Juvenile Justice Conference

Your Honour, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen.

Society has nothing more precious than its youth. We brought them into the world. To a large extent we made them what they are. To them, we entrust our hopes and our aspirations. To them, we look for our own future and the wellbeing of our grandchildren, for the security and prosperity of generations to come. They should be nurtured and nourished and inspired, for they are a treasure beyond price. Perhaps it's because we can't put a price on them that our investment is often so inadequate. This Conference seeks to increase the investment, and I congratulate those who have devised and prepared for it, and all of you who have come from such a wide range of disciplines to take part in it. May I particularly welcome our visitors from Australia. I hope you have time not only to share experiences, but also to see a little of our capital city and of our country, so very different from yours in many ways, today in particular, but so similar in many others.

A while ago there was a young man in the dock of the Wellington District Court. He was a decent-enough looking fellow, and I don't know what it was that had got him there. But whatever it was, things were not looking good for him. He took a matchbox out of his pocket, slid it open, held it up to his mouth and called into it "Kirk to Enterprise, beam me up Scottie."

Now what do you do with someone like that. He had broken the criminal code, and he was not only disrespectful to the Court, but he was not in the least overawed by the majesty of the law. He was quite cheeky in fact. Fancy behaving like that in my Court. But he had a bit of initiative, a bit of imagination, there was something rather attractive about him, really, some quality that could be harnessed and turned to good account for his own sake and the community's sake. So what to do with him? Commit him for contempt? Punish him for his original offence more sternly than otherwise? No, that would be an overreaction. But that original offence probably warranted imprisonment. We are pretty strong on imprisonment in this country. But there is something rather attractive about this fellow, and I don't really want to send him to prison. And if he goes to jail he could get beaten up or raped, or he could pick up the prison culture, and be much more of a problem when he comes out than he is now.

Yet if he doesn't get a jail sentence now, perhaps the Crown will appeal, and the appellate Court, who won't see him, might give him a longer term than this Court could probably get away with. And what would the media say? Youth laughs his way out of his proper sentence, makes a fool of the Court. People might write to the papers, or ring talk back radio, and complain about the weak-kneed Judge, a slap on the wrist with a wet bus ticket. And what of the victim? He has been grievously offended and offended against, he is very angry and wants to see justice done. And that means, because he hurt me, he should get hurt too.

Of course this particular fellow was a bit older than most of those who come within the range of youth justice. But his story has always stuck in my mind as an illustration of the kind of problem that confronts the Courts daily, and that still justifies the belief that this person standing there really ought to be somewhere else, beamed out to some different environment, where his particular offence could be dealt with in a different way, and whatever it was that led him to commit it could be addressed more effectively.

Of course there have been tremendous changes in attitude and approach to criminal justice since the days I began practice, back in the dark ages, although we still manage to have one of the highest rates of imprisonment in the western world. And one of the most far-reaching and successful of the changes has been in the way in which we deal with young offenders.

Indeed, the very expression, "youth justice", itself demonstrates the nature and extent of the change, for it's not one we would even have heard 20 years or so ago. Much less would we have thought back then that there could be a complete structure within the justice system set up to deal specifically with children and young people. But New Zealand now has such a structure. It is well-established, and fairly well-accepted, and it is working well, within the constraints of available resources C but with one, no two, notable exceptions: the persistent young offender, and the older serious offender.

There will always be the critics, always those who think the system is too soft, but to any thinking person success in the area of criminal justice depends on results, not on harshness. I believe that the results prove the scheme. And when you realise that the great majority of juvenile offending is committed by a very small number of core offenders, it will be obvious that to turn around even a handful of them will quite dramatically reduce the volume of offending overall. And that has been happening.

At the heart of this success is the family group conference, an example of restorative justice that could well provide, should provide, a model for a much greater range of offences and offenders than is the case now. The key to its success is the acceptance of responsibility, by both the offender and his family, most effectively achieved by them meeting face to face.

I think that very few offenders, of any age, appreciate the effect their actions have had on others. Of course there will always be those who don't care, but I doubt that there are many youngsters like that. They just don't think, and really we can't expect them to, given their so-limited experience of human life and emotions. But confront them with the reality, and confront their families and caregivers, let them hear from the victim her or himself exactly what effect the crime has had, and you'll usually finish up with a fair degree of contrition. The very experience of that contrition must begin to assuage the anger or distress of the victim, who so often, and justifiably, feels disregarded, an outsider, a mere observer of the process, despite the personal violation with which the process began. And when an appropriate sanction is proposed and agreed upon and carried through, preferably one that involves significant reparation, the process of healing, of restoration of a human relationship, has the potential to be complete. It is crucial, though, if this is to be so, that the sanction is worked through. If it is not, then not only is the process frustrated, but the victim is quite entitled to think that the whole thing has been a charade. The image of justice is tarnished, the concept of restorative justice is put into disrepute. And so I was disappointed to learn that this happens too often, especially in the payment of monetary reparation. This is, I suppose, a third exception to my earlier enthusiastic generalisation. Recovery of monetary reparation may not be seen as a significant matter if, as is probably the usual case, the amount is not great. But much more is at stake than the money: it is the integrity of the whole youth justice process.

I still have the most vivid recollection of a case I had many years ago in the old Children's Court. It was in the days when we still had Stipendiary Magistrates, who were all generalists, dealing with every kind of case that came along. We all waited in the corridor outside the Courtroom, lawyers, children, parents, police, social workers, all mixed up together C a mix of teenage bravado and forensic show and harassed officials and parental shame and frightened small boys. That day the magistrate was a very nice old gentleman, who had had a distinguished military career, but possessed of not too much imagination. I put up a passionate plea for my young client, and after due deliberation, these are the words that fell from the Bench. "Humph. I consider that the proper sentence is that you should be admonished and discharged. Consider yourself admonished and discharged." When we got outside, my client asked "What's amdonished and dech - dis ... " "Well," I said, "he meant you'd better not do it again or you'll be for it." Some of those magistrates (not this one) were pretty good at admonishing, and after all a good ticking-off can be very effective, but how much more imaginative and constructive are the range of possibilities that a family group conference can open up.

I have been enormously heartened by some of the accounts I have read, moved most of all I think by the reaction of some victims, whose anger has turned to sorrow when they realised the domestic or other circumstances with which the offender was contending, and who have gone out of their way to offer help, even employment.

Of course there are the failures. We are dealing with fallible human beings, usually very fallible ones, be they parents, other caregivers or the youngsters themselves. There will always be failures. But the successes far outweigh the failures: perhaps in numbers, I don't know, but certainly in quality. And I'm sure its these, the successes, that uplift your spirits, and give you the incentive to persevere with this very demanding work you do.

I said earlier that there are two exceptions to the successful operation of youth justice in this country: the problem of the persistent very young offender, and the problem of the serious older offender. The first is very much in the public mind. The second is one that the public would rather put out of mind. But both arise from a general public reluctance to accept that youth offending is a community problem, calling for community involvement in the measures needed to deal with it. The inadequacy of accommodation for persistent young offenders means that they are too often returned to the very domestic or social environment that gave rise to their offending in the first place, and that will obviously place no restraint whatever on their continued offending.

There is no lack of complaint from Police and public at the activities of these youngsters, but there seems a corresponding reluctance to spend the money needed to resolve the problem. And the inadequacy of appropriate accommodation for older young people who have committed serious offences is really a national disgrace. We are all too-familiar with the consequences of locking youngsters up in police cells or adult prisons, and I know of the effort expended and the frustration experienced by those who are endeavouring to provide proper facilities. Here is a prime example of the community washing its hands of a problem that is essentially its own. As a result, I am told that there is no adequate accommodation for these young people in the whole of Auckland, from where, if only by virtue of its size, the greatest proportion must come, and that they therefore have to be placed far away in Wellington or even in the South Island. Our communities must be brought to accept responsibility for their own.

The theme of your Conference is Youth Justice in Focus. Everyone who uses a camera knows about depth of field; that you can focus on a single object and see it on its own, with its surroundings and background indistinct and blurred, out of focus. Or you can increase the depth of field and bring as much of the surroundings and as much of the background as you wish into focus. There is a grave danger out in our community of youth justice being focussed on so narrowly, and so critically, that it is not seen in its true context.

Youth justice is not simply a matter of dealing with young people who offend against the law. It is as much concerned with causes as with consequences, and that concern requires a focus on families and communities as well as on the youngsters themselves. Although it's a bit of a mouthful, the title of our youth justice legislation, the Children, Young Persons and their Families Act, contains a vital truth: that the concern must not be, cannot be, solely with children and young persons. It is also necessarily with their families too. And as soon as we begin to look at families, we must see them in their context as well C that of community, community attitudes and community values, and community expectations. For those who come within the ambit of youth justice are, after all, simply the products of families C or what passes for them C and of communities.

And so youth justice has to deal with the results of family breakdown, of sexual and financial irresponsibility, of philosophies and practices that have led to economic, social and educational deprivation: the all-too common downsides of New Zealand society. There is a certain dread inevitability about the life cycle of many youngsters born into this rather fragmented New Zealand of ours. How often have Judges looked at reports that showed that the offender was almost predestined for trouble: it was just a matter of time. And schools find themselves having to provide food, and to act as welfare agencies and truancy officers; and Courts need the services of a range of professionals, way beyond the lawyers: and families need help in the basics of nutrition and child rearing, in budgeting, in the importance of education, above all perhaps in the importance of positive male role models.

It is very encouraging to see the number of community programmes that are helping meet these needs. The Police I know do wonderful work both organisationally and through the initiatives of individual officers. Maori and Pacific Island groups are addressing the particular needs of their people in a variety of ways, a notable one being the Tu Tangata programme, which puts parents and other adults into the classrooms as motivators and befrienders. Another splendid initiative I have seen is out at Porirua, not far from here, where teenage mothers are coming back to school, and acquiring both work and parenting skills. In Hamilton recently, I saw a programme for school dropouts who are being inspired to begin learning again. There is a whole range of programmes, too many almost, all dedicated to breaking that cycle of inevitability. I see that you will be hearing more about some of these in your workshop sessions, and that is as it should be, because they are all part of the broader picture of youth justice.

But let's face it, the strongest contributors to youth justice, because they are the most successful crime prevention units, are stable families, father, mother and the children in a warm and loving relationship, and schools which can capture the imaginations and so nurture the talents of the young. This is an exercise in true partnership, home and school together moulding character and developing talent, each with its own unique contribution to make.

I believe that it is here that our greatest challenge lies as a nation, for although there are countless wonderful families, there are thousands of children who know nothing of true family life. And while we have great numbers of talented and highly motivated youngsters, we still have a very great number who do not have the skills needed for survival in this increasingly competitive and quality-driven world. And with no worthwhile qualifications, there will be no work. With no understanding or experience of home and family, there will be no true nurturing, no sense of community, of responsibility for self and others. And so there will be plenty of candidates for the exercise of judicial youth justice.

What a cheerful way to start off this Conference! So let me be more positive and pay tribute to all who work in this most vital part of our justice system. I am sure we have got it right in terms of legislation and structure. I know how fortunate the nation is in the quality of our Judges and all the other professionals who make up the youth justice teams, for teams I am sure you need to be, and are. I am confident that this Conference, with its wide range of topics, and its excellent array of contributors, and its multi-disciplined participants, will be a shot in the arm for you all, an opportunity to share ideas and experiences and to gain fresh insights. I trust too that it will send a message to the wider community, to those who make decisions, and to those whose opinions carry weight with them; a message about caring, and community, and the acceptance of responsibility. For youth justice is the concern of us all.