What Really Happens if You’re Arrested as a Young Person in New Zealand?

If you’re one of the thousands of young people apprehended by police in New Zealand, what are your chances of going to prison? When do you cease to be a ‘child’? And how much does your ethnicity change things, really?

We spoke to Just Speak’s Tania Sawicki Mead about the state of New Zealand’s youth justice system, and what happens if you’re a young person who gets caught.

VICE: In our latest documentary, we meet boys as young as 14, some of whom have a decent record already, getting picked up for burglaries and so on. If I was a young person like some of those young men, what could I expect if I get caught and I’m entering youth justice system at that stage?
Tania Sawicki Mead: The reality is that your experience of the justice system, from apprehension to sentencing, will depend on if you’re Māori or not Māori. Those different experiences of the system start as early as when and whether you’re apprehended and then charged or sentenced for a crime, particularly with things on the minor end of the scale. With really serious things like murder and manslaughter—for obvious reasons, most people tend to be sentenced for that. But when it comes to things like ‘dangerous acts’ or burglary, if you’re a young Māori person—often a Māori man but increasingly young women are caught up in this—you’re more likely to be apprehended and prosecuted.
One example that I can give is we did some comparisons in 2011, using police data, and found that young Māori were five times as likely to be apprehended and prosecuted for Dangerous Acts than a Caucasian person. So that question of experience of the justice system really does depend on where you’re coming from, and who you are—which is indefensible. Your experience of the justice system should not depend on your ethnicity, but the reality of it is that it does.

So those discrepancies that start at those very early stages of apprehension, do they continue to flow through rest of justice system? How do they out-work at later stages?
Yeah, they do. There are screening tools that the police use to determine essentially, how effectively the treatment or intervention someone will have if they go through the system—which reflects, to some degree, their family experiences. So whether they’ve ever had a referral, one of those families have been referred for family violence, whether the parents or child have a criminal record, drug and alcohol use. All those kinds of things that both children and young people have no control over, they determine how they’re fundamentally treated by the youth justice system and what options are open to them. That is something we need to bring awareness to, even if we did develop these tools.

Do you have any numbers of how many young people are ending up in adult facilities around the country?
There were 1900 young people in Corrections in 2015-16. That might mean that they are in bail conditions or under supervision, doesn’t necessarily mean in jail, but that they are under the ‘care’ of Corrections.

So who’s an adult and who’s a child under the New Zealand justice system?
A big campaign of ours has been to get under-17-year-olds included in the youth court jurisdiction to be treated as young people—not as adults. Basically, all of our other conventions around the rights of a child say that you’re a child up until you’re 18. You need your parents’ permission to leave school for a day if you’re 17 but you’re treated as an adult in the eyes of the criminal justice system, which is totally counter-intuitive. And also doesn’t reflect what we know about the adolescent brain, which is that it is developing well into your twenties. There are so many opportunities to turn young people’s lives around if you treat them with care and respect late into their adolescence rather than essentially chucking them out because they’ve made mistakes when they were basically young and not always in their right mind. Like all young people, like all of us were. We campaigned really hard over the last couple of years to get 17-year-olds included in the youth court jurisdiction.

In an ideal world, it would be up to 21 because that’s a much more accurate reflection of young people’s cognitive development and also how successful we can be if we treat them.

How does NZ stack up against rest of the world in terms of our treatment justice system?
For a while, we led the world in terms of the introduction of the youth court system and the role of restorative justice in the process we really rested on our morals with that. It is something we should be proud of because it was really innovative in its time but I think that we have slowly let that extensive innovation slip away and without being vigilant about it, we have let hundreds and hundreds of young people slip through the cracks because we didn’t put effort into understanding how—or politicians didn’t act with enough courage in updating way that we do this. And we understood more about adolescent brains that we understood more about the fact that youth court systems, they’re so much more effective at dealing with harmful behaviours and helping people to do better than normal prisoners.

Are their other countries internationally that have really great systems that we can learn from with specific things we should be adopting?
The UK has some positive developments when it comes to youth justice that we could look at, but I wouldn’t suggest we adopt their system overall. The challenge that NZ has is our Youth Justice system has some really great, evidence-based, empathetic and innovative techniques or options available to it. But I think the other major problem that we have is that it’s underfunded particularly when it comes to things like family group conferences, which is part of the restorative justice process often the youth court system is connected with people in communities particularly Māori communities.

But one of the biggest problems that we have, is we have all these great solutions and we use them when we see them as innocent young people or vulnerable young people in need of care. But as soon as they pass that threshold we just throw them away and abandon all hope at turning life—even when the likelihood is that they are in that situation because it’s beyond their control, whether their parent was in prison, they’ve witnessed or experienced family or sexual violence, have a head injury, they have a learning disability, or more inter-generational in terms of poverty and colonisation. Those are all things that are massive predictors for someone engaging in harmful behaviour as a young person. We all understand that those things are well beyond someone’s control but as soon as they turn 19, 18, we seem to forget all of that and go: “Well, you’re responsible for your actions.”

This week VICE New Zealand released its latest documentary, following the lives of the young men entering the criminal justice system. The Lost Boys of Taranaki meets a group of children going bush with one last chance to get on the straight and narrow before they’re sent to youth justice residency.