‘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.

Control Freaks and Criminologists

Control Freaks and Criminologists

The focus of this blog entry are non-Indigenous criminologists who build their careers on the backs of Indigenous peoples yet demonstrate little commitment to First Nation issues or engagement with the communities they write about with such authority.

One of the most influential criminologists in the world today is Biko Agozino, a Nigerian academic currently teaching at Virginia Tech in the US. I regard Biko as one of the key criminologists of the 21st century for a number of reasons, in particular the fact that he dares to speak truth to power, namely the discipline of criminology and the part it plays in the continued subjugation of First Nations peoples and other marginalised communities.  Biko's importance to the development of Indigenous perspectives on social harm/crime, and critique of Eurocentric criminology is beautifully captured when he asks and answers the question:

"What is criminology? A control freak discipline!"(Agozino, 2010).

Control-freak indeed: has any academic discipline (apart from psychology) failed so dismally to achieve what it tells everyone are its key objectives namely to 'understand and reduce crime'? When the celebrated Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University was set up in the 1950s, the British Home Office gave it the task of 'identifying crime and solving the crime problem', meaning that it had to identify the causes and discover a cure.  If that is what we were meant to be doing then by every measure the academy has been a dismal failure.  The same can be said of the disciplines main host, supporter and funder, government (yes, if government is the host, then the discipline of criminology is a parasite).

Throughout the 20th century and so far in the 21st, we have offered ever more sophisticated theories of criminality and cures such as boot camps, tough on crime policies including New York's much praised (but greatly exaggerated) broken windows approach, longer prison sentences, ever more sophisticated prison regimes (for example, New Zealand's Integrated Offender Management process) community policing, militaristic policing strategies, conferencing and restorative justice, crime prevention through environmental design (for example, CCTV) and my favourite academic discovery of the moment, crime science. Anyone out there feeling any safer due to all these successful solutions?  Seen any significant reductions in offending rates? Of course if they are confronted with difficult questions like 'why do your scientifically-derived interventions not = meaningful, long-term reductions in crime', criminologists, clinicians, practitioners and policy wonks will invariably produce a small, localised evaluation of their pet project and say 'here, we reduced crime for this group over 12 months.....' or something similar.  Dig deeper and invariably you will find that those who designed the solutions manufactured (and often carried out) said research, or paid someone to do it for them while maintaining control over research production (a particular skill of the policy sector). One thing that can be said with accuracy about criminology is that it is extremely skillful in the art of self-promotion and self-preservation through making itself relevant.  And how does it make itself relevant?  Well, too often by kissing the backside of the state via gazing uncritically at its activities while gazing from afar at the life-world of First Nation peoples (Tauri, 2011: by 'from afar' I refer to the tendency of some criminologists to analyse statistics whilst sitting at their desks, then write with authority about the Indigenous context while getting no closer to engaging with us than staring out the window).

Of course I need to qualify the previous statement by stating that when I talk about the failures of criminology, I am referring to particular schools within the discipline often referred to as administrative criminology or positivist criminology. In short, these criminologies are characterised by a) a focus on issues, definitions (of crime), policies, etc deemed by the state to be important and worthy of empirical enquiry; b) take as their theoretical and epistemological (a word so loved by post-modernists that simply means 'world view') framework from dead white guys or live ones, that are sprinkled liberally over social and cultural contexts for which the said framework lacks explanatory power; c) 'job for the state', meaning take the Crown's coin and do the Crown's bidding; d) knowing little about the communities they research and write about, highlighted by the fact they prefer to use non-engaging methods (statistical analysis, written questionnaires, etc); and e) ignore or are uninterested in key issues for  marginalised communities like the impact of colonial dispossession, genocide, institutional racism and bias and the historical lack of meaningful infrastructural investment (see Cohen, 1988 and Young, 2011 for excellent discussions of these forms of criminology).

In neo-colonial jurisdictions there exists an even more virulent form of the criminology described above, to which I give the title Authoritarian Criminology. This form shares many of the identifying markers of administrative criminology highlighted previously, but is distinguished by:

• confining its criminological gaze to issues relating to state-defined ‘problem populations’, more often than not people of colour and working class youth, and issues without significant engagement with individuals or communities from these populations; and
• the utilisation of methodologies/methods that highlight Eurocentric knowledge construction  and ‘expertise’ devoid of meaningful engagement with First Nations, while silencing our methods of knowledge construction and dissemination through labelling them non-scientific, ideological and value-laden.  

This form of criminology can be called Authoritarian because it purposely seeks to ingratiate itself to the Policy Industry by isolating the Indigenous experience and voice and seeking to speak for us.  It perpetrates our disempowerment through its blindness to the role played by colonisation, genocide and institutional racism in ongoing Indigenous over-representation in the criminal justice system (or through focusing on individual antecedents of crime while sidelining structural drivers because they are 'unmeasurable').

Of particular concern to me is that there is far too much of this type of criminology happening in New Zealand and Australia at the moment.  Too often the work produced by this school is being peer reviewed and published in journals, edited books, etc, that are produced by like-minded colleagues, and without the necessary critical scrutiny of the First Nations about which these experts say so much (for those of you wanting to engage with this type of criminological material I suggest starting with Marie (2010), Weatherburn (2010), Weatherburn and a myriad of colleagues who provide exemplars of this type of work in the Australasian context).

Understandably the work produced by Authoritarian Criminologists is extremely popular with the mainstream media in Australasia, in part because it silences the Indigenous voice and offers simplistic statements on the causes of brown crime whilst avoiding nasty, complex issues like institutional racism, and the impact of neo-liberal social and economic policy on marginalised communities.  Remember, darkies behaving badly = revenue, and we can't let these people speak for themselves and offer informed commentary because they must be biased. Commentary must be left to outsiders, because after all they are objective aren't they?  The body of work is popular with policy makers for similar reasons and because its data is derived scientifically and practitioners don't ask political risky questions like 'what does the community want to do about this issue'?  For the very same reasons the work of Authoritarian Criminology is worthless to many Indigenous peoples.  Why?  Because it looks and sounds nothing like our experience of police, courts, prisons and the work of the Policy Industry.

It is imperative that First Nation commentators and practitioners take Authoritarian Criminology to task for the lazy, disempowering, culturally inappropriate research activities of its practitioners.  If you are doing this kind of research, then do us a favour and put aside your pretence at objectivity, because the fact that you choose to silence our voices while empowering yours through the use of non-engaging methods, invalidates this particular claim to authority.  Put aside your pretence at value neutrality because what you do as just as value-laden, ideological, and political as my commitment to Indigenous peoples and indigenous issues.  The difference between an Indigenous empowerment approach which I and the likes of Biko Agozino aspire to, and your approach, is we actually talk to First Nations and let them speak for themselves.  Try engaging with Indigenous communities in a meaningful way (with our permission and guidance); you might find it liberating to give voice to actual experiences and not just statistics.  

References

Agozino, B (2010) Editorial: What is Criminology? A Control-Freak Discipline! African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies, 4(1): i-xx.

Cohen, S (1988) Against Criminology. New Brunswick: Transaction Books.

Marie, D (2010) Maori and Criminal Offending: A Critical Appraisal, The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 43(2): 283-300.

Tauri, J (2011) Criminology and the Disempowerment of First Nations in Settler Societies, paper presented at the Crime, Justice and Social Democracy: An International Conference, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, 25-28 September.

Weatherburn, D (2010) Guest Editorial: Indigenous Violence, The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 43(2): 197-198.

Weatherburn, D; Snowball, L and Hunter, B (2006) The social and economic factors underpinning Indigenous contact with the criminal justice system, Crime and Justice Bulletin 104. Sydney: NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.

Young, J (2011) The Criminological Imagination. Cambridge: Polity.