ACT to build racist youth detention centres & create abuse survivors with failed policy they know doesn’t work
This week, the ACT party indicated that it would like to spend $500 million to build youth detention centres. This, it says, is necessary to “hold young offenders accountable” and to stop the “tag and release” of young offenders who face no real punishment for criminal offending.
In response to this proposal, justice and penal reform advocate Sir Kim Workman said to Mike Hosking that, “it's a nice idea, but it won’t work. Just look at our history.”
That history is being written before our eyes at the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Historical Abuse in State Care and in the Care of Faith-based Institutions. It is a history of torture and terror of young people.
Now in its sixth year of the Inquiry, and due to report back next year, the Royal Commission has “State youth justice care” as one of its particular areas of enquiry that includes borstals, youth prisons, detention centres, corrective training institutions and other youth justice residences. It covers the period from 1950-1999, ending at the start of the fourth Labour government, perhaps to avoid any uncomfortable truths from the too recent past coming to the surface.
Our history of youth detention is awash with horror stories almost too painful to contemplate. Oliver Sutherland’s 2020 book, Justice & Race: campaigns against racism and abuse in Aotearoa New Zealand tells more than a few of them including that of Kevin O:
“...the case of 13-year-old state ward, Kevin O, who in January 1978 was held for ten days in a ‘secure cell’ at the Owairaka Boys’ Home…he was picked up by police in Kaikohe and taken to Owairaka. He was immediately placed in what the Department of Social Welfare termed ‘secure care’ - in fact solitary confinement - in a cell about 3 x 2 metres. The only clothes he was allowed to wear were a T-shirt and football shorts - no underpants, no socks, no shoes…All meals were eaten in the cell…Kevin had seen boys who ‘caused trouble’ beaten by staff and locked in a special cell (‘Cell 7’) which was smaller than the other cells, with only a tiny 15 x15 cm window up too high to look out of. The boys emerged days later with black eyes and bruises.” (p85)
But even these stories pale in comparison to those at the now infamous Lake Alice. Again Sutherland notes, “Of all the outrages perpetrated by the state against children in ‘care’ in the 1970s, the horrendous abuse of those detained at the Lake Alice Psychiatric Hospital was surely the worst.” (p134).
What follows in that chapter are stories of abuse that must elicit disgust and despair bordering on physical sickness in all but the most hardened soul. The stories told to the Royal Commission from the many young people sent there must be in a similar vein.
It would be easy to say that this could not happen today, that surely things have changed. But in the 12 months to 30 June 2020, more than 110 teenagers were detained in police cells for at least 24 hours with some self-harming or attempting suicide.
Another 2017 report detailed the extensive use of restraints and seclusion, used disproportionately against Māori and Pasifika youth; that report was followed up in 2020 with another that notes,
“In the six months between June and December 2019, a total of 76 children and young people aged 14 to 18 years old were placed in the Secure unit of their facility on 298 occasions, spending anywhere between a few hours and 20 days in the Secure unit. In total, these children spent 815 days in Secure Care in the Youth Justice facility (compared to 54 children and young people spending a total of 307 days in Secure during 6 months in 2016). Over half (54.7%) of these children identified as New Zealand Māori.” (p28)
So despite decades of reforms to the justice sector, it remains institutionally racist towards Māori and Pasifika, and in contravention of international human rights law which completely prohibits the use of seclusion with children under 18 years of age.
In respect of the ACT policy, Newshub notes:
“Research out of Australia shows about half of those sent to youth detention centres have reoffended within a year…A 2009 study on peer influence concluded "considerable evidence suggests that the detention of juvenile offenders in programs characterised by high exposure to deviant peers and minimal adult interaction fails to reduce, and in some cases may exacerbate, rates of recidivism".
In this interview with Newshub, ACT leader David Seymour admitted they haven't worked in the past, but he believes they can in the future.
ACT trades in the currency of “law and order” willfully blind to the reasons why young people commit crimes like ram raids. Seymour is out of touch with what is going on across the country because he is insulated with money and resources that most of us do not have. It is easy to demonise children for acting out, when in fact it is the only thing they have: they want some of the fleeting fame of a Tik Tok moment.
With no background in youth affairs and no evidence to back up his new policy, David Seymour can casually dog whistle to his ACT constituency that knows, with a wink-and-a-nod, who he means when he talks about “youth offending.” He is more than happy to channel half a billion dollars to private prison companies to incarcerate our children. He isn’t the slightest bit concerned about creating another generation of state abuse survivors.
Valerie Morse is an anti-fascist and anti-war activist with a long interest in the ethical remembering of imperial wars.