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

by David Cohen

  According to testimony that was later offered at his trial on a variety of sex charges, Calcinai worked hard to improve his standing at the school that had employed him, though some of the parents were never won over by his style — his insistence on personally conducting routine ‘health checks’ of the children, for example, and the camping trips with some of the more troubled boys. Calcinai didn’t think much of those parents, of course, but as the judge told him at the trial: ‘It ill becomes you now to plead the low standard of the children and their parents.’ The police prosecutor added, ‘You have grossly abused trust and authority to satisfy your own perverted desires.’ In 1973 Calcinai was convicted and jailed for five years on six charges of sodomy and eight of indecent assault on three of the Maori boys he taught at Pipiriki.

  MEANWHILE, BACK AT EPUNI, CALCINAI’S SUCCESSOR had his hands full attempting to get what vestiges of an educational arrangement as Epuni had up and running.

  Dave Kelsey, now retired and living in the Far North after a career in teaching, knew as soon as he arrived that he faced daunting hurdles. For one thing, EBH School, as it was sometimes known, was graded as a primary school despite the bulk of its pupils being high-school age. Staff and pupils therefore enjoyed no automatic access to college materials. Another issue was the lack of teachers — there were never more than just the three — who were yet required to teach a full syllabus while also being part of the institution’s senior management team, partaking in endless case-planning meetings, preparing assessment reports, dealing with specialists and planning programmes tailored for kids with special needs — which was to say, virtually everyone among the 60 per cent or so of admissions who were put in the school.

  Finally, no outside help was ever available to the school other than just one part-time educator who was available for five hours each week. Sometimes it seemed as if the relevant departments neither knew nor cared what was being done educationally with the boys who were being admitted.

  Small wonder that outsiders sometimes thought of Kelsey as a man who was being paid to drive himself crazy. But Kelsey never viewed it that way. As he saw it, there was no magic bullet, only a series of steps one needed to take. His style was to home in on developmental sequences — the clusters of operational thought one needs to master in order to progress to the next level of learning — which in his case meant taking kids back to the last area in which they had any proven competence. Pupils who achieved something tangible received a certificate, complete with the Epuni logo, showing the particular goal they had achieved: reading at a 12-year-old level, evincing a basic command of addition or subtraction, or decimals.

  It felt like a good system, and the evidence was that Kelsey worked against considerable constraints to use it well. He had three classrooms at his disposal, a woodwork room and a large gymnasium. But the school had no library and purchasing new books was out of the budgetary question. So he and the other instructors made do with what they had. Thankfully, paper and pens were in good supply, so these they adapted as best they could to suit the school’s behaviourist approach.

  ‘I had a series of cards, English-based with drawings,’ he recalled. ‘We’d all sit in a circle or in a small group. Then I’d show some of these cards to the kids, and I might ask what was happening in them. What I was waiting for was basically some kid to say, “Oh, that’s what I used to do, this is what I did.” Shoplifting or something like that. And then we’d talk about it. At first there would be lots of bravado, but then we’d talk it through and the kids would become more serious.

  ‘I wouldn’t actually comment on whether it was an ethical thing to do, I would just say, “Well, why did you do that? How do you think the shopkeeper felt? What happened? What did your parents say?” Then we’d get down to the fact that some of the parents couldn’t care less, or some of them were acting a bit like Fagan. So we’d discuss those things, as well, but never as a moral issue. It was just about really wanting to give them an additional dimension from the action they had taken, to start thinking about it, to get their empathy going.’

  Friends used to ask Kelsey why he bothered. Oh, you’re not going to be able to do much with those kids, they’d tell him. Just give them art all day or something like that. And he would say, ‘Listen, you know, we’ve got these kids here at the moment with these needs.’ Meeting those needs was what he was being paid to do. ‘So I said, “We’ve got to try and find some way of helping these kids to get further ahead, because I’m a firm believer that work is therapy. If you’ve got a job to do, if you’ve got something to do, you get your status, you get more money, and you get your feeling of worth in society.’

  Did he ever notch up any notable success stories? The head teacher corrugated his brow for a moment. ‘Do you remember Peter Kelly, who used to be the racehorse caller?’ he asked me. ‘No? You know, the guy who used to call the races in that sing-song voice that never missed a beat?’ Kelsey smiled at the recollection.

  ‘Well, I had a kid who could do that, too, although initially, we had problems with him not even doing anything, not wanting to do anything. But he was super-bright. And once he realised that he could earn points to use the tape recorder to do this sort of thing, he was away. So we took him in to NZBC, as it was known at that stage, and they put him in the sound studio, gave him a go, and he was like, Woah! So things opened up for him. So that was a success.’ At least Kelsey hoped so; among the persistent frustrations of his position was not being able to track the later success of his wards.

  Kelsey cared about the good things that the boys opened themselves to outside the classroom too. One never-to-be-forgotten night, he recalled, one of his colleagues hit on the inspired idea of showing them Franco Zeffirelli’s dazzling Romeo and Juliet, the great movie that turns Shakespeare’s traditional love story into a thoroughly modern tale of two street toughs crushed by their fight with The System. Through love the kids in the film manage to find an ideal, something they can fight and, ultimately, die for. But death enlarges them, even as it diminishes their parents’ hatred, the kids becoming, as Juliet’s father puts it in the epilogue, ‘the poor sacrifices of our enmity’.

  Zeffirelli, himself the illegitimate son of a textile salesman and a seamstress, declared in interviews that his work would see him regarded as a ‘flagbearer of the crusade against boredom, bad taste and stupidity in the theatre’, and many critics seemed to agree.

  But how might the residents of Epuni Boys’ Home regard the effort? As the final reel clattered to a halt — blue cigarette haze hanging in the air — the youngsters seemed to be getting progressively quieter. Too quiet? As soon as the credits ended, the lights were hastily turned on and the front couple of rows given a searching look by the supervising educator. He nearly fell over at what he beheld: some of the country’s toughest kids were seated in what appeared to be a state of abject aesthetic shock, the tracks of tears visible on many of their faces.

  THE BLACK LIGHTS

  Tyrone Marks was always a fighter. That much still comes through in his direct manner of speaking, the forceful way he makes a point, his careful appraisal of a visitor before he leads him into an upstairs room of his Hamilton home for a couple of hours of animated conversation. No surprises there. For a long time Tyrone parlayed his considerable physical skills, initially honed through various exercise regimes at Epuni Boys’ Home and more recently through his training as a kick-boxer, into making a living out of security work, while also raising a family of five girls. Yet his early life was anything but triumphant.

  These days Tyrone is also a trained counsellor as well as having read psychology at the nearby University of Waikato, where he discovered the writings of Auguste Comte, the 19th-century French philosopher and founder of the modern discipline of sociology. Taken together with the insights he gained growing up as a state ward, these accomplishments give him an unusually keen perspective in assessing the institution he lived in during the turbulent 1970s.

  Turbulent is the word for reca
lling the era waylit by the lingering traces of the American civil rights movement, the terrorists in Munich, wars and rumours of wars in the Middle East. Not to forget — speaking of fighters — Ali’s emergence from forced retirement seven years after he was stripped of his heavyweight title for refusing induction into the United States Army and 43 months after his last official fight. Ali later did triumphant battle with George Foreman in what used to be called Zaire, in front of 55,000 delirious fans, screaming and hollering and waving at the makeshift ring where the resurrection took place under the African moon, regaining his title during the eighth round of a slightly surreal bout staged in a somewhat surreal country at the entirely surreal hour of 2 am.

  Epuni was changing too. Since its establishment the residence had been well supported by influential people in government, ministers and senior civil servants. This wouldn’t change markedly after the Child Welfare Division of the Department of Education, as it had been known since 1948, was replaced on April 1, 1972, morphed into the new Department of Social Welfare.

  As a future minister in charge of the department, Venn Young, glowingly put it at the time, successive political administrations had been only too aware of Epuni’s ‘excellent standards’ and the ‘high regard’ in which it was held by the local community, circumstances due in no small part to the ‘attention and devotion of the staff in settling down youngsters who are unhappy and wanting to be somewhere else’.

  For all the palmy notices, though, Epuni remained an institution alone; like the country’s other youth facilities it was left largely to its own managerial devices in creating what it believed to be the best living conditions for the 350 wards now coursing through its doors each year — and to work what it felt was the best kind of magic on the youngsters whose lives it was assessing.

  If we are to believe the archival records of the time, what greeted the boys was a strikingly different set-up to the one that had been operating even a few years earlier.

  Officially, only one in three boys at this point was being sent on to another institution, whether a long-term correctional facility such as Hokio or Kohitere, or the recently constituted Holdsworth School in Wanganui, or one of the country’s special schools, with the remainder going ‘home’. But those figures were a bit misleading. Kids who returned to the community often ended up in group houses or short-term foster placements rather than their original family environment, an arrangement typically leading to readmission to one or other of the correctional facilities or at the very least further contact with the authorities. Tyrone’s experience was a case in point.

  Tyrone, who is Maori, fitted the institution’s new ethnic bill, too. Epuni kept no records of ethnicity, but anecdotal observation, the recollections of residents and what records are still available from similar institutions all point to an overwhelming Maori presence by this point. In 1959, for instance, around one in every four boys admitted to a similar correctional facility in Auckland, the Owairaka Boys’ Home, was Maori; over the following decade the figure rose to seven in every 10 admissions, and by 1978 it had reached 80 per cent. Nobody in a position to count heads disputes that Epuni followed a similar trend.

  By teacher Dave Kelsey’s recollection, ‘about 98 per cent, more or less’ of the inmates at this point were Maori, a process that had been accelerating since the institution became an adjunct for a youth justice system overwhelmingly processing young Maori males of frequently indeterminate age. (Boys often inflated their ages in order to skip classes or smoke, or both, so that many of the admission forms contained false information.)

  Tyrone also came from a family that was very large by the standards of the day — seven brothers and six sisters — another Epuni signature of the time. According to one study, nearly a third of the wards at Epuni at this time had seven or more siblings, and nearly one-tenth of them had more than 10. This raised a frequently asked question. Were kids from larger households more prone than others to end up in trouble, or was the system more prone to zero in on these households?

  ‘That was the way it happened anyway,’ Tyrone began, pausing for a moment to fish for a cigarette. He popped a Pall Mall from his pack and lighted it. His eyes glistened. ‘You’ve got to remember,’ he continued, dragging thoughtfully, ‘this was the early sixties, and colonialism was still happening, you know. Well, I think it hasn’t really stopped, it’s just that those processes are probably just about over, you know. It’s been a long process but in that particular time, you know, that’s when all the state houses were coming along and all that socio-economic stuff happened then. So people were on the low-income thing, just like they are now, and there was an expectation that because they had big families that financially they probably couldn’t take care of them and weren’t taking care of them.’

  Tyrone’s old man was an Italian immigrant who met his young Maori bride in New Zealand shortly after the war. They found it hard to make ends meet. That’s when the people from Social Welfare got in on the act. One day they dropped by the family home in Hastings and told Tyrone they wanted to buy him some new clothes. Jump in the car, they said, so in the boy jumped. Child welfare officers tended to prefer it this way, since it was not unknown for parents like Tyrone’s to have a change of heart at the last moment and stage an awkward scene in response to seeing their children taken away.

  In any event the boy never went back. Pretty soon the various institutions he passed through began to haze into a soft grey blur. In Nelson he ended up at an orphanage called Sunnybank, a rambling, spooky old edifice run by nuns on the edge of town. They sent him to Campbell Park in Otago. They put him in the Holdsworth School in Wanganui. At Holdsworth he and a few other kids ran away. Tyrone got hit by a car. He suffered a dislocated hip, spine and some scarring to his left side. They kept him in hospital for nearly five months, during which time he had several other operations and a skin graft. Then it was on to Epuni Boys’ Home for some serious evaluation at age 12.

  WHAT ELSE MIGHT A DILIGENT SOCIAL WORKER HAVE done? ‘He might have taken a picture,’ Tyrone growled. ‘And he could have looked at a picture and thought about it. He might have thought, Okay, so you’ve got a big family. Mum has to stay at home and work. Dad has to go to work and do whatever, but he’s obviously on a low income. So what you might do, perhaps, is bring in some resources in a different way instead of just whipping the kids off, no questions asked … but unfortunately that’s the way it was with me and so many others; there were no forms, nothing.

  ‘It’s the same thing they did to the Aborigine children, you know — taking them off to state institutions because, they said, these kids were from large families and couldn’t be dealt with any other way. So we ended up in places like Epuni, and all those other homes, festering over a number of years, feeling like shit, and you know, ending up in a life of crime after years of being repeatedly told that we were useless, you know, and no good for anything else. That’s what happens if you tell someone that for long enough. It happened to me too. Same thing later on when it comes to jobs. You’ve got this background and then, because of it, you don’t have a degree or a diploma or anything, so you’re basically useless. You’re a non-contributor. You’re fucked.’

  Taking kids out of their community environment in this way effectively put the kibosh on any serious hope of a boy forging a relationship with a credible father-figure, maybe even his own father. Indeed, as others like Tyrone Marks mull over the personal cost wrought by the damaging domestic circumstances of their youth, many experts continue to examine the cost of father-absence that removing kids from a family setting effectively seals. And their conclusions about the likely effect on boys, irrespective of economic circumstance, ethnicity and place of residence, invariably point to the single-biggest predictor of a boy’s success being just this one thing.

  A boy doesn’t need parents who are especially civil to each other. He doesn’t need parents who particularly like each other. He simply needs parents who, for better or worse, in sickness and
in health, in bad times and good, stay together. And most of all he needs his father to be around — and he needs to be around his father. Yet not once, ever, during New Zealand’s long experiment with institutional childcare did any political or elected figure draw attention to the overwhelming data supporting this conclusion.

  From the United States National Center for Health Statistics, a federal agency, we learn that children living away from their fathers are 375 per cent more likely to require professional treatment for emotional or behavioural problems and twice as likely to flunk school. They are also considerably more likely than their regular counterparts to suffer from chronic asthma, frequent headaches and bed-wetting, to develop a stammer or speech defect, suffer from anxiety or depression, or be diagnosed as hyperactive.

  As for criminal tendencies, the likelihood that children will engage in illegal activities doubles if they are raised without a present-father, according to Anne Hill and June O’Neill, co-authors of a report published by the City University of New York. Another study, published by the United States Department of Health and Human Services, found that father-absent kids are twice as likely as others to become high-school dropouts.

  If anything the data becomes starker in the case of father-absent boys. From a British study called Tomorrow’s Men, a project supported by the University of Oxford and involving 1500 teenage boys, comes news that successful ‘can-do’ kids — taken to mean those with high self-esteem, happiness and confidence — almost invariably come from backgrounds with a high level of father contact. Indeed, more than 90 per cent of boys who believed their fathers spent regular time with them and took an active interest in their progress fell into this can-do category; by contrast, nearly three-quarters of those who believed their fathers rarely or never did these things fell into the group with the very lowest self-esteem and self-confidence, were more likely to suffer from depression, get in trouble with the law and dislike school.