Deep dive into the causes of crime

It’s tempting, for those with no direct experience of the criminal justice system, to view it from the media’s preference for polar opposites.

Kenneth Loach films, such as Riff-Raff, Sweet Sixteen, and I, Daniel Blake, frame crime and interaction with the justice system as products of social conditions. Young offenders, for example, are victims of circumstances beyond their control. These include family neglect, poverty, unemployment, and lack of opportunity.

A handy political label to blame for this is neoliberalism or, in Britain, Thatcherism. Loach wants his audience to be totally on the side of the offender versus the police, courts, and welfare systems. In Sorry We Missed You (2019), Loach also spotlights courier drivers as low-income representatives of the gig economy.

At the other end of the spectrum is a critique of welfarism as the primary cause of crime, due to moral failure and cultural decay, rather than social deprivation. A primary exponent of individual responsibility, even in deprived conditions, is Theodore Dalrymple, a pseudonym for Anthony Daniels, a medical doctor whose main patients were those facing criminal charges or prison inmates.

His Spectator columns (also under the name Edward Theberton from 1984-91) and prolific output of books are full of excuses that a person’s bad behaviour is someone else’s fault or are bare-faced lies. He also accuses social workers, academics and policy makers of being gullible, making it too easy for people to escape the consequences of their actions.

Publishers actively serve the market for truth about the judicial system. These are just some recent titles: prisons (Rhonda Hāpi-Smith’s Inside the Wire); criminology (Mental Health and Criminal Justice: A New Zealand Guide and Greg Newbold’s Crime, Law and Justice in New Zealand), gangs (Jarrod Gilbert’s Patched, Jared Savage’s Underworld and Gangster’s Paradise, and Mad on Meth by Benedict Collins), police (John Woodward’s Risking It All) and courts (Polkinghorne, by Steve Braunias and To Be Fair: Confessions of a District Court Judge, by Rosemary Riddell).

Asher Emanuel. (Source: Ebony Lamb)

The latest to join the shelf is The Valley: Crime and Punishment in a New Zealand City, by debut author Asher Emanuel, a Wellington lawyer and journalist. It differs from the above due to its stylistic departure into what is known as narrative non-fiction.

In the simplest terms, this means turning real events into a novelistic story, with verbatim conversations and real characters, but who may be given fictitious names. The aim is not to exaggerate or sensationalise the truth but to make it more believable by providing a readable narrative.

In capable hands, it has become a popular genre. The best-known exponents include New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe, whose London Falling was the top-selling book at the Auckland Writers Festival.

Keefe's style of investigative journalism has made him rich and famous, thanks to screen adaptations of Say Nothing (Irish terrorism on Disney+) and Empire of Pain/Painkiller (opioids and the Sackler family on Netflix). He even made a cameo appearance as himself in the final scene of HBO’s Industry.  

Emanuel conceived his book back in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, and did 18 months of fieldwork, from November 2020 to June 2022. He had to gain the permission and confidence of people involved in Wellington and Lower Hutt’s District Courts, as well as government departments such as the Public Defence Service (PDS), Corrections and Police.

This was no mean feat and has probably never been attempted before in a journalistic exercise with the goal of publication. The sheer scale and honest detail in The Valley may mean it won’t be attempted again any time soon (476 pages including sources and glossary).

Already, one legal commentator has raised questions of confidentiality and access to personal information. Former District Court Judge David Harvey, whose ubiquitous commentaries are about the only ones available, also raised the issue of whether the use of fictitious names offered sufficient protection from identification. He said he was able to identify three former colleagues without difficulty from the brief descriptions.

I’ve seen no other critical comments but anticipate this book will be closely studied. Most of those involved have approved the text, so no legal action is likely.

I asked Emanuel whether he had a model in mind, as narrative non-fiction has become an established genre. He referred me to Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016) by sociologist Matthew Desmond. It’s set in the poorest areas of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and follows eight families and their housing plight during the 2008 financial crisis.

It won multiple awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction, and aimed to show that the process of eviction for unpaid rent was a “cause, not just a condition, of poverty”. Critics would disagree, saying eviction simply exacerbates the array of problems that already afflicts such people.

Matthew Desmond. (Source: Barron Bixler)

The Valley transfers Desmond’s methodology to the Hutt Valley, describing how crimes attributed to family dysfunction, addictive habits, foetal alcohol spectrum disorder and much else are dealt with by the courts, probation service and Corrections.

Fresh charges

There are three main male protagonists: two of them convicted criminals aged 29 and 33, Māori and Pakeha; and their PDS legal aid lawyer, aged 34. When the narrative starts, the offenders are facing fresh charges for the same types of crime they have committed and been jailed for since they were teenagers: shoplifting, theft, burglary, drink-driving, and use of offensive weapons.  

Apart from some family members, little is known about the victims of these crimes, except that many are shopkeepers.

Both men are fathers but no longer take responsibility for their children or live with their spouses. Both receive welfare benefits and have health issues, mental and physical, due to drug use or alcohol abuse. During the 18 months they are shadowed by Emanuel, they have copious meetings, court appearances and encounters with dozens of officials, charity workers, potential employers and medical officers.

Most act in good faith and try to help, but it is seldom reciprocated. The offenders go in and out of jail, get bail or remand, and then commit more crimes in a continuing cycle. It can be a depressing, frustrating and unsatisfying business, especially for the defence lawyer.

Hutt Valley District Court.

Despite this, the narrative is never boring, at least to readers unfamiliar with the system and the minutiae of bureaucratic process or lawyer-client relationships. Mundane events dominate, such as the amount of paperwork associated with a prisoner being released without any place of residence or bank account for welfare payments.

One’s hopes might be raised that the offender will go straight after all this effort, but these are soon dashed. Solutions do not seem obvious, but this doesn’t deter Emanuel from having a go. This is where he may divert from readers who are sympathetic to Dalrymple or supporters of Sensible Sentencing.

Emanuel plumps for a solution that meets all the needs of his book’s recidivist criminals – medical, psychiatric, educational, occupational, social, familial – rather than criminal justice reforms.

Some readers, he suggests, would opt for “improvements to prosecution decisions, the availability of bail accommodation, or the diligence of the probation service”. Others would “focus on policing practice; rehabilitation, training and work opportunities in prison, or even aspects of the criminal law and procedure”.

However, he admits the cost of providing all the needs for turning criminals into responsible parents would be more expensive than locking them up. (A remand prisoner is said to cost $150,000 a year.) This is, he says, a political problem needing a political solution.

At the most recent general election, a majority rejected Labour’s “soft” approach to crime and many of its reforms have been reversed by the National-led coalition Government. Discounted sentencing and cultural reports are out, three strikes back in. The Valley leans into the Loach approach, but its realism confirms Dalrymple’s conclusions.

The Valley: Crime and Punishment in a New Zealand City, by Asher Emanuel (Bridget Williams Books).