REVIVAL

“There is a state care to prison pipeline in this country run by the Crown, and it is killing the wairua of our mokopuna just as surely as its muskets killed the bodies of our tūpuna when it first came here.”  [Survivor of child abuse while in state care.]

In his 1988 report, The Maori and the criminal justice system: A new perspective – He Whaipaanga Hou, Moana Jackson noted that, because the New Zealand criminal justice system was “rooted in the same cultural foundations as other major social structures such as the education system…the legal truism that the justice system operates 'one law for all' contains implicit seeds of institutional racism since it is one law based on the English common law with no acknowledgement of specific Maori rights or forms of social control.”

Moana also noted that Māori were not the only people impacted by such racism, as can be seen in this quote from the Over-Involvement of Indigenous People with the Criminal Justice System: a Canadian Case Study –

“Police are both the gate-keepers of the criminal justice system and the social hygienists of the community. The police will find a certain variety of crime among the poor [read indigenous] because that is where they seek it.”

Moana’s findings on the inevitable inequities contained within the Crown’s criminal system were to be horrifically reinforced a quarter century later by the Confidential Listening & Assistance Service [CLAS] which was set up in 2013 to hear the stories of survivors of child abuse in state care. 

Previous governments under both Helen Clark and John Key sought to exonerate the Crown for the abuse of children in its care by setting up the CLAS with very narrow terms of reference, then negotiating individual and confidential ‘settlements’ with the victims, extending the veil of confidentiality over the abusers, and refusing to implement most of the recommendations made by the CLAS. 

The current government is attempting to bring more accountability to its systems.  However, unless it abandons the deficit-based thinking of its predecessors, I predict it will fail just as dismally, if not worse, than they did.  

This was made clear when Judge Carolyn Henwood who chaired the CLAS, came to the Iwi Chairs Forum [ICF] in 2014 and voiced her personal distress at the litany of agony that had been poured out before her and the CLAS over the preceding two years.  We also heard her plea to help close the state care to prison pipeline operated by the Crown in which up to 40% of prisoners in jail (mostly Māori) have at some time in their childhood also been in state care.

While it is important to understand the deficit-based thinking from which the Crown operates, if we are to close that state care to prison pipeline, it is more important for us to deploy and manage our own strengths-based thinking and tikanga.  Because, therein lies the remedy to racism and the revival of our spirits.