative justice”, and nor was a major concern the oft-made and exaggerated claim that they were motivated by wanting to 'empower Maori to deal with their own youth offenders'.  Instead, their focus was on producing a state-centred forum based on what was then becoming the fashionable ideological bases to western youth justice policy, namely the responsibilisation of youth offenders and their families (see Richards, 2007 for a full analysis of the exaggerated way in which Maori input has been constructed by FGC advocates). 

This all sound lovely; the state producing a forum based on Maori justice principles, to empower us, etc, etc; except it is all exaggerated bull-dust.  Yes, when you look closely the forum includes some 'Indigenous' elements, and some RJ one's, but these were after-the-fact 'discoveries' manufactured by New Zealand and Australian criminologists who, in my opinion, simply cherry picked features of the FGC process that matched with so-called Indigenous and RJ processes, thereby creating the illusion of its 'Maoriness': in other words, they created a fiction which has since evolved into a myth: a myth many advocates of RJ and FGC have used since to facilitate the successful transfer of the forum across various jurisdictions. Nothing wrong with that per se, except those who are purposely doing this are doing so on the back of incomplete information (constructed in the form of the 'myth'); they are misrepresenting the forum as Indigenous, when it is not, and some are making quite a nice living from doing so.  And that, I believe, is unethical.  

Critiquing the Advocates

I want to focus for the remainder of this blog on responding to one particular RJ advocates critique of Indigenous criticisms of the FGC forum; namely comments made by Gabrielle Maxwell in a 2008 publication, in which she stated that:

In New Zealand there has been criticism that family group conferences have not been managed in ways that conform with traditional practice of Maori or those from other cultural backgrounds.  It has been suggested that the high proportion of Maori staff managing the process and the inclusion of Maori greetings and blessing is little more than tokenism and can rarely be described as a truly Maori process.  This is despite the undisputed origins of many aspects of the conference process in traditional Maori procedures (Consedine, 1995).  On the other hand, on occasion, the management of the conference process is sometimes passed over to a Maori social service group (Maxwell, 2008: 87).

These sentiments had previously been expressed by Gabrielle's one time collaborator, Alison Morris just a few short years before when she argued that in 'critiquing FGC's I failed to acknowledge the high numbers Maori working in New Zealand's Child Care and Protection service'.

Within Maxwell and Morris' comments we can identify many of the issues Maori and other critical Indigenous/non-Indigenous commentators have with much of the Academy’s writing on the FGC forum, in particular the manipulation of the available record to establish and sustain the origin myths of the FGC:

First: the most obvious issue is the claim that the FGC’s Maori foundations are ‘undisputable’.  The previous discussion, especially the research of Richards (2007) exposes the exaggerated nature of this claim.  In reiterating this origin myth and presenting it as ‘undisputable’, Maxwell and others ignore the significant amount of literature exposing this myth published since Consedine’s 1995 book.  Maxwell’s approach to espousing the origin myth of FGC highlights one of the fundamental criticisms Indigenous scholars have made about some members of the restorative justice Industry, namely the lack of engagement with the critical Indigenous/non-Indigenous literature (see Tauri, 2012; Tauri and Webb, 2011; more on this issue below).  

Second: Maxwell’s own published research on the FGC process (Morris and Maxwell, 1993; Maxwell et al, 2004) reported some Maori FGC participants being especially concerned with the tokenistic way in which ‘Maori culture’ was afforded space in the process, which more often than not comprised of state officials allowing elders to recite karakia (pray) at the beginning and end of the process: and that was pretty much it.  The 'reality' of the cultural context of the forum exposed by their own research, demonstrates that the actual practice of FGC is often far removed from ideological claims that the process offers meaningful opportunities for the empowerment of Maori, especially in 'leading' responses to the offending of their youth (See also Morris and Maxwell, 1998).  

Third: in the above quote Maxwell is replicating a fundamental weaknesses in the FGC/Maori justice scholarship, which is to ignore the lack of direct Maori input into the actual design of the Act and the FGC forum.  She also ignores the fact that officials involved in the developing the process - including the chief policy architect, Doolan - have since admitted that they were not focused on developing a ‘Maori justice process’, or indeed even a restorative justice one. 

What Maxwell and other restorative justice advocates are constantly doing is erroneously equating Maori requests for a ‘traditional forum’ (more especially in Moana Jackson’s 1988 report He Whaipaanga Hou than in Daybreak), with Maori justice philosophies being foundational to the formulation of the forum itself.  To do so is to ignore the reality of policy making in the New Zealand context, in particular the historical tendency for the criminal justice sector to ‘Indigenise’ Eurocentric crime control processes (see Jackson, 1995; Tauri, 1998; 2009; Tauri and Webb, 2011; Williams, 2001).  It also ignores that the supposed ‘Maori’ and restorative elements were identified long after the formulation and implementation of both the Act and the forum.  As Daly (2002: 63) effectively argues “the devising of a (white, bureaucratic) justice practice that is flexible and accommodating towards cultural differences does not mean that conferencing is an indigenous justice practice”.  Daly (2002: 4) then goes further, revealing that Maxwell herself is aware of this distinction when she includes the following quote from Maxwell and Morris’ original 1993 study:

A distinction must be drawn between a system, which attempts to re-establish the indigenous model of pre-European times, and a system of justice, which is culturally appropriate. The New Zealand system is an attempt to establish the latter, not to replicate the former. As such, it seeks to incorporate many of the features apparent in whanau [extended family] decision-making processes and seen in meetings on marae today, but it also contains elements quite alien to indigenous models.

Fourth: her claim that critics argue that “the high proportion of Maori staff managing the process… is little more than tokenism” does not feature in any of the literature published on the New Zealand context up till now, including the work of Jackson (1995); Love (2003) and Tauri (1998; 1999, 2005).  That significant numbers of Maori work in New Zealand’s child care and protection services (which involves FGC) is undisputed. However, it is simplistic to equate their employment in New Zealand's social services, with actual support for the process.  Indeed, Maori staff have in the past criticised the child care and protection processes utilised by the government agencies they work for, especially for the mono-cultural foundations of both policy and practice; most notably during Child Care and Protection Services staff consultation during the development of its differential service model, during Maxwell and colleagues own reviews of FGC published in 1993; 1998 and 2003, and most recently in Paora Moyles’ (2013) Master’s thesis on Maori social workers views and experiences of social work-related processes.  

Fifth: Maxwell’s attempt to counter criticisms of the tokenistic nature of the FGC process by noting that 'some FGC’s are handed to Maori and Pacifica service providers to facilitate', ignores the reality that her own research exposed - that very few FGCs actually take place in Maori homes or are run by non-Government entities (see Morris and Maxwell 1993; Maxwell et al, 2004).  

And

Lastly: as a critic of the way in which the FGC process continues to be marketed as a Maori process, and author of a number of journal articles and having read a considerable amount of the critical Indigenous/non-Indigenous literature, I found it interesting that when summarising the criticisms of authors like me, that none of the published, critical material was actually referenced, either in the body of the work, or in the bibliography.  Nor were the 'critics' actually named. The problem with this strategy, and probably the reason for it, is that it makes it difficult for readers to test the veracity of our claims.  And just as importantly, it makes it extremely difficult for readers to critically analyse Maxwell’s representation and analysis of our arguments - hence why some of our work is included in this blog.  I have come across this type of behaviour before: back in the early 2000's the justice system called for submissions for contract research on youth justice, to which the Crime Research Group at Victoria University of Wellington submitted a proposal.  In response to the submission, I and my colleagues challenged the lack of engagement in the groups proposal, with Maori and other Indigenous peoples criticisms of RJ in general and FGC in particular.  The response? One line, stating "... although Tauri has a different view".  So much for critical analysis of all available literature and once again, we see the critical Indigenous voice silenced. 

References

Daly, K (2002) Restorative Justice – The Real Story, Punishment and Society, 4(1): 55-79.

Doolan, M (2005) Restorative Practices and Family Empowerment: Both/And or Either/Or? Retrieved 8 August from http://www.americanhumane.org/site/DocServer/au13

Jackson, M (1988) Maori and the Criminal Justice System: He Whaipaanga Hou: A New Perspective.  Wellington: Department of Justice.

Jackson, M (1995) Cultural Justice: A Colonial Contradiction or a Rangatiratanga Reality?  In F. McElrea (ed.) Legal Pluralism and the Colonial Legacy.  Aldershot: Avebury: 31-45.

Love, C (2002) Maori Perspectives on Collaboration and Colonisation in Contemporary Aotearoa/New Zealand Child and Family Welfare Policies and Practices, paper presented at the Policy and Partnerships Conference, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo. 

Maxwell, G (2008) Crossing Cultural Boundaries: Implementing Restorative Justice in International and Indigenous Contexts, Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance, 11: 81-95.

Maxwell, G and Morris, A (1993) Family, Victims and Culture: Youth Justice in New Zealand.  Wellington: Social Policy Agency and the Institute of Criminology, Victoria University of Wellington.

Maxwell, G; Robertson, J; Kingi, V; Morris, A and Cunningham, C (2004) Achieving Effective Outcomes in Youth Justice.  Wellington: Ministry of Social Development.  

Ministerial Advisory Committee (1988) Puao-Te-Ata-Tu (Daybreak): The Report of the Ministerial Advisory Committee on A Maori Perspective for the Department of Social Welfare.  Wellington: Department of Social Welfare. 

Morris, A and Maxwell, G (1993) Juvenile Justice in New Zealand: A New Paradigm, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 26(1): 72-90. 

Morris, A and Maxwell, G (1998) Restorative Justice in New Zealand: Family Group Conferences as a Case Study, Western Criminology Review, 1(1) retrieved from http://wer.sonoma.edu/v1n1/morris.html.

Moyle, P (2013) Fro Family Group Conferencing to Whaua Ora: Maori Social Workers talk about their Experiences, unpublished Master's thesis. Palmerston North: Massey University. 

Richards, K (2007) 'Rewriting History: Towards a Genealogy of 'Restorative Justice', unpublished PhD thesis. Penrith: University of Western Sydney. 

Tauri, J (1998) Family Group Conferencing: A Case-Study of the Indigenisation of New Zealand’s Justice System, Current Issues in Criminal Justice: 10(2): 168-182.

Tauri, J (1999) Explaining Recent Innovations in New Zealand’s Criminal Justice System: Empowering Maori or Biculturalising the State, Australian New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 32(2): 153-167. 

Tauri, J (2005) Indigenous Perspectives (chapter), in Walters, R and Bradley, T (eds), Introduction to Criminological Thought:  Auckland: Pearson Longman.

Tauri, J (2009) An Indigenous Commentary on the Standardisation of Restorative Justice, Indigenous Policy Journal, forthcoming.

Tauri, J (2011) Indigenous Perspectives (reconfigured chapter), in R. Walters and T. Bradley (eds), Introduction to Criminological Thought (2^nd ed.).  Auckland: Pearson Longman.

Tauri, J (2012) Indigenous Critique of Authoritarian Criminology, in K. Carrington; M. Ball; E. O’Brien and J. Tauri (eds.), Crime, Justice and Social Democracy: International Perspectives.  London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 217-233.  

Tauri, J and Webb, R (2011) The Waitangi Tribunal and the Regulation of Maori Protest, New Zealand Sociology.

Williams, C (2001) The Too Hard Basket: Maori and Criminal Justice Since 1980.  Wellington: Institute of Policy Studies.