Abstract
Following the annexation of Aotearoa/New Zealand by the British in 1840, Māori, as the Indigenous people of that country, experienced loss of sovereignty through the imposition of and application of new and transformative policies, including the law and unfamiliar legal and social codes. This paper considers the state and the influential legacy of an imposed, Settler-state social welfare and criminal justice system on Māori. An explicit, insider narrative will highlight how suppression, disconnection and abandonment, made manifest through particular and abusive state policies, has informed and constructed the life pathway of a member of a culturally and socially-submerged population, the Mongrel Mob gang.
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Notes
Aotearoa is the Māori name for New Zealand. In the body of this article, Aotearoa will be used together with the Pākehā name for the country, hence Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Pākehā is a Māori term commonly used to refer to non-Māori people and is used to refer to New Zealanders of European descent.
Such institutions pursue correctional education in which positive, transformative outcomes and the reduction of offending are the priorities. And, of course, the particular pedagogy of the jail teaches the prisoner about the specific regimes in which new language, codes of behaviours and exercises of power reside.
Over-representation in prison has become a normalised concept and can be seen as an attribute of a particular group (McIntosh 2015). As such it becomes a cultural measuring tool by which such a group is judged. Over-representation, as a constituent of the criminal justice system (CJS), therefore becomes part of the social environments and life pathways of such groups. The normalising of such a notion establishes an untruth as a truth; misconceptions become universalised as truths. Bull (2009) writes that any examination of Māori and the CJS begins with their over-representation in that system and the discussion continues without questioning the notion of over-representation: the impact and role of criminogenic factors are ignored. (See also Carr and Tam (2013); Jackson (1988); Webb (2011); Workman (2011)).
The marae is the sacred meeting place of a Māori kinship group where people gather for important, formal occasions such as tangi (funerals) and hui (meetings).
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Andrae, D., McIntosh, T. & Coster, S. Marginalised: An Insider’s View of the State, State Policies in New Zealand and Gang Formation. Crit Crim 25, 119–135 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-016-9325-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10612-016-9325-8