The New Zealand Listener has been such an important part of my NZ media intake that for the first year I was living in Scotland I asked my family to post it over to me. However, the magazine has come in for some stick under new editor Pamela Stirling. Stirling has shifted the magazine’s politics into the centre (as opposed to more-or-less leftie, as it used to be) and shifted its target audience from those concerned about society to those concerned about themselves.
However, it’s nice to see that the old Listener hasn’t completely disappeared. The Feb 24-March 2 issue, available now, might have a garish piggy-bank cover titled ‘Saving: The Facts you can bank on, but inside is an absolute gem of journalism: The Killers Among Us.
The article begins:
In the aftermath of the recent actions of murderer Graeme Burton six months after his parole from prison, many people have wondered how the Parole Board could have got it so wrong. Some politicians have even advocated an end to parole for violent offenders. And yet, of those 226 killers, more than 90 percent have not re-offended. These are three of them.
The article goes on to extensively profile three murderers who are now out in society and have not re-offended. Each of them gets plenty of opportunity to speak, candidly, about their experiences, about what in the system didn’t work (lack of support, lack of training, lack of options once out) and what did (two of them mention the volunteer-driven Prisoners Aid and Rehabilitation Society as a lifesaver – I’d never heard of it). These aren’t heartwarming sentimental stories. The article isn’t trying to sell us a fairy tale. These three sound just like I would expect a reformed murderer to sound like. I’ll go further – they sound like I would *want* a murderer to sound like, down the line.
People ask me if I’ve got a criminal record and I always tell them, ‘Yes, I have.’ They have every right to ask. But I’ve been out 12 years. No one’s got the right to forever judge us as criminals… we’ve done our time and we want to change. I can’t undo what I’ve done… But you don’t look at the past, you look at the future…. It’s going to be hard. But I’m going to keep trying.
If we believe at all in the idea of rehabilitation, then surely this is exactly what we’re aiming for?
Of course, part of the problem with discourse around this issue is that people don’t believe in rehabilitation. The Sensible Sentencing Trust people vilify criminals as the Other, a different kind of human to me, and their crimes arise inevitably from their twisted nature. Many in politics are eager to adopt this troubling narrative, because it is an easy sell to a voter troubled by crime in the community. I would not commit crime, the logic goes, but these people did, so they are not like me, and therefore we must be protected from them.
The article gets to the root of this as well. Devon Polaschek, criminal psychology lecturer at Victoria University, is interviewed and given plenty of room to tear that idea to shreds.
And, says Polaschek, almost anyone has the capacity to kill. “We think that if you have regard for human life, it provides a barrier to taking it. But most of us can suspend that regard. We may care a lot about that person, but when we’re very angry we have the capacity to hurt.
While she’s at it, Polaschek briskly demolishes the perception of murderers as likely to reoffend, and attacks the lack of support for offenders within prison and after they leave it. It’s a splendid platform for ideas that seem like common sense to me, and yet are so often entirely missing from public discourse. Some may level charges of “ivory tower academics” who are “out of touch”, but such charges rely on exactly the same magical thinking that believes crime reveals criminals to be inhuman beasts. Polaschek is right.
But it is the murderers themselves whose words resonate. Murder has always been with us, and presumably always will be. There will always be murderers in our society. This article shows us why we should not give up on them.
Good work, Listener.
Good stuff: it’s good to know that the Listener still has some sort of heart & brain. If you just went by the cover stories, there’d be nothing of interest to a non-babyboomer who doesn’t really care about house prices, plastic surgery and the NCEA. The reviews have been enough to keep me reading it, but there’s been precious little of this sort of journalism that counters the perspective of the right-leaning dailies.