Kim Workman The reformer
As a young policeman in the 1950s, Kim Workman remembers a climate of rampant institutionalised racism. Sixty years on, with Maori making up more than half the prison population, we’re still at it, he says.
There were plenty of times he felt uneasy in those early years on the beat.
‘‘I’d see groups of young Maori walking to the dance halls singing and joking and playing guitar. Some of the Pakeha cops couldn’t bear this because it wasn’t the way they thought you should behave so they would wrangle them and the next thing you know these guys would be arrested for obscene language or disorderly behaviour.’’
Workman, a social justice advocate and godfather of the restorative justice movement in this country, is in a contemplative mood. That’s what happens when you write your memoir.
Sitting in his Waikawa Beach office, where books jostle for space with a piano and keyboard, he shares disturbing statistics from those early police years.
Workman, whose father was Maori, held his ground when he witnessed injustices he couldn’t ignore.
Over time he became identified as a bit of a stirrer.
He cringes at the attitudes he was confronted with back then.
He vividly recalls getting a memo from his inspector after joining the local kapa haka group saying he was to quit because it was unseemly for a police officer to be seen ‘‘publicly cavorting in a grass skirt’’.
‘‘I was really angry so I responded with a formal memo saying I understood his position and that if he could make arrangements to disestablish the police pipe band I would comply. That stopped the conversation.’’
By 1976 he was a senior sergeant about to be promoted to inspector but when then Prime Minister Robert Muldoon directed police to start dawn raids targeted at alleged Pacific Island overstayers he decided he wanted out.
Workman, who receives an honorary doctorate from Massey University next week, has spent his career advocating for a better way to tackle crime than throwing perpetrators in the slammer and ignoring the cause. Reducing recidivism through rehabilitation, reintegration and restorative justice has been his mantra.
At 76, Workman is as active as ever. Even as he was confined to his bed with a rather painful skin infection recently, he couldn’t rest, penning a 120 page submission to the Waitangi Tribunal, which went on to release a report lambasting the Crown for breaching its Treaty of Waitangi obligations by failing to tackle the high rate of reoffending by Maori.
He has joined Race Relations Commissioner Dame Susan Devoy in her push for an inquiry into the abuse of children in state care following the government’s decision not to launch one.
‘‘I knew that those institutions were horrible places because I visited them as a youth aid officer. I saw those same people in prison in the early 1980s a decade later when I was in the Ombudsman’s Office and again in the 90s when I was head of prisons. But I had not really grasped the systemic enormity of the issue until later on and I felt guilty about that. Why had I not stood up and done something earlier in a public way?’’
Workman hangs his head when he thinks about working with kids, predominantly Maori boys, at a state care facility in Levin. The home was run by a grim lot, he says.
‘‘The treatment of kids in institutions was just shocking. All they knew was how to kick arse.’’
Workman (Ngati Kahungunu, Rangitaane) grew up in Greytown, Wairarapa with his three sisters.
His Pakeha mother and Maori father ran a market garden but he had no intention of joining the family business.
He was too interested in parties and playing jazz. He can blame Louis Armstrong for the latter.
After failing School C twice and becoming a bit of a handful the local bobby coerced him into becoming a police cadet.
‘‘I had no great vision or social conscience around criminal justice. I just thought it would be an exciting life.’’
While he experienced prejudiced attitudes in his work, racism had reared its ugly head well before that.
He recalls his father and grandfather took him to the Greytown Working Men’s Club when the local Maori Battalion returned from World War II in 1945.
At their welcome home ceremony the Battalion did a stirring haka outside the club. Much later when Workman was 12, he met one of those soldiers who told him he’d gone back to the club the week after and was refused service because he was Maori.
His own mother would not let his sisters have Maori boyfriends. She herself had suffered prejudice when she married Workman’s father and didn’t want her daughters to suffer the same way.
Workman, who has four children with his first wife and two with his second, moved from the police to the Ombudsman’s Office where he investigated complaints from prisoners and psychiatric patients and later to the State Services Commission. After a stint at Maori Affairs he became head of prisons.
During his time at the helm he advanced prison reform but his tenure ended abruptly after an incident of severe prisoner ill-treatment led him to suspend 12 prison officers.
There were calls for his resignation in Parliament. Workman was out in the cold on this one.
The only support came from a Mongrel Mob leader.
‘‘We just sat down and talked. This guy had a full moko, broken teeth and cabbage ears. I thought ‘Why is this guy talking to me? Mob leaders and prison bosses aren’t supposed to have a relationship. I thought about the story in the Bible where Jesus touches the leper and I thought, ‘he’s touching the leper.’ It was really quite a spiritual moment for me.
‘‘As he was leaving he put his hand on my arm and he started to pray. That was a profound moment for me.’’
His experience with that Mongrel Mob leader ignited a faith in Workman who went from being agnostic to converting to Christianity.
‘‘I was reading the gospel for the first time at 52 and I was reading it like a political document.
‘‘My social justice proclivity took hold. From then on anything I did, the gospel was implicit in it.’’
Around this time Workman was spiralling into severe clinical depression which he duelled with over the next few years.
He went on to head Prison Fellowship, taking it from an evangelical outfit to include a broader focus, including the introduction of restorative justice.
He co-launched the Rethinking Crime and Punishment project, and more recently was involved in establishing Justspeak, a national youth movement advocating positive reform in the criminal justice system.
The report released by the latter this month looks at ways to reduce our burgeoning prison numbers.
He’s pretty incredulous at the Government’s plan to open a $1 billion facility for 1500 inmates.
Our prison numbers are positively criminal, he says.
The reformer has his work cut out.
‘‘The treatment of kids in institutions was just shocking. All they knew was how to kick arse.’’