From 1960 to the mid-1980s, unprecedented rates of institutionalisation of young people were normalised by the police, judiciary and state welfare institutions, the impacts of which are still felt today
Opinion: During general election season, anecdotes and high-profile events seem to trump sound evidence in the discourse, especially when it comes to criminal offending. Every political hopeful has a story, and too often these stories spur off-the-cuff proposals, many inevitably of a punitive nature. So what can we learn from our well-researched history about these kinds of responses to criminal offending?
In this article, we set out the case that during the period from 1960 to the mid-1980s, unprecedented rates of institutionalisation of young people were normalised to an extreme extent by the police, judiciary and the welfare institutions of the state, and that this has had direct, severe and ongoing impacts on the affected cohorts. Moreover, it has taken two generations to get back to the lower levels of imprisonment of 70 years ago – which, internationally, still ranks us among the most punitive countries in the world.
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Over the past century, shifts in the influence of policy, legislation, and broader societal change have coincided with significant shifts in the punitive nature of laws and their administration, which often exacerbated their impact on communities, particularly Māori. The 1950s was a period when the fear of parents about teenage behaviour was at alarmist levels, heightened by the Mazengarb Report on the “moral delinquency of the young”.
The harsh formal responses to young offenders by the police and judiciary that was associated with this fear began to change in the late 1980s, as evidence-based justice responses for young people, including the youth court and youth crime prevention teams, were established and embedded. Consequently, examining the changing dimensions of the prison population reveals intergenerational shifts also associated with the changing propensity of state agencies to incarcerate young males yet to reach adulthood.
When reviewing historical statistics, we can see that by 1960, imprisonment rates of young men, as with the rates of institutionalisation of children, had reached a historic high. These rates stayed very high until the late 1980s. For boys born in 1957, by the time of their 25th birthday, 47 percent of Māori boys had been before a court of some type, as had 22 percent of non-Māori boys, indicating the extreme rates of state involvement with families, and Māori in particular.
In 1972, one in 14 Māori males aged 17-19 were sentenced to prison, as were one in every hundred non-Māori males. As more and younger men were imprisoned, by 1980, the average age of males in prison had fallen to 24 years. Notably, this rise in imprisonment rate did not reflect a rise in seriousness of criminal behaviour – most of the offences committed by these young men during this time would not see them imprisoned today.
Relatedly, the shift away from the community-oriented policing of the 1950s coincided with a rising share of children being taken from their families and placed in the custody of the state. Between 1945 and 1980, on average some 2,500 babies were removed annually from their unmarried mothers, most usually for closed adoption.
The generational impacts of this profoundly harmful mix of the scale of closed adoption of babies, the taking of children into the custody of the state, and the extensive imprisonment rates, remain with us, as those children have aged and become parents, and some grandparents themselves. This is particularly true for Māori, because of the known targeted and racist administration of ‘care and protection’ policies against whānau Māori and the intergenerational nature of these harms.
At a population level, there are two significant ways that past imprisonment and institutionalisation experiences at any time can influence the chance of future imprisonment: ‘life course’ effects, which acknowledge that where and why young people of each generation spend their formative years shapes their life course; and intergenerational effects, which arise when the following generations are more likely to share the experiences of earlier generations.
Imprisonment when young is strongly associated with further imprisonment over a lifetime, as well as higher recidivism rates. This ‘life course’ effect is most obvious when looking at ‘cohorts’ – groups of people born in the same years who can be tracked through the state care and justice systems over the course of their lives. For cohorts who were aged 15-19 between 1960-1985, imprisonment rates when these people reached 30-39 and 40-49 show that the same people were moving through correctional custody: they were growing up through the justice system, institutionalised again and again over time. To date, these men are the most institutionalised generation in our history.
Intergenerational effects are most noticeable for the generation born between 1970 and 1990. Their likelihood of being imprisoned when young was significantly lower than those of the previous generation, but at ages 30 and over they have been imprisoned at higher rates than earlier and later generations. Although punitive responses had shifted from where they were for previous generations, there was not a corresponding shift in supportive social service settings.
Taken together, though the effects of excessively punitive definitions and responses to offending are immediately felt by individuals, across time, why, when, and whether people are imprisoned or institutionalised by the state also has a profound effect on their life course trajectories, the lives of their families, their descendants' lives, and the wellbeing of our society as a whole.
For Māori whānau, as a very young and small population that was pushed from rural New Zealand into towns and cities, effects rippled through communities and seeped through generations. The size and age structure of the Maori population has changed more visibly for each generation of Māori than that of non-Māori. The convergence of these changes with shifts in the punitive nature of the justice system have resulted in each generation of young Māori being connected to the justice system in a different way than that of their parents. For those Māori born after 1990 who have a much reduced connection to the justice system, a very different future is developing, and knowledge of which should shape the views of those holding political power, more so than the anecdotes and stereotypes that too often dominate.
At this point in the electoral cycle, it is particularly pertinent for us to be thinking about our histories because when a government forms, whatever their stripe, they will shape policy for the next three years. As we have set out here, these policies will have determinant impacts on generations to come.
