Young Timers
It’s hard to know whether the young man standing by the rumpled bed in a cramped, dull cell at the youth unit of Christchurch Men’s Prison cares. He’s just been yelled at for not making his bed. His words and attitude say he’s ambivalent to the thought that in a few months he’ll end his teenage years in jail and head into his twenties an inmate of an adult prison.
“It might be quite good,” he shrugs. He’s heard adult inmates have more freedom than youth prisoners and some get released into the community during the day to work.
Six months into a three year sentence for burglary, Steven* expects he’ll be out on parole within a year and until then he’ll just take one day at a time.
At the moment, Steven (Ngāi Tahu) is dealing with having to spend most of the day in his cell, because he and a few other inmates were caught brewing cider. As part of his punishment he’s also lost his TV privileges. Although he has been penalised, he’s still proud of the cider incident. Even if Steven was feeling sad and lonely, chances are he wouldn’t admit it.
It’s that attitude that frustrates Department of Corrections Māori Area Advisor Kopa Lee (Ngāi Tahu, Ngāti Wheke).
“It’s hard to know whether they are beating their chests or if it is really how they feel,” he says. After all, tough talk, boasts and ambivalence are traditional teenage traits through every culture. Few teens, especially young males, would admit to feeling vulnerable to their mates.
But for Lee there is a deeper worry. He believes ambivalence towards jail time and lack of respect for authority is growing. Where once this was an almost transparent veneer that boys matured out of, now it’s a hard opaque shell and young men like Steven seem genuinely not to care.
“It’s an ingrained attitude that they have before they came to prison. It’s their attitude at school. It’s their attitude to life and the requirements of society,” he says.
Steven’s journey to the youth unit is not exactly textbook, which reinforces Lee’s concern about the growing ambivalence among young offenders.
The second of four children, Steven by his own account had a stable upbringing with a whānau who were always very supportive of him.
“My family are pretty straight,” he says. “No one else has been to prison.”
He can’t quite explain what triggered his first offending although he was already flirting with breaking the law, while indulging in “a couple of sessions of pot” a day.
On a long walk home one day in Nelson he wanted money for a taxi ride and started breaking into cars for the cash. Steven didn’t steal enough for a taxi and he was caught within a few months of his first theft but this did little to deter him. He admits that maybe the drugs did play a part.
He was bored with life despite studying for his heavy transport licence, and the offending became exciting.
Steven racked up 40 offences in four months. “I liked the thrill, the feeling of having to watch your back all the time.”
His dad, Gavin*, chokes slightly talking about the shock of hearing of Steven’s arrest. “I just struggle to understand it.”
Thinking his son had stopped offending after his first arrest, he was “really distressed and confused” to find Steven had continued his crime spree. When he was arrested Steven had chalked up more than 40 offences in four months, making jail time inevitable.
Gavin,who split from his wife when Steven was at primary school, says he felt very unsupported when Steven was arrested. Despite his Ngāi Tahu heritage, he says he has had little to do with the culture so didn’t know who to turn to.
It’s that disconnect that many people involved in youth justice believe is the driver behind the soaring rate of crime by rangatahi Māori. Recent research by the Christchurch School of Medicine and Health Science supports this.
The Ethnic Identity and Criminal Offending in a New Zealand Birth Cohort study conducted by Professor David Fergusson found young people who identified strongly as Māori were less likely to commit crime than those who did not – regardless of whether or not they came from a poor or dysfunctional background.
As advisor for the Department of Corrections Māori Services team Lee says the positive results and feedback from the tikanga programmes run by the youth unit support these findings.
He Waka Tapu, a Christchurch-based service that deals with violence prevention, is about to launch an innovative programme aimed at high-need offenders. It’s based on research by Professor Mason Durie that suggests if you can facilitate a re-engagement with cultural encounters in a safe way, that in itself is therapeutic and has beneficial outcomes.
Clinical Director Tohi Tohiriki (Te Arawa, Te Whānau a Apanui) says the programme has a cultural narrative that informs the process.
“In traditional times young Māori men used to go through whare wānanga, progressing through them to acquire the knowledge to become a man. These themes will run alongside culturally related activities that support behaviour around family, education, peer relations, substance abuse, leisure and recreation, personality, behaviour and attitudes.”
Baseline measures obtained at the start of the programme will demonstrate specifically what interventions contribute to a decrease in recidivism over time. The aim is to collect hard evidence that can be used to prove tikanga programmes are effective.
It’s the kind of information that would come in useful for Lee. As well as struggling to find enough tikanga programmes to meet the need, it’s hard work convincing the parole board to make programmes part of the conditions of release when he only has anecdotal evidence to go by.
“Tikanga programmes are hard to audit, which may explain the reluctance for providers to incorporate them into their services,” says Lee.
“I know they work because prisoners are not shy about telling you how they see things. If they think it’s crap they will tell you.”
Gavin is hoping the fledgling interest Steven is showing in the tikanga programme on offer at the unit will help make a difference to his son.
“Maybe he will be more grounded,” he says.
Meanwhile, as providers and advisors within the sector call for greater resources to develop tikanga programmes, the Government has allocated $84 million towards Social Development Minister Paula Bennett’s Fresh Start legislation that proposes a new look at tougher measures, including bootcamps, as means of tackling young repeat offenders.
If Steven keeps re-offending after he’s released, under the Fresh Start legislation he could find he’s likely to get an even longer stay behind bars.
Bennett (Tainui) says introducing longer sentences for the worst young offenders will give rehabilitation services more time to effect change.
She says however the Government does acknowledge the importance of Māori providing services for Māori.
“One-size-fits-all is not the most effective way to respond … [plans for offenders] will be based on an assessment of what is required to turn their lives around. This will require service providers to work together in providing a package which is designed for the young offender. This will often require iwi and Māori-based solutions for Māori children and young people.’’
In a bid to curb the worst adult violent offenders the Government also proposes introducing the Sentencing and Parole Reform Bill – commonly known as the Three Strikes law.
An offender would receive a standard sentence and warning for their first serious offence. The second offence would usually lead to a jail term with no parole and a further warning. On conviction for a third serious offence, the offender would receive the maximum penalty in prison for that offence with no parole.
Bennett says she hopes the new law will be a deterrent to young offenders.
Not everyone is convinced tough measures and bootcamps are the right approach and the Māori Party voted against the Bill after its third reading in Parliament.
“Dr Gabrielle Maxwell, from the Institute of Policy Studies here in Wellington, concludes … that if you are going to make a difference in the ives of young people who have been abused or traumatised it is necessary provide them with close and sustained, supportive relationships,” Māori Party co-leader and Associate Corrections Minister Dr Pita Sharples Ngāti Kahungunu) told Parliament in a speech explaining the Party’s reasons for pulling support for the bill.
Principal Youth Court judge Andrew Becroft says tough-talking programmes don’t work for everyone effectively, particularly Māori; and there have to be new ways of thinking around dealing with hard core recidivist young offenders.
He rates bootcamps as “arguably the least successful sentence in the Western World.
“[They made] young people healthier, fitter, faster but they were still burglars, just harder to catch.”
He supports the use of iwi-run rehabilitation measures such as Māori Youth Court judges holding court sessions on marae, and police talking to hapū about sending young offenders to be supervised on marae instead of being sentenced to spend time in Child, Youth and Family institutions or youth prisons. However Becroft acknowledges there is a lack of suitable programmes.
He is also in favour of restorative justice programmes where offenders come face-to-face with their victims, and says these meetings also produce good results.
However, this didn’t work for Steven, and meeting his victims did little to deter him. “I tried to stop but about six weeks
after the meeting I was offending again.”
Dr Sharples believes it’s time whānau and communities shouldered some of the responsibility for wayward rangatahi, and says they should step up to implement their own solutions. He wants the Government to release money for Māori to run their own initiatives, such as the Whānau Ora programme which provides a combined approach across social agencies to deal with offenders.
Marae courts are a promising development despite having some critics, Sharples says.
“Some people say we shouldn’t use the marae for criminal justice but at the end of the day marae should be serving the community’s justice, welfare and spiritual needs.’’
Sharples says the Hoani Waititi Marae, an urban marae in West Auckland, is a good example of how marae can work for rangatahi.
“I believe marae have an obligation to offer programmes to help and educate our youth whether they (marae) are paid for it or not.’’
The Government is piloting several schemes where kaumātua get out in the community and identify whānau, and their rangatahi, in need of help.
One of them is the Oranga Whānau or Nanas in Cars Initiative, where kuia drive around to homes to “put the kettle on, bring some cakes and see what needs doing”, Sharples says.
By going into homes elders get to see how families can be supported, hopefully having a flow-on effect on issues such as child abuse and youth crime, he says.
“A lot of our people are living day by day and our youth don’t have the dreams others do.
“It’s time we took responsibility and l did something about it.”
Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu Kaiwhakahaere Mark Solomon agrees iwi have an obligation to help their rangatahi stay away from crime.“In court a judge often sees a rangatahi standing there with no parental support
and believes the only option for him is to go inside. That’s our side of it (iwi) and we have to address that.’’
He believes much of the problem centres around the perception of how police deal with young Māori and the relationship between the two parties. He is optimistic that will improve as Ngāi Tahu is part of a new initiative between police and iwi to address issues seen as the drivers of Māori crime.
The Iwi Crime Crash Plan involves police and other Government agencies funding iwi to come up with crime-prevention initiatives. Police Commissioner Howard Broad has already met with some Māori communities to hear their opinions.
Ngāi Tahu is now holding a series of hui to talk about how it can help support whānau and prevent members getting involved in crime.
Solomon says he believes the initiative is a first for Ngāi Tahu. “It’s a start that the issues are being raised and we are sitting around the table together. I don’t think that has happened before.’’
He says a tāua at one of the Police Commissioner’s public meetings summed up the perspective of rangatahi and their whānau beautifully.
“She said ‘Look dear, we know you are good people and we certainly need a police force but for whatever reason some of my mokopuna see your men in uniform and they see the enemy. Let’s get together and talk about it and we can make it work’.’’
However respect for elders has also been weakened by the alienation of many young Māori from their wider whānau.
As rangatahi lose touch with their Māori heritage and traditional values, shame or whakamā, which used to be a powerful motivator, no longer holds sway the way it used to. Kim Workman (Ngāti Kahungunu, Rangitāne), the Wellington-based director of justice reform group Rethinking Crime and Punishment, says in previous years a pattern of suicide was noticed when young Māori living in the city away from their families were on remand in custody.
“The whakamā was more than they could bear.”
Workman says he doesn’t believe it’s the attitudes of young people that have changed; rather the attitude of the whānau.
“Whānau influences behaviour, sometimes over generations. Whānau is a powerful location for transformation,” he says. “But it works both ways. The influence can be as detrimental as it can be positive.”
Whatever the whānau influence, Dr Sharples believes rangatahi are not ambivalent about going to jail.
“Young people not in gangs are not usually happy to be in prison. But eventually they adjust to that community and forge a way of life that’s all about the here and now. That gives them some status.”
Unexpectedly, hope glimmers from Steven who mentions he may move out to the country on his release to avoid the temptations of the city and the mates he stole with.
Oddly, he reckons he might enjoy a bootcamp.
He says he would also happily spend time on his marae, once he discovers where it’s located, and learn more tikanga on the marae rather than behind bars.
“It might be good to learn stuff from those old fellas.’’
He shuffles his feet, his baggy jeans and oversized sweatshirt making him look like any vulnerable teen putting on a brave face. His life really is just all about the here and now. Will he reoffend? The statistics say yes. He’s not sure.
“I’ll try not to. I just wanna get a job and earn some money. Maybe if I find out more about my whakapapa it will help me be more mature and stop stealing and stuff,” he says with a shrug.
* Not his real name – TE KARAKA was only given permission to interview Steven on condition he, his father and his whānau were not identified in any way.
