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

by David Cohen

  He was a tiny 11. He didn’t seem to know why he was there — probably for truanting or something. We asked why he had run away.

  ‘I want to go home. I want my mother.’

  We should have taken him to a doctor, I see now, but sometimes you don’t think straight.

  They aren’t homes, they’re prisons.

  To critics like these the exercise seemed to be as much about letting newcomers know what awaited them if they ever stepped out of line as it was an isolated technique for dealing with the odd inmate in a state of high distress. As a mandatory policy, it was ‘sick’, complained Bill Olsen, a self-described concerned citizen, in an impassioned letter to justice minister Martyn Finlay. ‘Most of these boys come from homes where they have never been given any warmth or love. Their greatest need is to have a sense of security and belonging rather than a cold cell. It’s no wonder that so many of the young offenders are going on to become adult offenders if the current practice of Social Welfare institutions is to be a junior prison.’

  Added V.H. Colgate, another ‘concerned citizen’ who lodged one of a number of official complaints: ‘These cells smell more of retribution administered in prison rather than a “boys’ home”. While a few boys might be unsettled and need special arrangements, it is criminal for the state, as a matter of routine, to place boys in cells. Some day in a future enlightened age we will look back as we now do on birching. What research evidence has the Social Welfare Unit come up with to show that this type of prison cell placement cuts down on the rate of re-offending?’

  The department had no such research-based evidence. Rather, it argued, the incarceration period offered a ‘well-defined programme’ designed to prepare a new ward for entry to the wider institution. Yet the evidence for this, too, was pretty thin. Yes, there was a requirement that these children in cells be ‘constructively occupied’ with suitable activities. But in the scores of testimonies reviewed and former inmates interviewed in the course of researching this work no former ward recalled the existence of any such programme other than an hour of daily ‘PT’, consisting largely of push-ups and running on the spot.

  As for the plan for using the period of incarceration to foster social awareness — in, for instance, the sharing of meals in some common room — this, too, seems to have been more anticipated than actual.

  It was only as relatively late as 1985 that the department’s own literature acknowledged that the cellblocks at Epuni and elsewhere were a form of punishment and it no longer behoved the institutions to bandy about therapeutic terminology in describing their function. ‘It pays to be aware that if parents created a spartan lockable bedroom in which they punished their children for long periods of time, the department would prosecute and probably gain guardianship of the children,’ one memo acknowledged.

  A year later the department’s lawyers weighed in, advising that the courts had no legal basis for remanding children in cells and that the institutions were also in breach of health regulations for insisting that incarcerated wards eat meals on their own in a room with an uncovered toilet. The following year yet another memorandum was issued advising institutions that the practice probably had never had any legal basis at all.

  Some of the institution’s administrators always begged to differ. Geoff Comber had few doubts about the efficacy of the practice. ‘In my view, the right place for those kids was in a secure area separate from any other group,’ he pointed out with a shrug, ‘because if you’d put them in with the rest of them as a separate group, you’d often get real difficulties.’ For the kids themselves, too, it seemed the correct thing. ‘They caught up on their sleep. They got three square meals a day. They were showered, given a change of clothes. It was quiet there.’

  There were other considerations. One night Comber was called to a cell that was being shared by a couple of new arrivals, who were beseeching him to come inside to help with an unspecified problem. Comber felt a surge of apprehension. Something told him he shouldn’t accept the invitation, at least not on his own. ‘You get an instinct on these things — it was the way they were standing, the sideways looks, the nervousness.’

  Comber played a bit of squash, but the slightly stooped, bespectacled administrator was no champion fighter. Leaving the door locked, he zipped back to his desk, grabbed the telephone and phoned a colleague, asking him to come and stand cover while he attended to the inmates. Sure enough, when the wardens eventually ventured into the cell, they found that the boys were packing lino-cutters.

  Other employees were not as fortunate. One of the inmates, Tony, had been placed in ‘secure’ for a small offence, but for reasons that were never made clear ended up in the block for a fortnight. He seethed. Eventually, the 13-year-old decked one of the attendants with a can of Maurie’s beloved White Lily polish. Blood streaming down his forehead, the housemaster staggered back into the passageway, slamming the door shut and activating a security button, which locked all the doors and set off an alarm to call for assistance.

  It had been a near thing. Asked 40 years later about the assault, and whether he regretted it, the perpetrator quipped, ‘Well, perhaps you should direct that question back to him, if he is still alive. Ask him if he is sorry for locking up children in solitary confinement for days or weeks at a time.’

  It’s a question that others are still asking the relevant authorities — nowadays most often in courtrooms.

  THE GIRL WHO KICKED IN DOORS

  Now the years started passing in flashes, like postcards caught in the Wellington wind, things moving so fast that every time one blinked it felt like something had changed, something new had swirled into the picture. The Springbok tour. The Lange crowd. Anti-nuclear legislation and the gay rights bill. And out in the capital’s northern satellite city, an earlier postcard arrived, mailed in from a faraway place and personally delivered by its famous subject.

  Las Vegas: the same town where in 1971 Sonny Liston died in mysterious circumstances, now also the final resting place for Muhammad Ali’s boxing career, impaled and embalmed after the three-time champion staged a charade of a comeback match against Larry Holmes at the close of the decade. Within a couple of years it would be known — and how sadly fitting this would be — that the decade’s greatest fighter was also manifesting Parkinson’s syndrome (tremors, slurred speech, a halting gait, glazed eyes), the result of absorbing some 20,000 shots to the head and neck, most of them received during and after the time of the Manila fight. It was a powerful reminder, if one was needed, that many professional boxers who revel in taking punishment — like many boys who come of age inside correctional facilities — die young no matter how old they live to be.

  Before exiting the scene, however, Ali made a couple of interesting trips. One was to an inauspicious school in New York where a young pupil named Michael Tyson — bespectacled, pudgy and with such a lisp — was sufficiently moved by seeing his hero that he decided to dedicate his life to following in Ali’s irrepressible dancing footsteps. The other was to the Hutt Valley.

  On February 23, 1979, against all expectations, Ali arrived in town to speak at a once-in-a-lifetime dinner in nearby Trentham — and great was the excitement at Epuni Boys’ Home, too, where a brisk trade was going on in the Marvel comics the fighter was now starring in. At $75 a head, the dinner was the most expensive event of its kind ever to be held in the region. But the main difficulty faced by its promoters was convincing a dubious public that Ali was actually theirs for the evening.

  Yet he materialised. Not just for the planned speaking engagement itself, but criss-crossing the area over the course of a grey-lidded wet day for a slew of impromptu public appearances with a slightly bemused press corps in tow trying to figure out why, among other things, this character held such an appeal to disadvantaged young people.

  In a front-page story a staff reporter from the capital’s morning newspaper, The Dominion, marvelled at the affinity darker-skinned younger fans seemed to have for the star — playfully ‘si
ngling out Maoris’, as she put it, ‘baiting and sparring, and giving them something to boast about for the rest of their lives’.

  Meanwhile back in the Hutt Valley, shortly after his arrival Ali addressed another group of his beloved youngsters at a school hall. He told them he had been very lucky because when he was 12 he had a purpose in his life: ‘Ten people with a purpose in their lives are worth more than 1000 people without a purpose.’ He might have gone on had a bell not sounded for lunch. Quick as a wink, Ali spun around, raising his guard and jabbing in the direction of a startled schoolteacher standing nearby. ‘Is that the school bell or the punch bell?’ he said to laughter.

  Later he also made a point of meeting with some of the disadvantaged children in care, whose unexpected benefit from the visit would be a new minibus purchased with a portion of the proceeds.

  If it is true that we feel the most for those in whom we catch a fleeting glimpse of ourselves, such gestures suggested much.

  ‘After all the bragging that I do, I’ve just got to win,’ the 37-year-old champion told his young followers in the Hutt Valley. ‘It’s your attitude in life that makes things happen. You’ve got to have the right attitude. Never say, “I cannot.”’

  By some accounts, he didn’t fare as well at the hands of the region’s older denizens at the major scheduled event. ‘I had this feeling that a lot of the older white guys in the room, most of whom had probably never been in the presence of a black American, were throwing off at him behind his back,’ Bernard Lagan, a reporter who covered the event, recalled. ‘He was so physically imposing standing there in this funny function room among the Hutt Valley elite, really imposing but also soft-spoken and incredibly gracious, and it was like people didn’t know what to do or say.’

  Earlier, a less embarrassed young soul wanted to know what Ali made of the culture he’d fleetingly seen in the Hutt Valley up until that point. What about those young Maoris who had flocked to his side at the airport? What did he make of them? ‘If the world could be more like New Zealand it would be a good place,’ the fighter responded softly. ‘The dark people here don’t seem to be mistreated, you know, they don’t seem unhappy.’

  A growing number of locals begged to differ.

  A FEW YEARS ON, IN MAY 1984, A TELEPHONE OPERATOR by the name of Naida Glavish hit on the idea of answering calls with the standard Maori greeting, kia ora. Disturbed by the bilingual liberties his Auckland-based employee was taking, Glavish’s supervisor asked her to desist, but she didn’t. She was promptly demoted. Soon the legal knives were drawn. But what might once have been a routine employment dispute quickly became a key moment in a wider cultural conversation that was now circling relentlessly on the race issue. Glavish’s refusal to budge set something big in motion, a national debate not just about the place of the Maori language in New Zealand commercial life, but also about the place of the country’s Maori citizens, period, and how it might be improved.

  The desire for some kind of cultural dénouement was no less keenly felt on the residential childcare front. What was taking place outside Epuni was a highly charged political affair, but set-ups like Epuni were unquestionably part of the political landscape, too; their stark relevance to the Maori population was very obvious. According to one study, more than eight in 10 residential wards at any of the country’s state-run institutions were Maori or Pacific Islanders, with the same groups constituting as few as 1 per cent of all administrative or managerial staff.

  Energised by what was happening elsewhere, tribal leaders were now not hesitating to let their feelings be known, buttonholing anybody within the Department of Social Welfare who would listen with the argument that these thousands of children were theirs and the time for relinquishing their care had come. ‘It’s not like they were saying these kids weren’t getting into trouble,’ recalled Geoff Comber, the former Epuni deputy principal who went on to head residential operations in Auckland, ‘but rather that they could do a better job of looking after their own.’

  Not that Comber needed convincing. Sure, he didn’t always like it when the department’s Maori critics accused him and the others of doing little other than locking up brown-skinned youngsters, or pointed out that virtually everyone responsible for closing the doors also happened to be white. ‘But they were right,’ he acknowledged.

  This realisation was also being borne in on John Grant, the department’s director-general in the mid-1980s. He urged the department to listen to its critics. After all, Grant reasoned, it wasn’t as if they had done a lot of listening up until that point, or really had any consistent idea of how to improve things. ‘And in the end,’ Comber said, ‘it went beyond that, to the point where we had to question the entire raison d’être of residential services. Did we really need them at all?’

  In the official quest to confront this issue, the mid-1980s was already shaping up to be a banner period for Social Welfare. At the turn of the decade the department was operating 21 residences with an overall bed-capacity of 738. Thousands of kids were now being processed each year. Business was booming, literally, for the institutions came at a price: $55 million (in 2009 dollars) a year in operational costs alone, or $1.4 billion in total since the initiative picked up steam in the late 1950s.

  But even as the residences clocked up historically high levels of activity, their purpose was being questioned as more and more people, including for the first time a growing number within the system, were starting to ask if these places had possibly become — never mind the costs for a moment — more of a social burden than anything they were ever intended to fix.

  It wasn’t just the perennial issues of the cellblocks, inadequate staff training and the ongoing use of questionable therapeutic techniques. Rather, as the Glavish controversy highlighted, it was the wider awareness of the country’s unresolved race relations problems that was changing most significantly and quickly. An institution like Epuni, of course, was not unmindful of such matters. It could hardly be otherwise: evidence of what others were beginning to wake up to had been in front of the institution for two decades, and those who worked at Epuni were already very familiar with the disconnect, and indeed had for some time made a genuine effort to at least improve their public relations with the parents of Maori wards.

  Typically these PR exercises would involve arranging visits and showing parents around the buildings, and duly writing up the more favourable notices offered by the visitors, such as one on December 4, 1980, when a half-dozen Maori parents pronounced they ‘had no idea of the extent and trouble to which we go in our efforts to better the circumstances of the boys placed in our care’. As the tenor of such notices suggests, though, the awareness carried little self-criticism, much less an awareness of how drastically things were really changing outside, the scale of the shift that was being experienced. No more South African rugby tours. No more Cool White Kids from the suburbs gathering together as they did in the late 1970s to burn the vinyl recordings by black disco artists and celebrate the pure white sounds of the punk acts. No more telephone operators losing their jobs for uttering Maori salutations. No more celebration of New Zealand’s race relations as being the envy of the world.

  ‘In the nicest possible way,’ Aussie Malcolm later said, ‘we were white and we knew what our role was. Our role was there to move our sooty cousins forward. There’s this delightful racist element in what I’ve just said, but we were supremely unaware of it. We visited maraes. We understood marae protocol. We were very forward-thinking liberal progressive white people. It never occurred to us that we were racist even though, looking back, it was bloody condescending, wasn’t it?’

  Yet the question of how to improve the situation had the best minds of those operating the residences at an impasse, and now, finally, others a little higher in the operational chain were trying to think outside the box. Most notably among them was one of John Grant’s brightest offsiders, the one-time principal turned residential services chief, Mike Doolan.

  Doolan, a s
porty-looking administrator with genuinely liberal impulses and an intelligent voice that projected weight, was already convinced that the children’s institutions were fundamentally incapable of delivering the kind of outcomes that they had been set up to achieve. He sensed that another era was approaching. His feelings had begun to crystallise in the late 1970s, when he was managing the Kingslea facility in Christchurch and becoming more and more concerned with the likely legacy such institutions were leaving for the country.

  An important incident for Doolan involved a young Pacific Islander at Kingslea, a strapping girl capable of taking more than one man out in a fight if the spirit so moved her, whose situation seemed to deteriorate violently with each passing week she spent inside. More often than not the girl found herself locked up in Kingslea’s cellblock. That didn’t seem to improve the situation. Lying on her back, she would rhythmically thump the steel door with such force, and over such a long period, that it would eventually spring open. The institution could not contain her. And the pathetically forceful way in which this brown-skinned youngster made the point gave Doolan pause. Brooding on the matter, he hit on what at the time seemed like a radically novel idea: rather than keeping her confined in a government ‘home’, why not send the girl back to her own home? It seemed worth a shot. He signed her out with his fingers crossed.

  Over the following weeks, with growing anticipation, he waited for the middle-of-the-night emergency call that conventional wisdom held was sure to follow. It never came. Nothing more was ever heard of the ward. ‘Home was where she wanted to be,’ Doolan realised. ‘And that taught me a big lesson.’

  Part of the lesson was a simple truism about life: overwhelmed with detail, we often lose sight of the individual. But there were other considerations. Doolan started to think about the residential system itself. Like any serious enterprise, whether love or war or two guys fighting, systems can be seen as games. A move is made, begetting a countermove, another move, and so on. Eventually, what one ends up with may bear little resemblance to what started it in motion, causing one to take a hard second look at the opening gambit that set the train in process.