Thursday, October 01, 2020

Many more prisoners identifying as Ngapuhi

Corrections Volume Report 2019-20 has just been released. I had a quick scan through for anything particularly noticeable. These two graphs caught my eye:

(The Ngapuhi number is 609 - off the graph.)

The immediate inference is that iwi-affiliated offending and imprisonment is going through the roof. But consider this graph:


This is a conundrum. The iwi-identifying number is increasing whereas the Maori number is decreasing.

4,907 prisoners are Maori. 2,498 state one of the iwi affiliations above. About half.

My conclusion is that prisoners are increasingly identifying with an iwi. I wonder why? Bet there is some sort of incentive. Sudden radical changes in data are usually driven by a specific, but not necessarily obvious reason.

Is the Ngapuhi Treaty settlement actually going to happen??

But the plot thickens. In 2018, from the Minister:

Mr Davis said Māori make up over 50 percent of the prison population, and he wants that number reduced.

"Of that 50 percent, half again, are from Ngāpuhi, my own tribe, so this is personal.

"My tribe of Ngāpuhi is probably the most incarcerated tribe in the world, per head of population, so we really have to look at what we're going to do differently as a country, to turn these figures around."

Yet the just-released stats show there were 668 Ngapuhi prisoners in 2018.

Perhaps Mr Davis is encouraging the trend in order to validate his claim?


4 comments:

Oi said...

Its easy enough to "turn those figures round" - Just stop committing crime.
Its amazing what this achieves!
Police stop locking you up!
Judges stop sentencing you to prison!
Employers start considering you for jobs!...... The possibilities are endless!

Anonymous said...

Hello
Ngapuhi are the largest tribal population - 125K - near double the closest group.
If the split must be made on a tribal group basis then I guess the chart should be per capita per tribe. But why stop there? Split the NZ Euro numbers up by town. Would the European crime stats show areas where they have higher incaceration rates than some Tribal groups?
Mike

Lindsay Mitchell said...

Mike, I know that Ngapuhi are the largest tribe. My point is, why are more Maori prisoners (whose overall numbers are declining) suddenly affiliating with a tribe? What is incentivising them to do that? I'm just curious.

Max Ritchie said...

There’s a financial incentive, as you imply. But also there are social reasons, one of which is that prison time is better in a tribal umbrella. I’m not sure if tribalism is good or bad. My instinct is that it’s bad but I may be quite wrong. Bad because of what one sees in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Congo etc, etc. a slippery slope which will end badly, in my view.