Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home

by David Cohen

  Among the regular rewards are the opportunity to shoot pool in the lounge area and the right to enjoy a few additional cigarettes, above and beyond the daily allowance that all boys aged 15 or more are allowed, to puff between work duties. The kids generally like the system, and that’s how it’s meant to be; the token-economy initiative is what one might call an exercise in behaviour modification, treating the ‘what’ rather than the ‘why’ of behaviour, to be sure, and disabling bad habits. Originally devised for similar correctional facilities in the United States, it has proved so popular locally that a number of the other New Zealand institutions have taken it up — including the Weymouth centre in Auckland and Wanganui’s Holdsworth School — since Epuni first adopted it in 1972.

  On this particular evening what’s most coveted is the opportunity to enjoy a ringside place on one of the orange plastic chairs arranged around the small television set in the recreational area next to the dining room. As usual the bigger boys go for the seats in front, the smaller ones just behind. There’s Charlie, still wearing a cast from the car crash he had the last time he absconded. Next to him slouches Rangi, none too smart but extremely strong, complete with what looks to be a large handkerchief pointlessly wrapped around his head.

  Odder still, at least for anyone with an inkling of what they signify, are a number of crude Nazi symbols tattooed on his massive arms, as opposed to the usual four green dots on the knuckles (the four F’s, remember: find her, feel her, fuck her, forget her) that younger gang members typically plump for. All the same you do have to marvel at the menace the boy effortlessly exudes, dusky arms loosely folded, black hair still wet and draped across an already muscular neck.

  You find yourself thinking about everything you’ve seen today, and you think about life. What does it mean to be a child in that moment when those diamond-hard certainties breathed into us at birth first start to slip away? The kids, however, are gaping at the hazy little box, breathing in the energy of what’s happening half a world away — the distant drumbeat now frighteningly close at hand — with all the force of the 28,000 televised fans sucking the air out of the sweltering Araneta Colosseum, in the Philippines, and you should be, too.

  EVERYTHING THEY EVER TOLD YOU ABOUT HEAVYWEIGHT boxing — about power, beauty, reach, intelligence and creativity — points to an early victory by Muhammad Ali over Joe Frazier in tonight’s bout, the third of their epic clashes in the middle of an era that began, as it happened, at precisely the same time as Epuni Boys’ Home, and even now casts an ever-powerful presence over so many of its wards. But everything they told you isn’t necessarily so.

  The opening few rounds confirm as much. Ali, the taller and heavier fighter, disdaining his trademark butterfly approach but still keeping his hands characteristically low, moves in confidently on his more economically packaged, rugged-looking opponent with cruel insults and disdainful jabs. Why else would he be fighting flat-footed in the middle of the unusually large ring?

  But Frazier, sweat bouncing off his body, is complex, full of surprises, ominously laconic in the exchanges grunted back and forth during the early rounds, and cutting much more of a verbal presence than one has been led to believe of the man sometimes dismissed as twice as black and half as smart as his more popular foe. (Ali: ‘They told me you was through, Joe, they told me you was finished.’ Frazier: ‘They lied.’) And Joe, as they say in the business, has a cold motor; Ali ought to have remembered that from their previous fights.

  By the fifth round, the time for verbal jazzing is way over. Ali, anxiety growing in his black-marble eyes, looks to be in trouble. Frazier — pitter-pattering, crouching, snorting, weaving, slinging lefts and rights to Ali’s body and the occasional bomb to his head — is a baggy propeller, arms whirring faster and faster around a deadstill gaze. Peek-a-boo, the standard bobbing and weaving style where the hands are placed in front of the boxer’s face, it might be, but that doesn’t really do full justice to the superhuman performance Frazier is putting on. How can anyone punch a hole through that?

  The minutes tick by along with the mounting physical traces left by one of Frazier’s signatures: a mighty left hook. Now the bullets are flying. Ali seems unable to find a way out. The assault continues until the bell signals the end of the 10th; the champion, head bowed low, staggers to his corner.

  Times like these are when a cornerman is faced with the difficult task of convincing a younger man to find it in himself to continue fighting after he has suffered a series of terrible blows. In this, as incredibly gifted a boxer as Ali is, he’s really no different from any young man, whether among the onlookers in Manila or those in Epuni. But these kids never had anyone like Bundini Brown, Ali’s flamboyant, booming cornerman since 1963, who loves and chides his champion like the father figure that virtually all these far-flung fans lack, and now presents himself at the ring apron, his face damp with emotion.

  ‘Go down to the well one more time,’ Brown yells, tears running down his face; ‘the world needs ya!’ Ali kind of nods and rises to his feet.

  At first the advice doesn’t really help. Ali’s 11th round again proves to be a disaster. But then, something finally clicks: he produces six shots to Frazier’s head, ripping another eight for good measure shortly afterwards. Now it’s Frazier’s legs that seem to be searching for the canvas, his punches losing steam as he attempts to ward off the onslaught. The bell is the only thing that saves him in the 14th round.

  Now the two fighters collapse in their respective corners, heads hanging down like broken dolls that resemble nothing so much as Epuni’s newly inaugurated little criminals, while Ali’s trainer, Angelo Dundee, whispers something in his ear. What is he telling him? Who will prevail? How did we all end up in this fight anyway?

  LITTLE CRIMINALS

  Who we are and what we call home are different things. But the two realities are inextricably intertwined, circling and jabbing each other throughout our lives. ‘After all, anybody is as their land and air is,’ Gertrude Stein wrote. ‘It is that which makes them and the arts they make and the work they do and the way they eat and the way they drink and the way they learn.’

  If that’s really the case, if this idea of home explains so much about our true selves, then it’s significant that the flagship correctional training centre in which our young friends are drinking in Ali and Frazier in the final, drawn-out moments of their historic death waltz should be indigenous to New Zealand’s Hutt Valley, a region where the theme of juvenile delinquency sometimes feels as old as the rugged hills overlooking the premises.

  It’s also significant, perhaps, that our young friends have seldom been regarded as our friends.

  Juvenile delinquency as an identifiable term dates back to the early 19th century when it appears to have been coined to describe a slightly ambivalent concept relating to children — which is to say, those aged 14 or younger — and youngsters who threaten the social order. On the one hand it suggests a hesitancy about whether such youngsters should be regarded on an equal footing with adults. At the same time, though, it seems to identify a particular problem while hinting that what is under discussion might ultimately be more socially harmful than many other types of offence.

  The term was advanced not by an academic but by an agitated American popular press, in the 1810s, and in fairly short order the politicians of the time took up the emotional cue and pressed the concept towards its legislative debut, in the statute books of New York City in 1824. Thirty years later the expression started appearing in the New Zealand vernacular, serving as an inspired phrase for the youthful masses supposedly laying siege to the new antipodean dream. This was a scourge against which the moral stewards of the time would anxiously gird themselves, in a colony in which by the end of the century 42 per cent of the population was under the age of 15.

  From a typical editorial in the Poverty Bay Herald of May 14, 1895, for instance, readers discover that ‘the children of the poor today have less regard for law or authority’. Increasing
ly, many such youngsters were giving themselves over to ‘acts of wanton mischief’ and ‘rudeness, incivility, indecency and profanity are more than ever features of their speech and behaviour’. Indeed, the growing social pestilence shown by the children of the poor was ‘disappointing and regrettable’, the paper said. Not to mention a sure sign of criminal conduct to follow.

  Another piece from 1870 predicted that New Zealand would soon fall prey to an army of children who were beginning to embrace the vagabond lifestyle. ‘It has been shown again and again,’ this correspondent wrote balefully, ‘that these social pests are the offspring of dishonest, intemperate and profligate parents.’ Nor did the media of the day believe any effort should be spared in dealing to those associated with the problem. The case of three boys in Wellington caught throwing stones at a house, for instance, called for nothing less than ‘very decided repressive measures’, thundered a leader-article in the Evening Star.

  Here, as ever, New Zealand newspapers essentially echoed the received wisdom of their American counterparts, which by the late 1800s had started to spice their own editorial offerings with academic seasoning. In Juvenile Offenders, published at the end of the century, the criminologist W. Douglas Morrison offered that ‘whether we look at home or abroad, whether we consult the criminal returns of the Old World or the New, we invariably find juvenile criminality exhibiting a distinct tendency to increase. It is a problem which is not confined to any single community: it is confronting the whole family of nations; it is arising out of conditions which are common to civilisations.’

  But just as America supplied the lingo for identifying and understanding the issue, American culture was also seen as fomenting the problem. Among New Zealand’s first debates over censorship, for example, was the controversy caused by a plan to screen a film of the heavyweight boxing championship fight between Tommy Burns and Jack Johnson. Twice the National Council of Churches inveighed against the screening, arguing that the film should be banned on account of what would be the injurious effect on ‘the small boy inhabitant of the community, who is generally panting for gore and plenty of it’ — and twice this ecclesiastical intercession caused no small public debate.

  Of course every recorded era has experienced a strikingly similar collective headache in respect of its young, along with the conviction that the problem is drastically worsening, starting with Socrates famously complaining about young men of his time contradicting their elders, gorging on the fat of the land and hatching schemes to ‘tyrannise their teachers’.

  In one of the more thorough popular examinations of the same theme to be published in recent years, the British author Jon Savage traces similar blasts of chill horror across centuries of Anglo-American literature, beginning with Rousseau’s 1762 tract Emile and its scandalous characterisations of puberty as ‘a change of temper, frequent outbursts of anger, a perpetual stirring of the mind’. (In a compassionate aside that might have been better studied by latter-day ‘child savers’, Rousseau also chided adults for ‘always looking for the man in the child without considering what he is before he is a man’.) The American scholar who in the late 1800s more or less invented the modern discipline of adolescent studies — the term was his — was a genetic psychologist named G. Stanley Hall, who also popularised the same conviction with a Rousseauesque mantra: ‘Every child is a little savage.’

  Onward the narrative extends through time and cultural space, and with it, always, the most ancient of questions has been posed: What is to be done? What is to be done about those whose young minds, as the Christchurch Press put it in 1896, appear ‘laden with immeasurable possibilities for evil’? But such clamour has usually tended to be restrained by what we have already seen to be the ambiguity of the concept of delinquency, for no society — certainly not New Zealand — has ever fully agreed on whether it constitutes crimes to be punished or problems to be treated.

  It is in no small part due to this lack of agreement that one of the most historically popular measures for dealing with the problem — residential institutions for the young — has usually ended up serving the twin purposes of reformatory and shelter. Part of the justification for simultaneously using such institutions for these apparently contradictory purposes has been the fact that problematic children of both types in the western world have long been cared for by people other than their biological parents.

  So why not, the reasoning has gone, bundle both kinds of kids together in the one place? Periods of rapid urbanisation — and the associated social alarm over the new levels of delinquency created by the newcomers from the sticks — have tended to be the eras when this argument has found its greatest purchase. Even so, along with the understandings of what ‘delinquency’ means and how it might best be treated, popular enthusiasm in New Zealand for putting into service the solution of customised residences has waxed and waned.

  Officially, sanctioned care for neglected or indigent children dates back to the 1840s, when government resources were set aside for the establishment of schools for the offspring of wayward settlers. The move mirrored changes in Britain, which allowed for reformatories and ‘schools of industry’ to be dedicated to prevention and to some kind of rehabilitation for those impoverished children who ‘become the curse and trouble of all places where they live’.

  In 1867, the industrial school arrangement was strengthened with the passage of legislation allowing the state to house perceived ‘larrikins’, the early Australian term for delinquents. Religious education, language instruction and industrial training became the main focus of these new facilities which, in addition to a naval training camp, included 10 such schools in which kids under 15 — some as young as two — could be required to live for up to seven years.

  In 1873, the head of any of these schools in New Zealand became the official guardian of the child in place of his parents. The Naval Training School Act of the following year introduced a provision for wayward boys to be detained in the naval training schools or, in certain cases, simply sent to sea. By the following decade the government was boarding-out most of the 4000 children who were in these schools, and soon only one in five of them remained in state care.

  Shortly into the 20th century, however, as a result of public disquiet over the treatment experienced by some of the boys in private care, the situation changed again. This was when the government took control of all residential establishments for children under 16 years of age who had been found to be, in the language of the day, destitute, neglected, vagrant, in a detrimental environment, associating with persons of ill repute, uncontrollable or convicted of offences against the law.

  Officials at the Department of Education, which oversaw these residences, did little to hide their contempt for those placed in their correctional charge. As in the United States, which also invented the concept of a children’s court in Illinois in 1899, mainly as a way of addressing youth crime in the city of Chicago, the guiding judicial principle in New Zealand always was that such children needed rescuing rather than punishing. ‘I endeavoured to act in each case,’ said one American judge of the time, ‘as I would were it my own son who was before me in the library at home, charged with some misconduct.’

  In practice, according to Mike Doolan, a one-time residential care manager turned senior fellow at the University of Canterbury’s Department of Social Work, this country’s implementation of the doctrine of parens patriae, or ‘the state as parent’, has often been put to work in New Zealand in a somewhat less benevolent fashion. While the aim of the burgeoning movement, which saw residential admissions catapult from 800 in 1880 to 1700 by the turn of the century, was in keeping with the good American judge’s sentiment, the evidence suggests that our own Child Welfare Branch administered its duties with a somewhat more gnarled Calvinist hand. It was a hand calloused by the imprint of the international social reformers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but motivated to a degree by a strictly punitive attempt to morally corral the lives of its wards as mu
ch as any desire to liberate and dignify them.

  As one General Brett, a whiskery old member of the colony’s Legislative Council, put it, residential solutions were well suited to ‘those ill-conditioned and corrupt lads’ for whom reformatories would provide a much-needed ‘terror of the rod’. Practically speaking, too, the idea seemed to offer a way to keep the country’s more impressionable delinquents away from the welter of bad new social influences.

  Among the chroniclers who captured what this meant through the eyes of a kid was the maverick Labour MP John A. Lee. A one-time resident of the notorious Burnham Industrial School, where he was sent at age 14 after being convicted of petty theft, Lee went on to become a decorated war hero and oratorical gun for hire. A committed socialist, ‘Bolshie Lee’ produced a number of works lightly fictionalising aspects of his residential experience, most notably his 1936 book The Hunted, which moved George Bernard Shaw to sing Lee’s praises.

  The book was based on Lee’s time at Burnham in the early 1900s. He writes of endless lineups on the watch of one Mr Denton, an unusually panicked sexual moralist even by the standards of the time, who claimed he could tell if a boy indulged in masturbation simply by staring into his eyes. This, Mr Denton would frequently do. He was convinced that God had gifted him with special insights into the spiritual effects of a habit that he believed would first drain away the substance of the masturbator’s spine, then the wretch’s brain and immortal soul, consigning the youth to a stint in the mental asylum followed by almost-certain premature death.