This was a great session to end my WORD weekend with Asher Emanuel speaking about his book The Valley with Rebecca Macfie. This book is an incredible insight into the day-to-day realities of the criminal justice and punishment systems for those who the system entraps.
Rebecca opened the session describing The Valley as “a once in a generation work of investigative journalism” and a work of great courage, immense skill and great restraint; praise that still undersells the importance of this work.
The Valley focuses on three individuals: two young men in and out of the system, and an employee of the Public Defence Service in the Hutt Valley. Asher describes these men as born in the late 1980s and reflecting different parts of the Hutt Valley’s working-class strata - people that in a different life might have been Asher’s neighbours. The book follows these men through 2021 and 2022 in their various interactions with organisations and systems. Asher described his book as something in the traditions of social realism and social history: an attempt to capture day-to-day reality.
The systems
Rebecca said she saw the book as focused on those people who are invisible data points, the kind of behaviour and actions that were not “newsworthy”, but people who would be seen as ‘recidivist’. She saw it as a story of churn with people kept entrapped, “a profoundly interlocking imprisonment.”
Asher called his book a work of media criticism, originating in his work in courts and then seeing how media reported this differently, and the result is a lack of public understanding of the criminal justice system compared to those involved and interacting with it.
The news media was the sole source of knowledge for many people, and the commercial needs of media (and perhaps the ideological?) drives coverage and its tone. But this was not representative of the realities of these systems which are grinding, repetitive and often trivial. The reality that we are unable to see in the media was often the consequences of people’s unmet needs and an inability to escape the system.
Rebecca asked about ‘points of amplification’ and how these effects are being made worse. Asher said that the general image of the prison system of ‘violent bad people serving their time’ was not its reality and that many people were there for non-violent offending and on remand before trial and sentencing. He gave the example of one of the book’s subjects Rikihana, who because he had been trespassed from many of the places he shoplifted from, if he did this again it was now burglary which is a more serious offence worthy of potential remand. More broadly, Bail Act changes in the 2010s pushed a growth in the remand population because the onus of showing someone should have bail was pushed onto the offender in many cases it hadn’t been. Above all, what has happened is an increasingly chaotic interaction of consequences of decisions on people in the systems. Rebecca said there can be a temptation to find the ‘bad person’ or cause of failure, but the book showed that the failures were not individual but systemic and organisational (for example, how supports are scarce and rationed).
Asher noted the impact of templates and archetypes on storytelling (including crime writing), but those narratives can take us away from the truths of actual material reality. In trying to depict this in his work, the impression he came away with was the fundamental powerlessness of all involved in these systems, from offenders to police to lawyers and judges. He also noted that in our current framework, supports were built on the logic of not providing supports unless it was shown they were needed, meaning individuals must drive getting what they or others need.
Politics of ‘law and order’
Rebecca viewed The Valley as telling people how these politics and policies work in practice and proves those who think they know that they are wrong. She noted that the research started in a time where reducing prison populations was government policy, but now this was the opposite. Why was it that some people are so enamoured with incarceration as the solution? Asher responded that he saw these politics are driven by idealism, not material realities. They are driven by political and social forces that took other institutions out of the equation and left prison as the answer.
The claims of ‘tough on crime’ politics were “deeply unserious” and discussed John Pratt’s argument of ‘penal populism’, where the earlier consensus in New Zealand was not politicised and saw prison as a place of rehabilitation. But the collapse of the social democratic consensus in the 1970s and 80s, and its impacts meant that populist politics of law and order were used to distract and divide opposition. Crime rates have been steadily declining across the developed world despite short-term spikes or statistical fudging, but this trend is an uncomfortable reality for supporters of carceralisation (increased imprisonment). It does not prove their policies work and the supposed threat is diminishing.
He gave the example of the media and political storm around ‘ram raids’, where the solutions offered were only punitive, and its disappearance from the media and politics was not a reflection of what was happening.
The writing process
Asher discussed how he had barely used “I’ in the book, even though his presence is throughout the book. He wanted it to read as a novel but its contents were strictly true. He noted narrative non-fiction is a big genre, but it would be rare and controversial to depict the subjects how he did, something like “verboten [forbidden] knowledge.” He knew the book would need be impeachable and he wanted the book to be ‘as told by’ not ‘as told to.’
Asher said he spent two years gathering information, and there were more subjects in this than the three in the book. He also allowed the book’s subjects and people to be involved and gained their consent over what he would publish. This was a long process of ensuring this consent, but it was important to do this. Rebecca called this the “ultimate in journalistic accountability.”
Audience questions
When asked what he would say to proponents of ‘law and order’ policies, Asher said he would simply point to the long-running trend of reducing crime rates and that belief in rational actors and sentencing simply does not hold up.
In response to an audience question on how he dealt with helping or intervening, Asher said he did so when he felt he had to, (“when you’re there you have to do what is right”) but that he made sure this was clearly recorded and he was honest as well as drawing boundaries. And yet, ultimately even then he was powerless like everyone else.
When asked about his view of the Probation Service by a former member, he said that it was fundamentally different now than it had been before, and their ability to deliver was under massive pressure in many ways. The institution was being deeply let down and it was not the fault of the staff working it.
This session and Asher’s book were incredibly insightful. The Valley is an incredible work and a view into systems and how they operate in a way that many of us would never encounter. It is an important read as well, because how can we understand these systems if we never know them?
Troy, Tūranga
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