Aaron Hendry, Youth Worker, rangatahi advocate and social justice commentator argues that the ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric fails because it continues to ignore the underlying issues that contribute to crime in the first place.

Despite the lack of evidence that tougher penalties prevent young people and children from becoming involved in crime, National has renewed calls for tougher sentencing and more punitive measures as a response to the current spike in ram raids.

Though the 'tough on crime' rhetoric appears to provide a decisive response to offending, it in actuality is a response that perpetuates the cycle of offending and in doing so, ensures that more victims will be created. In order to prevent people from becoming victims of crime, we need to ensure we respond to the reasons our young people are becoming involved in crime in the first place. This means getting serious about solutions.

In my mahi has a Youth Worker over the last 10+ years, here are some of the solutions I’ve seen be successful:

1. Understand the context. 

To be successful in reducing offending – and to respond appropriately - we have to understand why young people are becoming involved in crime in the first place.

Professor Lambie from Auckland University, recently released a report titled How we fail children who offend and what to do about it. He highlights that many of the tamariki we are talking about are children who are traumatized and abused, young people experiencing homelessness or extreme poverty, kids struggling with mental illnesses, addictions and disabilities. 

In many cases our tamariki are in environments where they are easy targets of exploitation or manipulation. They are vulnerable, unsafe and, without strong and healthy social networks around them, they find themselves participating in crime as a matter of survival. I have seen rangatahi come out of youth prison, straight back into homelessness or unsafe living environments. If they do not have the resources they need to survive, theft is not a wilful act of youthful rebellion but a desperate attempt at survival. 

National recently advocated for the increased use of Youth Prison for repeat offenders. In my experience youth prison is not a solution. All it does is kick the can down the road, leaving unaddressed the environmental factors that contributed to the young person’s involvement in crime in the first place. Punishing these kids does not change their circumstances. 

If we do not change the environment, we will have little success in changing the outcome.

2. Resource our communities.

Often our communities know the young people who need more awhi and manaaki but lack the resources to adequately care for them.

Investing in youth workers who can connect with our young people and ensuring each community has a youth centre where young people can find belonging and support, are essential if we want to be proactive in engaging young people and their whānau before they are at risk. We can also do more by resourcing our schools to act as community hubs focused not only on education but also on youth development and over all wellbeing. 

By viewing our schools as community hubs, we have an opportunity to intervene early with our young people, building teams of counsellors, youth workers, mental health professionals, and social workers, to work collaboratively in order to ensure our young people and their whānau are able to get the support they need and identify those at increased risk before they've become disconnected.

3. Invest in Restorative Justice Approaches. 

A restorative justice approach involves supporting the young person to face what they have done and to take responsibility for the harm they have caused. It is an approach that holds a high level of accountability alongside providing the young person with the support they need to address the reasons they become involved in crime in the first place. 

Our current youth justice approach is founded upon restorative justice principles and it is working for a lot of our young people. Taking a long view, the Youth Justice Indicator Summary Report (a report released annually by the Ministry of Justice) indicates that youth crime is on the decline since 2010 when the report began recording the data. The report also indicates that by utilizing our current approach there has been a significant reduction in reoffending once young people and children become involved in the youth justice system. Our current system is not perfect, however where it falls down is largely due to lack of resources both within the justice system and within the community, resulting in the system not operating the way it should. This was another significant finding of Professor Lambie’s research. He highlights that due to a significant lack of resourcing, tamariki with complex needs are not receiving the level of support or intervention that they are entitled to, meaning that even though we know what we need to do to reduce the chance of reoffending, lack of investment is leading to a lack of execution.

4. Focus on prevention. 

We need to get serious about addressing the systemic issues that lead young people to offend. This means ensuring all our whānau and rangatahi have safe and stable housing, that rangatahi are not living in poverty, that we invest in building connected and inclusive communities, and that we ensure communities have the support and resources they need to hold and heal their own.

Once we understand the context our young people are living in, we need to respond adequately. It is no good punishing a child who stole food to feed his whānau by chucking him in prison, if we don’t also respond to the reason he offended in the first place. 

A proactive and pragmatic approach to reducing crime would be to ensure whānau have guaranteed liveable incomes by raising the benefit and ensuring the minimum wage is set at a liveable level. With housing insecurity and unsafe living environments also being a key driver for young people’s involvement in crime, enacting legislation that would prevent government agencies such as Oranga Tamariki and the justice system from releasing a young person into homelessness, is another pragmatic solution. This legislation would ensure that government agencies actively plan for the welfare of young people in their care and would require the Government to provide supported housing services for young people in need of safe housing in order to ensure that they are able to get the support they need.

For this group of young people, their lives are filled with a complexity that the blunt instrument of punitive rhetoric is not equipped to address. To respond, we need to get smart, responding to the individual needs of tamariki and their whānau. 

It is time we moved past sound-bite solutions and worn-out clichés and began responding to crime rather than just reacting.