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August 30, 2022
State care pipeling to prison no longer
Peter Verschaffelt
Posted On August 30, 2022
Download AudioChildren’s and Corrections minister Kelvin Davis says statistics from the past must not be used to typecast today’s tamariki who spend time in state care.
A research report for the Royal Commission on Abuse in Care looked at 30,000 children and young people who had been care up to the inquiry’s cut-off date of 1999 and found a third went on to serve a prison sentence.
The figure since then is closer to 7 percent.
“We’ve got to stop saying is you’re in state care it’s a pipeline to prison because 93 percent of our kids in state care do not go on to prison. That was different when we look at the cohort from the 1950s through to 1999 and even then that was looking at the young people who went into residences. We’ve just to be careful about labelling kids these days ‘criminals in the making because it’s just not the case,” Mr Davis says.
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