"Ethnic Justice"

It's the Just Way, Not the Maori Way

The wife of murdered Maori man, George Taiaroa has called for a Maori justice system.  This is not novel.  It has been bubbling away for some time.  The contention is that the way the present justice system operates reflects an alien culture; Maori feel uncomfortable and disengaged in such a foreign atmosphere.  Better to have a justice system which reflects Maori culture, the Maori way of doing things.

Some aspects of this "Maori culture" work well in some situations we are told.  But the principles involved are not "Maori" per se, but are Christian common sense.  We believe the entire justice system should adopt them and deploy them appropriately.  Features such as the perpetrator meeting with victims, apologising to them, making appropriate restitution, and the perpetrator's family insisting upon such actions by their relative, and so forth are all sound practices.

However, such opportunities for forgiveness and restitution need to be well-managed (as we understand the present practice generally is).
 If not, they will simply turn into angry grievance sessions or guilt manipulative exchanges, where the perpetrator and his family and supporters attempt to justify the criminal act(s) and push off guilt and responsibility to "society" at large, or the rich, or the school system, or whatever.  Such blame-shifting, if tolerated by the justice system, would serve only to reinforce the perpetrator's self-righteousness, and justify his criminal offending in his own and his coterie's eyes.

Here is a typical example.  We overheard a conversation in a train recently--it was rather hard not to hear it.  Two Maori young men were discussing Indian convenience store owners and operators.  Their language was foul, racist, and unrepeatable.  The basic premise was that Indians were stealing from exploited people like them.  Their prices were far higher than the price of similar goods in supermarkets.  Obviously, when wanting ciggies or some other item late at night or in locations where there were no supermarkets nearby, these men and their friends had resorted to the local convenience store, only to be charged higher prices.  They were (according to their own calculus) being "ripped off".  Streams of expletives issued forth to tell the world how evil Indians were.

In a restorative justice programme, unless there were strong family and official intervention and a change of mind before the restorative and restitutive meetings, the process would end in disaster.  Why? Because the Indian shopkeepers were to blame, not those who stole from them.  The latter (in their own world view) would have been acting justly, and fairly punishing the storekeepers, who were (expletive, expletive) thieves.

Nevertheless, with our "eyes wide open" to the possible risks and pitfalls, we believe restorative justice for certain offenders and offences needs to be universal throughout the justice system.  We also believe strongly in the fundamentally just principles of New Zealand's Three Strikes system, where guilt and punishment accumulates upon subsequent recidivist criminal acts.

These principles are not ethnic, but universal principles of a fundamentally just criminal system.