Justice must be impersonal
25th July 2009
I have been disappointed but unsurprised by reactions to last week’s comments from Chief Justice Sian Elias criticising the direction of justice and penal policies in New Zealand. Elias argued, not for the first time, that locking prisoners up for longer does not make our community safer. She has been rounded on by editorial writers, pulled up by politicians and dismissed by most opinion-makers as being out of touch with the times.
I am constantly surprised that we don’t see the obvious connection between our increasingly punitive sentencing laws and the rise of violent crime. For the past twenty years successive governments have been ratcheting up prison sentences to the point where we now have 9,000 people locked up - the second highest rate of imprisonment in the developed world. The present government happily predicts that its ‘get tougher’ intentions will see a further 37% increase in prison population by 2017.
Why are we content to accept this outcome and so abrupt in our dismissal of the Chief Justice’s views? Why are we so attached to the idea that locking prisoners up for longer will reduce crime in our community when that policy has failed for twenty years?
The comment that has caused greatest outrage is Elias’s assertion that emphasising the rights of victims traumatises them and damages the impartiality of the justice system. The rights of victims are a sacred cow of those who would make our justice system much more punitive. The wildly misnamed Sensible Sentencing Trust builds most of its argument around tales of victims who feel they have been denied justice.
Elias is warning us that placing the victim further into the process is a “repersonalisation of the justice system.” In order to understand that this may not be a desirable thing we need to imagine what life was like before we had a justice system.
A few hundred years ago justice in most societies was rough. If my neighbour stole and ate my pig I could either accept it as the way things were or I could gather up a bit of local muscle and deliver justice to whatever degree I thought appropriate. I justified my response with the bible (‘an eye for an eye’) or by reference to an older law of the jungle (‘survival of the most aggressive’). Either way it was strictly punitive – I aimed to wreak as much havoc upon my enemies as I could get away with.
Unsurprisingly this behaviour came to be seen as not a good way to run a society. It made criminals of all and, in communities that placed a high value on honour (which includes, by the way, communities that many New Zealanders trace their roots back to) it caused prolonged and violent conflict.
Eventually we hit upon a wiser way to manage justice. We agreed that if I felt I had been wronged I could complain to a neutral party – the state. I agreed to surrender to the state my right to personal vengeance. In effect the state became the aggrieved party, the state accepted ownership of the crime and responsibility for justice.
But the system only works as long as we have confidence in it and today confidence in state justice is dwindling. Why? People who advocate getting tougher on criminals will say they’ve lost confidence because the justice system fails to reduce crime. They are wrong. Rising crime is not caused by the justice system any more than rising heart disease is caused by the hospital system.
Rising crime is caused by the breakdown of the cohesive forces that bound us together as a society and allowed us to live tolerably with each other. The problem is the rise of individualism and, to use Chief Justice Elias’s word, the ‘repersonalisation’ of almost everything.
If I believe, as today many of us do, that the state exists to help me maximise my individual needs and desires, I am more likely to clamour for the state to get tough when those needs and desires have been impaired by the actions of others. When I act largely from self-interest I allow emotion to replace reason and vengeance to overshadow justice.
Most people who support victims rights and tougher sentencing believe they do so in the interests of society. It is regrettable that they are actually serving the interests of individualism and their actions are contributing to the further erosion of the society we all wish to enjoy.
Monday, July 27, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
A tale of opportunity and legacy
4th July 2009
This is the story of a book, a movie and a life.
In his recent book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell dissects some of the world’s most highly successful people in pursuit of the idea that nurture trumps nature. According to Gladwell success is due to happy accidents of legacy and opportunity, from something as simple as being born at the right moment in history, to something as complex as inheriting a particular set of cultural values and practices.
Bill Gates, for example, was born at the perfect time – 1955 – to be an inquisitive young teenager at the precise moment that computers became accessible. If he’d been born a few years earlier he would have been already too set in his ways to grasp the vision of desktop computing. A few years later and someone else would have beaten him to it.
Furthermore, his parents sent him to a private school where the PTA mums banded together to buy a computer in 1968 to which young Bill had unlimited access. 1968! - in Tuatapere we’d only just got television.
Gladwell points out that what appears to be raw talent is sometimes the product of deep social bias. He explains the apparently random preponderance of top Canadian ice hockey players with birthdays in January or February as a result of the grading cut off date of 1 January. A ten year old with a January birthday will be slightly bigger and stronger than his age group peer born in October or November, and will therefore be more likely to be picked for the rep team, where he will get better coaching and more game time which will eventually make the accident of birth seem like an accident of talent.
Ideas of legacy and opportunity appear also in the movie Bride Flight, currently screening in Christchurch. It is based on the true story of a planeload of Dutch immigrants to New Zealand in 1953, following the lives and loves of several men and women as first they zig-zag their way across the globe in one of the earliest long-haul flights, and then grapple the reality of immigration in this strange, wild, unpeopled land.
Some succeed, some fail, some do both in either order, others muddle along. The fortune of each is determined by personality, luck and ability. The Dutch themselves will tell you it is down to sheer hard work. Gladwell would pick apart each individual’s life to reveal their DNA of legacy and opportunity.
Drina Verstappen, my mother, should have been on that plane. In 1953 she was preparing to join her fiancée who had left for New Zealand the previous year. She turned down a place on the aircraft because there was no room for her two travelling companions, opting instead for the sea route on the immigrant ship Subayak via the Panama Canal.
Like all immigrants my mother became an outlier the moment her feet left her native soil. When she walked up the gangplank she changed the course of her life forever.
I have often wondered at the breath-taking magnitude of that decision. There has been nothing to match it in my own life.
My mother possessed neither wealth nor education. She knew nothing of the world beyond the small villages and farms of southern Holland. What she did was to seize the only opportunity she had ever been offered to set her own course and break free of a past marked by war, economic malaise and tradition.
Drina is 83 now. It takes a long life to reveal a big story and as the years unfolded I have come to understand that the experiences of my mother’s early life in Holland, so easily dismissed as hardships, became assets in New Zealand. In particular, the act of emigrating gave her a courage that she has never lost.
Although she possesses neither fame nor fortune Malcolm Gladwell would appreciate my mother’s story. Like the heroes in his book she understands the ‘culture of possibility’ and has used it brilliantly to shape her own life, and mine.
4th July 2009
This is the story of a book, a movie and a life.
In his recent book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell dissects some of the world’s most highly successful people in pursuit of the idea that nurture trumps nature. According to Gladwell success is due to happy accidents of legacy and opportunity, from something as simple as being born at the right moment in history, to something as complex as inheriting a particular set of cultural values and practices.
Bill Gates, for example, was born at the perfect time – 1955 – to be an inquisitive young teenager at the precise moment that computers became accessible. If he’d been born a few years earlier he would have been already too set in his ways to grasp the vision of desktop computing. A few years later and someone else would have beaten him to it.
Furthermore, his parents sent him to a private school where the PTA mums banded together to buy a computer in 1968 to which young Bill had unlimited access. 1968! - in Tuatapere we’d only just got television.
Gladwell points out that what appears to be raw talent is sometimes the product of deep social bias. He explains the apparently random preponderance of top Canadian ice hockey players with birthdays in January or February as a result of the grading cut off date of 1 January. A ten year old with a January birthday will be slightly bigger and stronger than his age group peer born in October or November, and will therefore be more likely to be picked for the rep team, where he will get better coaching and more game time which will eventually make the accident of birth seem like an accident of talent.
Ideas of legacy and opportunity appear also in the movie Bride Flight, currently screening in Christchurch. It is based on the true story of a planeload of Dutch immigrants to New Zealand in 1953, following the lives and loves of several men and women as first they zig-zag their way across the globe in one of the earliest long-haul flights, and then grapple the reality of immigration in this strange, wild, unpeopled land.
Some succeed, some fail, some do both in either order, others muddle along. The fortune of each is determined by personality, luck and ability. The Dutch themselves will tell you it is down to sheer hard work. Gladwell would pick apart each individual’s life to reveal their DNA of legacy and opportunity.
Drina Verstappen, my mother, should have been on that plane. In 1953 she was preparing to join her fiancée who had left for New Zealand the previous year. She turned down a place on the aircraft because there was no room for her two travelling companions, opting instead for the sea route on the immigrant ship Subayak via the Panama Canal.
Like all immigrants my mother became an outlier the moment her feet left her native soil. When she walked up the gangplank she changed the course of her life forever.
I have often wondered at the breath-taking magnitude of that decision. There has been nothing to match it in my own life.
My mother possessed neither wealth nor education. She knew nothing of the world beyond the small villages and farms of southern Holland. What she did was to seize the only opportunity she had ever been offered to set her own course and break free of a past marked by war, economic malaise and tradition.
Drina is 83 now. It takes a long life to reveal a big story and as the years unfolded I have come to understand that the experiences of my mother’s early life in Holland, so easily dismissed as hardships, became assets in New Zealand. In particular, the act of emigrating gave her a courage that she has never lost.
Although she possesses neither fame nor fortune Malcolm Gladwell would appreciate my mother’s story. Like the heroes in his book she understands the ‘culture of possibility’ and has used it brilliantly to shape her own life, and mine.
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