This posting comes about following a Green Party blog thread. Recently a business man, Bruce Emery, was convicted of manslaughter for killing a young man who had been "tagging" (i.e. painting graffiti) on his property. You can read about the case on the TVNZ website. He was sentenced to four years imprisonment.

This matter came up for discussion in the NZ Green Party blog, written by one of the Green MPs, Meteria Tureia. (With the news that Jeanette Fitzsimons is shortly to retire as co-leader, Meteria is one of the two candidates to replace her - the Green Party constitution rules that there will be two co-leaders, one male and one female. The other co-leader is Russell Norman.) The case gained some notoriety, with strong racial overtones, as the victim was a young Maori boy. This is what she wrote:

Nice day for a lynching

Monday February 16th, 2009. 4:01 pm by Metiria Turei

Three Strikes Lobbyists Should Be Struck Out

Any legislation the current government is thinking of introducing that has the backing of the Sensible Sentencing Trust (SST) needs to be looked at twice and then most likely thrown out.

The SST are the organisation supposedly committed to the rights of victims of crime. But their spokesperson Garth McVicar proved that the SST is only concerned with those victims who fit their own stereotypes. Garth McVicar has suggested to Radio NZ that convicted criminals - those who kill - should walk free provided the crime is stabbing taggers. Mr McVicar was commenting to Radio NZ after Bruce Emery had been found guilty of the manslaughter of Pihema Cameron. [ Mr McVicar ] is reported as saying the Sensible Sentencing Trust ... wanted to see the killer of a teenage tagger set free, because he was forced to take the law into his own hands. (Bruce Emery, 50, was found guilty on Friday of manslaughter for the fatal stabbing of Pihema Cameron, 15. He caught the teenager spray-painting his garage door in Manurewa in January.)

Garth McVicar comments that the verdict is a shame, because he understands the frustration Emery was going through when he caught the tagger at his house. He says the trust would have liked to have seen Emery discharged altogether. Mr McVicar says this would have sent a message that minor crimes like graffitti need to be dealt with seriously. Otherwise, with the continual breakdown of law and order, he says people will become frustrated and forced to breaking-point. (I have expanded Garth McVicars' comments from the provided link JKM)

So the Sensible Sentencing Trust not only condones vigilantism, but lynching too? There is no doubt that the killing of teenager Pihema Cameron is a tragedy for both his and Bruce Emery's families. It was a disastrous set of circumstances that lead to the senseless taking of a young man's life. The fear and frustration evident in Bruce Emery's reaction to the tagging was understandable. But no-one, NO-ONE deserves to die for any crime, let alone 'minor' property crimes like tagging. The sentence Emery received is extremely low, and the Cameron family are right to be appalled at that. Will the SST help them to appeal that sentence? They have supported other families whose sons were murdered, why not the Camerons? No, instead Mr McVicar displays a callous attitude to the victims of this tragedy. Surely an organisation that prides itself on supporting victims should be giving some assistance and sympathy to Pihema's grieving whanau.

And now this dubious organisation is bragging about the fact that their wish list is going to almost entirely implemented by the present government. Is the SST advocating legislation for death sentences for tagging now? Maybe I should not be so surprised.

This blog was followed by some comments. You can read them by following the link provided above. There was the usual mix of opinions that you get in such a case, including the more red-neck - what does the youth expect, he shouldn't have been tagging, what were his parents doing, and it's not surprising that people are taking the law into their own hands. This was my comment:

The reason Garth McVicar supported Emery was obvious, Emery is white, middle-aged and middle-class, his victim wasn't. Emery's victim represents everything that McVicar is terrified of, a brown, poor, over-breeding and restless underclass hellbent on causing mayhem in our well-ordered Anglo-Saxon society, how dare they? (The fact that this well-ordered society is presently undergoing a disintegration undermines his hypothesis a little, but I don't suppose this has registered yet.) His hero, Emery, represents the last vestiges of civilised life backed into a corner, and fighting for its existence in a frightening world; what happened in reality was the exact antithesis of McVicar's delusional state. The capacity of such people as Garth McVicar for self examination is nil, as is their capacity for empathy for others excluded from their closeted and distorted view of the real world.

What is tragic in New Zealand is the number of people who think like him, including it would seem some posting to this blog. Our threatening economic mayhem is going to put great stresses on our society. We live in one of the OECD's most unequal societies, in terms of educational attainment, health, and divisions of wealth. It would be my contention that much of the difficulty we suffer in our society is related to this simple fact, and it will certainly have a lot to do with how we manage, or not, the economic and social storm coming our way.

What McVicar and his ilk refuse to understand is that you can't lock up an entire underclass, it has been attempted previously of course, as in eighteenth century France and early twentieth-century Russia, but the results were not noted as a resounding success.

Please note that I am not condoning youthful villainy or crime. There is in New Zealand a very dark and concerning underbelly of violence - to me, it echoes the dark and gloomy native forests, and it is a deep and unnoted current in the New Zealand psyche. There always has been this underbelly, it is reflected in our appalling child abuse and child violence statistics, among the worst in the OECD, but it would be true that it has become more intrusive into the otherwise laid-back and relatively stress-free Kiwi life-style. In particular, far too many young Maori men are involved in gangs, the Mongrel Mob, Black Power, who's life-styles are unbelievably pathological and violent. They are intimidating and frightening, and are involved in all sorts of crime, prostitution, armed robbery, gang warfare, drug dealing and manufacture of "P" methamphetamine. These men's attitudes to woman a Neanderthal would be ashamed of. There is an urgent need to deal more effectively with the menace. They are the sort of groups that if social unrest were to occur due to economic crisis, could become more politically organised and dangerous. I am not excusing all this when I make my more general comments, and my criticisms of the "Sensible Sentencing Trust".

My posting occasioned this reply:

No jockmoron, what is tragic in New Zealand is that when a brown boy kills a white, middle-aged and middle-class man the brown boy is a victim of society, but when a white, middle-aged and middle-class man kills a brown boy, the white man is called a racist.

and my reply to this, the last in this particular thread:

Doug,

When a when a brown boy kills a white, middle-aged and middle-class man the brown boy is guilty of murder, when a white, middle-aged and middle-class man kills a brown boy, the white man is also guilty of murder. I was trying to explain Garth McVicar's apparent inability to understand this, and to set it in a wider, and I believe accurate, context. But it is true, I can only judge Garth McVicar by his words, not by personal acquaintance. If you think my explanation was wrong, please find me a better one.

JM

This discussion is part of the more wide-ranging discussion about crime and punishment which is always the big political football, especially at election times. The Act Party, in a relationship with the governing National Party, are keen to consider have a "three strikes and you're out" policy, as done in some states of the USA. National have agreed to advance consideration of this policy, though it is difficult to be sure how keen the majority of the National Party are on this matter. There has been some debate as to the likely financial costs of this, this article explains the matter. There is a possiblity we would be looking to double our prison population over the next twenty-five years. New Zealand has already one of the higher incarceration rates in the developed world, we are seventh highest in the OECD with a rate of about 155/100,000 population. (The USA is about 700, and because US prisoners account for fully two-thirds of the entire OECD prison population, the OECD average is 261, whereas the median imprisonment rate is about 100). To even be thinking of a policy that might substantially increase our prison population is absurd, and socially destructive. (NZ Ministry of Justice) Our imprisonment rates have slowly increased over the years, but this doesn't seem to have reduced our crime rate, so by what logic is proposed that further increasing the number of prisoners will be more likely to reduce crime?

Addendum -(added 28/2/09) Yesterday's Dominion Post carried two articles relating to the criminal justice system in New Zealand. The first was headlined in the front page: "Judge puts boot into boot camps". The background to this being the National Parties determination to re-introduce compulsory military style training to young offenders, I think previously it was known as the "Short, sharp shock". The fact that these have been tried previously in New Zealand, and didn't work, by any measure of outcome, and that overseas experience is no better, doesn't seemed to have stopped this simplistic reactionary nonsense from being re-introduced. You can find the article here (I have downloaded to my own web site, as Dominion Post articles are removed after a few days). This is part of what the principal Youth Court Judge Becroft said: The traditional "boot camp" for young offenders was "arguably the least successful sentence in the Western world .... it made them healthier, fitter, faster, but they were still burglars, just harder to catch, " He said further that physical programmes backed up by mentoring and family support could work, but New Zealand's corrective training camps, which ran up till 2002, found 92 per cent of young attendees reoffended within a year. "It was a spectacular, tragic, flawed, failure" One mark down for the National Government. Another was a biting article from a well-known local Wellington barrister, Michael Bott, criticising the "three strikes and you're out" policy, which I criticise above. One's own opinions are always right of course, but it's nice to have them confirmed on this occasion by someone who should know. You can read it here. (I have typed it out myself, the article wasn't available on the web page.) It makes some similar arguments and also makes the point that imprisoning people substantially reduces the chances of reform because so many of the social props that keep people out of trouble are gone by the time they get out. (Of course it could be argued that some of those social "props" are what got them into trouble in the first place.)

The Howard League for Penal Reform have long provided an invaluable counterweight to the red-neckism that is a strong political and social force in New Zealand. I would thoroughly recommend reading their articles on their website , they provide much valuable information, which I have previously scoured the internet for, but available here in more immediate form. The Howard League was set up in the UK in Victorian times, and their demand for wise, rational and ethical debate is sadly as much needed now as it was in those days.

Added 4/3/09 - George Monbiot in the Guardian writes about the staggering case in the US, where two judges have been convicted of taking payments from private prison companies (bribes) in exchange for jailing 2,000 children. It's just mind boggling. George goes on to write about private prisons in the US and the UK, the high rate of imprisonment in the UK (though not as high as in New Zealand) - he calls it the "revolting trade in human lives". I agree. It truly is astouding - as the whole edifice if the monetarised, coporatised and privatised economy come tumbling around our ears, and brings down with it so many worthwhile and valuable social and economic assets that have created value and work for the citizens of our countries for years, generations even, when it should be obvious to blind and the deaf that this doesn't work, it could never work, and it was always preposterous to think it would work - that it is still proposed by our National government to build private prisons in New Zealand. This sort of behaviour is more than ignorant or extreme, it is wilful, cynical and anti-democratic. I've said this before, many of our leaders will at some time have to come to explain what they've done to our economy and society, perhaps in front of a judge, on the charge of "social and/or economic treason". I am unsure as to the best option for punishment, but perhaps a thousand hours of community service, helping the unemployed or working in a prison, might be just.