Reframing the crime debate
AUT Lecturer Grace Gordon has lent her expert opinion to the crime debate ahead of this year’s election.
In an opinion piece written for the NZ Herald, the criminologist offers an alternative to the usual narrative of crime and punishment.
“For far too long, our approaches to safety have been dominated by fear that restricts our ability to achieve collective and sustainable safety. In a society that is becoming increasingly divisive and disconnected, mistrust, suspicion, and fear of ‘others’ surface,” Dr Gordon says.
“To alleviate this fear, we resort to a criminal justice system that superficially removes these fears. For example, someone experiencing mental distress, substance abuse, or homelessness is viewed as someone to be feared.
“In the past six years, the police have seen an 87 per cent increase in calls relating to someone in mental distress. This shows how reliant we are on punishment-focused institutions to feel safer.”
This fear-based approach, she says, runs the risk of victimising people who don’t have basic needs met and are then made to feel they don’t have the ability to engage meaningfully in society.
“People are deprived of resources, wraparound support, and care, and then become trapped in the justice system with limited opportunities to break away from a cycle of harm,” Dr Gordon says.
“People entangled in the justice system are more likely than the general population to have been a victim of violence, to have a lifetime diagnosable mental health or substance disorder, and to have lower levels of educational achievement.
“When safety is approached from a place of fear, our responses to crime are often punitive and exclusionary. This enables a vicious cycle in and out of prison where people are removed from communities and their support networks.”
Dr Gordon says that instead of focussing on how to punish criminals we need to be looking at ways to solve issues underlying crime and refocussing on how to connect with people who feel excluded from society.
Putting money back into community connections and relationship-building based on care could provide an antidote to the gloomy headlines of the current news cycle, she says.