In a new, absorbing work, Asher Emanuel lifts the lid on the reality of the criminal justice system by telling the stories of a small group of people within it.
Eight years ago, around the time that young lawyer and part-time journalist Asher Emanuel was writing for the Spinoff about criminal justice and a new minister’s ambitious approach, an idea arrived in his head: tell the story of the system from within.
Thousands of hours, dozens of notebooks and countless setbacks later, the result is The Valley: Crime and Punishment in a New Zealand City. A gripping, true story of the lives of Rikihana, Nathan, their legal aid lawyer Lewis and the way their lives roll in and out through the turnstiles of the Hutt Valley District Court, here is an eye-opening, page-turning, up-close insight into systemic fractures and human impacts.
“I’d been working in a court and and seeing the criminal justice system from that side of of it, and it seemed to me that there was a gap between what people who worked in the system or who went through the system knew about it, and what most New Zealanders who were fortunate enough to not really have any contact with it, other than maybe being breathalysed by a police officer at a random stop, knew,” Emanuel told the Spinoff. He thought there was a missing story that needed telling. “And what that story really needed, I think, was people. And so I set out to find those people.”
Part of what makes The Valley so engaging is that it resists at once being overburdened by an academic approach as well as any saviour mode. Instead, these are the real lives of endearing, infuriating, fallible people, told without condescension to them or the reader.
Behind the door, in the legal aid offices, the air is thin and the people are funny. “If you’re working in these parts of the system, where people are in crisis, I think part of the way of coping with that is, you know, if you’re not laughing, you’re crying. And so people do, you know, they need to find a way of processing the stuff they deal with. And people who work in that kind of frontline work, or know people like that, will recognise that, I think, in the way that life goes on at the office and in the car, back and forth from court.”
Emanuel spent two years with the people who would become the characters of The Valley. In that time, he said, his own understanding was expanded. “The people are surprising. There are things about Nathan and Rikihana that are surprising and will make you think differently. The things they think and that they say, and their understanding of what’s happening to them, was at times not what I would have thought.”
Is it a political book? “It’s not a party-political book,” said Emanuel. “But it’s a book which deals with the kind of social crisis that’s present in the criminal justice system. It can’t not be political. That’s a political issue. It’s a political problem. It’s a consequence of political decisions.”
He said: “A recurring theme in The Valley is that these guys aren’t slipping through cracks – these are chasms. Whether it’s the rehab provision, or it’s accommodation, there’s a kind of pass-the-parcel that goes on with people who can be difficult or have high needs and so on, and often no one ultimately takes responsibility.”
These are, after all, questions that go to the core of the kind of society we construct and inhabit. In his prologue, Emanuel puts it like this: “No account of statistics or arms-length analysis of policy can quite get to the truth of the matter: that the criminal justice system is operated by people, upon people. That the basic problem with which the system grapples – sometimes successfully, sometimes not – is at once deeply practical and deeply moral: how to make right the wrongs that people do to one another.”
