‘These guys aren’t falling through cracks, it’s absolute chasms’

Source: Radio New Zealand

At one point in The Valley, Rikihana Wallace* – first jailed in his late teens – is close to graduating from a scaffolding course. His long-time lawyer Lewis Skerrett* is optimistic about this opportunity, but then Wallace’s steel cap work boots are stolen from his room at a boarding house.

“He’s afraid that if he shows up to the course, they’ll think that he has sold his boots. And so he doesn’t go. You might think that’s not the best decision, but it’s the decision that a person with his life experience might make. And it means he doesn’t graduate the course.

“Who knows what might have happened had that taken a slightly different path? When you see that long view, you begin to appreciate the kind of challenge that is faced by these guys,” Asher Emanuel tells RNZ’s Nine to Noon.

Upper Hutt’s Rimutaka Prison is a frequent setting in The Valley.

RNZ / Diego Opatowski

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For two years, Emanuel had unprecedented access to three people who became central characters in The Valley – Rikihana Wallace and Nathan Morley* (two men who’ve appeared frequently in the Hutt Valley District Court) and their public defence lawyer, Lewis Skerritt.

“If you don’t have a brother or a cousin who’s in a situation like Nathan or Rikihana, you might go past these guys on the street … but you won’t be able to understand what life is like for them,” Emanuel says.

“People will think, ‘I know the story, I’ve heard the story before, but I thought that, and I definitely hadn’t’.”

The visiting room at Rimutaka Prison.

RNZ / Diego Opatowski

Both Morley and Wallace live with traumatic brain injury, Emanuel says, a disability that puts them at risk of impulsive behaviour and which they share with up to two-thirds of New Zealand’s adult male prison inmates.

At another moment in The Valley, Wallace talks with Skerrett about the effects of Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD) – another condition affecting many Kiwis who end up in the justice system.

Eyes can glaze over the challenges faced by many incarcerated people are presented as “a laundry list of difficulty”, Emanuel says.

But although it remains cheaper to jail people than pay for the support services that might keep them away from crime, he says a lot of offending is driven by “solvable problems”.

In The Valley, Skerrett asks Morley at one point whether or not he’s seen the community mental health nurse recently, his client says: “on and off, but they’re busy with the people who are about to kill themselves”.

“These guys aren’t falling through cracks. It’s absolute chasms.”

The high dependency unit at Rimutaka Prison.

RNZ / Diego Opatowski

In another scene, Wallace steals a relatively small amount of goods from a supermarket – which many would consider “shoplifting”, Emanuel says, on a Friday afternoon. Charged with burglary, he spends the weekend in Rimutaka prison.

“Even though he’s bailed by a judge on Monday or Tuesday, Corrections has told the Ministry of Social Development that he’s in custody. The benefit has been stopped, and the rent at the boarding house is no longer being paid.”

New Zealand’s incarceration rate has more than doubled since the late 1980s, and this March, the prison population ticked over 11,000 people – a new record high.

Behind these rates is a “social crisis” that’s putting extreme pressure on justice sector workers and also people in the health and education sectors, Aster says.

“We have a problematic criminal justice system.”

*Rikihana Wallace, Nathan Morley and Lewis Skerrit are pseudonyms.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand