Crime Prevention starts with Building Character
Crime is not monolithic and this solution does not purport to change the world. It focuses on youth crime that is spawned by deprivation, a lack of role models, lack of opportunity and peer pressure, especially through social media. It focused on the failure of the 1960’s initiatives called Urbanisation that targeted rural Māori to entice them to leave ancestral lands and move to jobs in the city. With globalisation those jobs left NZ, and with them went both opportunity and a pathway to mature adulthood. In this proposal, the focus is on building character.
This is a simple plan borrowed from the United States during the Great Depression when far too many young people were unemployed. The government started the Civilian Conservation Corps and sent those young people into the countryside to build trails, bridges, cabins and other outdoor-experience amenities. It worked. It taught the young how to use their bodies, how to work, how to make things. It also taught them pride in their work, how to work as a team, and to leave lasting monuments they would show to their grandchildren decades later.
In Aotearoa, there is a framework waiting for a 21st century CCC…
Reopen the ancient Māori trails
Combat youth crime by legislation and funding that assigns delinquent teens to work projects reopening the ancient Māori trails that will foster the kāinga visitor industry.
Reopen the ancient trails: Perhaps the most famous walking trail today is the Camino de Santiago in Spain. The 800 kilometre trail is an ancient pilgrimage walk that has been rediscovered by affluent tourists looking for a more meaningful travel experience. NZ does tramping trails, but not as part of a larger context. The positive proposal to reopen the Māori trails would go much further.
They are Still There: Crisscrossing North and South Island are a series of ancient trails that connected kāinga. When asked 20 years ago, the elders not only knew where they had been, but said most were still there.
CCC – The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) model to fight NZ youth crime: In the depths of the Great Depression, the US Government developed the CCC to provide work for young people. In doing so, it built character in the same way the army does, but using shovels and diggers, not guns and tanks. Rebuilding the ancient trails not only creates a new visitor experience, enhancing the tourist economy, but it rebuilds character in young people who currently are destined to a life of crime, and provides them with a lifelong alterative.
Understanding Why
Youth crime is local. Crime is a symptom of a broken culture where mature adults have lost control, and delinquents fail to mature into responsible adults. Its core problem is economic where the adults are not stakeholders in their culture.
Stakeholding:
- Being a tenant beholden to a landlord means less stakeholding than owning one’s home.
- Being a beneficiary beholden to a social worker means less stakeholding that having a career.
- Being a grunt worker beholden to a boss means less stakeholding than as one’s own boss or part of a team.
- Living in terraced housing in a bedroom subdivision means less stakeholding than living in a village
In 1929, in the Economics of the New Zealand Maori, Raymond Firth wrote: the great importance of association in common locality is that it represents not merely a physical fact, but also leads to the formation of a whole body of psychological bonds, due to the common interests of the members and their contact in everyday life.
Formation of healthy psychological bonds is essential to creating a way of life that does not involve crime. It works best when it is multi-generational, and mature, stakeholding adults and elders are in charge.
Crime is not homogenous
The crime bothering voters in 2023 are ram raids, car theft and home invasions. These are crimes by mostly young people, mostly disaffected urban Māori and Pasifika raised by solo mothers living in relative poverty. The core of the problem is lack of social structure, plus new social enticement on smart phones. RNZ reports ram raids are inspired by Tiktok.
Children as young as 10 group together to steal cars and ram them into stores so they can steal goods sold in those stores. They do it for the thrills, and the bragging rights among their peers. They have no sense of the catastrophic impact it has on the store owners.
Solutions are not getting tough on crime:
Yes, coddling under 18’s as children when they commit crimes means children laugh at an impotent law enforcement system. But locking them up in youth-detention centres with other criminal youth just creates a high school for crime… most of whom will graduate to the university of crime, the NZ prison system where they meet the criminal network.
To break the cycle, the State must replace a broken family structure with a healthy tribal structure (tribal in the same context that a gang or an army unit is a tribal structure) that rewards positive social standing.
Reopening the trails to reconnect kāinga creates an economic opportunity for the kāinga, but also for the disaffected youth currently stealing cars and ram-raiding shops. It provides a far more organised and effective form of community service that has a career path to positive citizenship.
What this policy will do:
The monument will be reopening the ancient trails, and establishing a visitor industry that provides long-term employment for the young people who built them. But more importantly, opening and then operating the trails builds character for young people and gives them a career path in which they become stakeholders.
After they build the trails, which includes both land and waterways, they will be trained as guides, logistics suppliers and maintenance crews. As well as walking some may lead horse trekking, others on waka.
This kind of work forms a tight community, with similar psychological bonds to those found in army units or gangs, and it provides them a healthy outdoor life and a stable income.
Learn from history:
When the Great Depression threw hundreds of thousands of young people into joblessness, the US government developed programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps that assigned those young to work camps where they were paid to work on environmental conservation projects. They worked outdoors with picks and shovels, building trails, camps and back-country cabins. While the outcome was beneficial – those trails and buildings are still enjoyed by millions today – it was the social relationships that mattered the most. It built life-long character.
