Greg Newbold, Crime, law and justice in New Zealand
| Date | 01 December 2017 |
| Author | Antje Deckert |
| Published date | 01 December 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0004865817693329 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
significantly to the literature around the varied justice needs of victim-survivors both
individually and collectively, and provides critical insight into future directions for
reform beyond the criminal law.
References
Estrich, S. (1987). Real rape: How the legal system victimizes women who say no. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Henry, N. (2010). The impossibility of bearing witness: Wartime rape and the promise of justice.
Violence Against Women,16(10)1098–1119.
Greg Newbold, Crime, law and justice in New Zealand. Routledge: New York, 2016; 285 pp. ISBN
9781138192409, £120 (hbk); 9781138192416, £35 (pbk)
Reviewed by: Antje Deckert, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
Scholarly books that focus solely on criminal justice in New Zealand (NZ) are few and
far between. With a small population of 4.5 million, publishers might shy away from
what appears to be a small target market. But there is a need for criminological schol-
arship about NZ because our nation continues to experience one of the highest incar-
ceration rates in the Western world. Hence, the focal point and title of Greg Newbold’s
Crime, Law and Justice in New Zealand are both appropriate and timely. Newbold seeks
to portray the ‘dynamic crime profiles in New Zealand starting in the 1950s but focusing
particularly on the past 30 years’ (p. 6).
The book is divided into nine chapters. The first delivers a six-page introduction to
familiarise readers with NZ’s population growth, changes in demographics, and theories
to explain evident crime trends. Of the following eight chapters, four are dedicated to
specific offence categories: Dishonesty,Sex,Violence, and Drugs. They identify crimina-
lised behaviours within their specific category, describe the historical change in crime
numbers, and how the government, news media, and public have responded to various
crime trends. These four chapters are interspersed with two chapters dedicated to Gender
and Youth and Ethnicity. The last two chapters concentrate on Gangs and Organised
Crime and Corrections and Crime Control. Regrettably, neither the preface nor the intro-
duction shed light on a rationale for the selection or sequence of topics.
Newbold asserts that although self-report and victimisation studies are common
national measures of crime, ‘for the sake of consistency’, he ‘relied on police reported
crime for which there is a long time series’ and on conviction data when ‘discussing age,
gender or ethnic differences in crime rates’ (p. 3). He does, however, attribute increased
offending in a number of crime categories with the maturing ‘baby boom’ generation
(p. 7) and considers a significant demographic downward shift in the young population
as a main cause of crime decreasing since the 1990s (p. 12). However, the book’s figures
do not reflect this understanding. Instead of using per capita crime rates, data are pri-
marily presented as the total number of offences reported to police.
In the introduction, Newbold contemplates various reasons for why overall crime
rates may have fallen. However, some ideas, like the suggestion that ‘wife beating [is]
becoming less common [because it is] more stigmatised and more rigorously policed’
630 Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology 50(4)
To continue reading
Request your trial