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Exploring the Experiences of Youth and Staff in Aotearoa New Zealand Youth Justice Residences

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Thesis(2.35 MB)

Date

2024

Authors

Beck, Emily

Supervisor

Tunufa'i, Laumua
Gordon, Grace

Item type

Thesis

Degree name

Master of Criminology and Criminal Justice

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Publisher

Auckland University of Technology

Abstract

In Aotearoa New Zealand, youth justice residences (YJR) are a commonly used intervention to address serious youth offending, intended as an alternative to traditional incarceration and an opportunity to engage youth to encourage their desistance. Despite youth justice being a heavily researched topic overall, academic scholarship on Aotearoa YJR remains lacking. At any given time, almost two hundred young people may occupy YJR across Aotearoa, 88% of whom will reoffend after release (Oranga Tamariki Evidence Centre, 2020). Though youth crime has more than halved in the past decade (Ministry of Justice, 2024), community outcry over public offenses like ‘ram raids’ has fostered populist pressure on the government to enforce a more punitive system, promoting an increased use of YJR and the reopening of military-style boot camps. This heightened tough-on-crime approach will no doubt affect youth unequally, as rangatahi Māori make up at least three quarters of those in YJR despite only accounting for one quarter of the wider population (Francis & Vlaanderen, 2023). The government’s intended shift towards a restorative and culturally sensitive approach to youth justice has thus far not counteracted this disproportionate impact. It remains unclear if piecemeal reform situated within a Western justice system, particularly in a neocolonial context, is a feasible solution to youth offending (Agozino, 2004; Cunneen & Tauri, 2016, Chapter 3; Tauri, 2014; Webb, 2017). This research uses qualitative semi-structured interviews with seven youth justice residents and staff members at two Aotearoa YJR, to gather insight into their experiences. Interview responses are explored through reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2022) and expanded on through a critical discussion of responsibility, narrative, and power, supported by existing contextual literature. Themes are developed that frame justice-involved youth within an experiential “personal microcosm” and a critical “structural macrocosm”, both of which influence their behaviour and trajectory. Through these frames, YJR is described as a “three-body problem” where youth, staff, and the larger government are all made responsible for fixing youth offending, but none have the ability to do so. With analysis rooted in critical race theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2017) and counter-colonial criminology (Agozino, 2004), this thesis discusses how YJR has been perpetuated as a “zombie idea” (Peters & Nagel, 2020) through majoritarian storytelling (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). This storytelling involves a proliferation of “tales of terror” (Rappaport, 2000) told about Māori, exacerbated by sensationalised media reporting on youth offending. Furthermore, the government “performs ignorance” around the failures of YJR in order to dodge accountability and maintain institutional legitimacy (Stanley et al., 2024). This thesis closes by highlighting the need for transformative justice, identifying alternatives that center decolonial action to promote healing for rangatahi and their whānau.

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http://hdl.handle.net/10292/18258

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