Restorative Justice in New Zealand

[the_future_modernes]

Righting wrongs the Maori Way:Instead of prison, New Zealand chooses restorative justice and community problem-solving.

During the 1980s, New Zealand faced a crisis familiar to other Western nations around the world. Thousands of children, especially members of minority groups, were being removed from their homes and placed in foster care or institutions. The juvenile justice system was overburdened and ineffective. New Zealand’s incarceration rate for young people was one of the highest in the world, but its crime rate also remained high. At the same time, New Zealand’s punitive approach was also in part a “welfare” model. Although young people were being punished, they were also being rewarded by receiving attention. Yet they were not being required to address the actual harm they had caused.

Especially affected was the minority Maori population, the indigenous people of New Zealand. Maori leaders pointed out that the Western system of justice was a foreign imposition. In their cultural tradition, judges did not mete out punishment. Instead, the whole community was involved in the process, and the intended outcome was repair. Instead of focusing on blame, they wanted to know “why,” because they argued that finding the cause of crime is part of resolving it.Instead of punishment (“Let shame be the punishment” is a Maori proverb), they were concerned with healing and problem-solving. The Maori also pointed out that the Western system, which undermined the family and disproportionately incarcerated Maori youth, emerged from a larger pattern of institutional racism. They argued persuasively that cultural identity is based on three primary institutional pillars—law, religion, and education—and when any of these undermines or ignores the values and traditions of the indigenous people, a system of racism is operating.

Maori leaders pointed out that the Western system of justice was a foreign imposition. In their cultural tradition, the whole community was involved in the process.

Because of these concerns, in the late 1980s the government initiated a process of listening to communities throughout the country. Through this listening process, the Maori recommended that the resources of the extended family and the community be the source of any effort to address these issues. The FGC [Family Group Conference] process emerged as the central tool to do this in the child protection and youth justice systems.

In 1989 the legislature passed a landmark Act of Parliament. The Children, Young Persons and Their Families Act totally revamped the focus and process of juvenile justice in New Zealand. Although it did not use this terminology until later, the New Zealand legal system became the first in the world to institutionalize a form of restorative justice. Family Group Conferences became the hub of New Zealand’s entire juvenile justice system. In New Zealand today, an FGC, not a courtroom, is intended to be the normal site for making such decisions.

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ETA: Per hazel's comment below, this article is missing a hell of a lot of context.

Comments

[hazel]

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.

[the_future_modernes]

Somehow, I had a nasty feeling that this was the case. *sigh*