Is the Tough on Crime rhetoric obscuring solutions?
If we want to prevent crime, then we need to deal with reality. That means taking the drivers of crime seriously, and choosing to respond to them, rather than react.
Youth crime continues to dominate our news cycle’s, with predictable “tough on crime” rhetoric chocking our collective imagination and preventing us from seeing past the issue to the problem itself.
Based on continued coverage of the issue, one would be forgiven for believing that our young people are out of control, with crime amongst our youth communities rising on the daily.
The data however, doesn’t bear that out.
Since 2010, we’ve been keeping track of how our youth justice system has been going. And over this period, one of the interesting things we’ve been able to see, is a continued decrease in young people becoming involved in crime. This report is called the Youth Justice Indicators report, and in it’s latest summary of the data, we have clear evidence that youth crime is continuing to decrease with the report highlighting yet another decrease from 65%-63%.
We also saw a reduction in serious offending (the sort that would lead to court action or a Family Group Conference) with a drop from 61%-58%.
That data also shows, that young people that get engaged in the Youth Justice System do see a reduction in reoffending. For example the proportion of 14-16yr olds that reoffended within 12 months dropped from 49%-33%. Trends were similar when looking at reoffending within 24 months, with reoffending from young māori dropping from 70%-56%, and for non-māori rangatahi dropping from 60%-47%.
And so, the claim – so often repeated - that our current approach to youth justice is inadequate and failing, and thus that we need harsher more punitive punishments, just doesn’t bear out in the data.
We know, that if we can intervene early, address the underlying causes that have contributed to that child’s involvement in crime, and wrap support around them and the whānau, we can support those young people to prevent further involvement in crime.
By doing this, we also keep our communities safer, and prevent more victims from being created.
However, the success outlined above does not mean we should be content with where we are at. There is a group of young people that our society, and our system, is failing.
These young people often have a range of complexities, are battling poverty, addiction, mental illness, have undiagnosed disabilities and are lacking housing and/or have a lack of adequate support in the community.
These are not excuses, this is simply reality.
Many adults want to ignore the reality of abuse, trauma, and poverty that commonly contribute to children becoming involved in crime. They respond by demanding we drop the excuses and punish the children for their crimes. And yet, these are not excuses. No one is saying that it is ok that children are robbing dairies, nor that the harm felt by communities affected should be ignored. However, it is not an opinion to name the reality that a huge number of young people that become involved in crime and go on to reoffend come from back grounds of abuse, have experienced trauma, and are surviving in the midst of extreme poverty. No problem can be solved unless the reality of it is faced.
And this is the reality.
There is a group of young people in our society we have failed. We have not cared for them, we’ve denied them their basic human rights, and having failed in our collective responsibility to care for our most vulnerable children, we are now – as a society – reaping the consequences of our actions.
There is good news however.
We can turn this around.
We can ensure these children get the support they need, and in doing so break the cycle of offending and violence within our community.
One, immediate action we could look at is increasing funding into the Youth Justice System, ensuring young people have swift access to Youth Justice FGC, quality legal representation, and that the community has adequate resources to respond to the needs of those young people. Some of this work has begun, we need more of it.
Second, we know that early intervention is the key to supporting our children from becoming involved in crime. Children who are likely to become involved in crime, are also often well known within their communities. What we lack is adequate resources in our community to do early intervention well. We need to do some serious work with iwi and community leaders, to explore how we can ensure our communities have the resources they need to intervene early and prevent rangatahi from becoming involved in crime in the first place.
There is also a wider view we need to begin looking at. We know that housing insecurity and poverty are key drivers sitting behind some children’s involvement in crime. We need to marry these issues together. It’s vital that we ensure that every whānau has access to their basic human rights, that means raising benefit levels, lifting wages, and ensuring that every family and child has a safe, and stable home to live in.
The problem with punitive measures is that they fail to address the reasons young people offend, and thus fail in their goal of preventing victims from being created in our community. Tough-on-crime rhetoric endangers our community by ignoring why youth crime happens, and all the evidence we have about what to do about it. We need to start getting smart on crime, and move away from this tough on crime rhetoric. It doesn't work, and it won't keep make our business owners, nor our wider communities safe.
A.J. Hendry is a Laidlaw College graduate, and a Youth Development Worker and housing advocate, working in the Youth Housing and Homelessness space. He leads a service supporting rangatahi experiencing homelessness and is also an advocate working collectively to end youth homelessness in Aotearoa. He is also the curator and creator of When Lambs Are Silent.