Haaaah, I am not even sure where to begin. Yes, family group conferences can be very very useful (and the operation of the Family Court and the Youth Court, I believe, stacks up fairly well internationally); but omg the situation on the ground here is so much more complex than that article suggests.
For one thing, there is a lot of tension between tikanga Maori and pakeha systems of justice, and the day to day operation of most of the court/justice system is heavily grounded in English/common law jurisprudence: try Towards a Maori Criminal Justice System by Moana Jackson (a well-known Maori lawyer and legal theorist) for starters. Maori (and Pacific Islanders) are disproportionally represented in corrections statistics, as well as all the usual suspects of poverty, overcrowding, lower educational attainment, and poorer health.
For another, there's a large populist movement of Lock The Bastards Up, which conveniently averts its eyes when a Member of Parliament gets caught out having, as a "young 26-year old", stolen the identity of a dead baby to commit passport fraud after reading about the trick in a novel called The Day of the Jackals, or when a 40-something white dude chases a 15-year-old brown kid down the road in the dead of night and stabs him after catching him graffiting the fence of the family house... and gets 4 years for manslaughter because "his family missed him a lot."
Which is all to say: it's really nice to see New Zealand praised for doing something that looks good to outside eyes, but we're maybe not that good an example in practice.
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malionette
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Date: 2011-07-26 06:29 am (UTC)For one thing, there is a lot of tension between tikanga Maori and pakeha systems of justice, and the day to day operation of most of the court/justice system is heavily grounded in English/common law jurisprudence: try Towards a Maori Criminal Justice System by Moana Jackson (a well-known Maori lawyer and legal theorist) for starters. Maori (and Pacific Islanders) are disproportionally represented in corrections statistics, as well as all the usual suspects of poverty, overcrowding, lower educational attainment, and poorer health.
For another, there's a large populist movement of Lock The Bastards Up, which conveniently averts its eyes when a Member of Parliament gets caught out having, as a "young 26-year old", stolen the identity of a dead baby to commit passport fraud after reading about the trick in a novel called The Day of the Jackals, or when a 40-something white dude chases a 15-year-old brown kid down the road in the dead of night and stabs him after catching him graffiting the fence of the family house... and gets 4 years for manslaughter because "his family missed him a lot."
Which is all to say: it's really nice to see New Zealand praised for doing something that looks good to outside eyes, but we're maybe not that good an example in practice.