Crime and māori in the media

Abstract

Using the experience of New Zealand’s indigenous Maori population as an exemplar, this chapter explores the idea that the Maori-crime nexus is a simulacrum, or hyper-reality, that has arisen within the media from associations of “signs” such as the racialisation of crime, gangs, tattoos, and official statistics. One of the consequences of this hyper-reality is that one in six Maori men born in 1980 had served a custodial sentence by the time they were 30 years old. The author concludes that, if hyper-reality has also become the starting point for research, policy, and practice, our attempts to stop more Maori from going to prison will fail.