Mr Arden Tanner-Dempsey1,2, Ms Samantha Taaka1,2
1University Of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand, 2New Zealand Institute for Security and Crime Science (NZISCS), Hamilton, New Zealand
Te Pae Oranga Evaluation
We will be discussing the results of the most recent evaluation of Te Pae Oranga (TPO), an alternative justice process for low level offences in partnership with New Zealand Police and Māori. Although TPO focusses on using Māori cultural processes to address offending, anyone can be referred to the process (Paulin et al., 2019). Māori are overrepresented in the New Zealand’s criminal justice system (McIntosh and Workman, 2017); TPO is designed as an alternative pathway to prosecution with a focus on addressing the root causes of offending behaviour (Abikanlu et al., 2021).
We evaluated the effectiveness of TPO with a cohort of 1302 people who were referred between July 2019 and June 2020. Our findings show that people who completed the TPO process had better outcomes than their matched controls. This finding was demonstrated by small but significant reductions in reoffending rate, number of new offences, community harm associated with reoffending, and longer periods of time before reoffending. These findings were the result of improved outcomes for Māori participants; we observed no intervention effect for non-Māori. We also found that there was less engagement in TPO among higher-risk people, and that people who were referred but did not attend the process had poorer outcomes than their controls.
These findings support previous evaluations: TPO is effective for low-level offenders. We suggest that efforts should be made to support attendance among people with more serious offending histories or consider whether referral conditions should be refocussed toward only low-risk offenders.
Biography:
Arden Tanner-Dempsey is a trainee clinical psychologist and forensic psychology masters student supervised by Professor Devon Polaschek at the University of Waikato. He completed an evaluation of Te Pae Oranga as part of a summer research scholarship funded by the New Zealand Evidence Based Policing Centre.