Little Criminals: The Story of a New Zealand Boys' Home (13 page)

No doubt contemporary studies have more to say on this, but simple decency suggests it is a dubious starting point for dealing with troubled boys without any credible psychiatric diagnosis to begin with. In the person of the unit’s chief child psychiatrist, Selwyn Leeks, however, such ideas obtained enthusiastic purchase. Leeks’ preferred version of ‘aversion therapy’ involved using electroconvulsive treatment as a way of putting wayward young patients back on the straight and narrow.

Electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, had been in use for many decades. The treatment was first introduced in the late 1930s as a last-ditch method of helping severely depressed adults by way of inducing a seizure. Then, as now, the efficacy of the shock treatment had never been definitively shown, and even at that point in its history it had already attracted its share of bad notices. Yet at no point was it ever intended to be used on anyone other than consenting adults, and then only under a general anaesthetic.

During Tyrone’s time in Lake Alice he was subjected to ECT as many as three times a week. The procedure, typically administered after the boy was first given a biscuit and a cup of tea mixed with
a drug to stop drooling, involved strapping electrodes on his head with bandages that had been dipped in salt water in order to avoid leaving burn marks. Leeks oversaw the performance. Usually it would be given without anaesthetic and without niceties, although the doctor was always careful to make a point of explaining that what was happening was intended as a punishment, sometimes pausing between zaps to ask quietly, ‘How many times do I have to ask you to behave?’

And it hurt. Tyrone thought he knew a thing or two about pain, especially in the wake of his accident back in Wanganui, but this was agony of a different order, something so wild and punishing it cannot be reduced to a descriptive line. Sometimes the boy’s legs would be so numb afterwards that he would half-roll down the stairs. ‘It was like a couple of boxers in the ring,’ he said, reaching for a familiar metaphor, ‘and the guy who gets knocked down, when he gets up, he doesn’t know where the hell he is.’

Indeed. The black lights, Ali used to call it, that dull glare of sub-consciousness that leaves one spiral-eyed on the canvas, aware of nothing other than a referee’s spread hand flashing close to your face, fingers extended as he counts loudly to eight, in accordance with the sport’s ancient protocols, and the fallen fighter wants nothing so much as the opportunity to roll under the bottom rope and collapse on the outside floor. The black lights can lead, as they did with Ali and many others, including those who experienced this form of ECT, to the loss of one’s most sensitive tool of cognition: memory.

In fact the boxing metaphors for ECT go back even further than that. Writing about the treatment as early as 1942, the psychiatrist Roy Grinker warned of profound emotional and intellectual changes in patients from a procedure whose effect he likened to injuries wrought by the sport: ‘Those who have seen fighters that have been in many battles,’ he wrote, ‘know the punch-drunk of
slap-happy conditions and may recognise a similar state in some patients after shock treatment.’

Expressing the same criticism in more refined language, the Boston psychiatrist Max Fink added that, based on the data he had studied in 1958, the mechanism ‘seems to knock out the brain and reduce the higher activities, to impair memory and thus the newer acquisition of the mind, namely the pathological state, is forgotten’.

Never did either of these specialists foresee a situation in which such a procedure would be used without appropriate sedatives on unwilling children — and never did the Department of Social Welfare imagine a time when the government of New Zealand would end up paying millions of dollars, as it did in 2001, to nearly 200 former inmates who in many cases literally lost their young minds, and in almost every case lost what remained of their childhoods, as a consequence.

‘I still fucking hate touching battery terminals,’ Tyrone admitted at the end of a long conversation. ‘Even light switches are the same. So yes, that did have an impact on me — it’s really quite scary. But who I feel the most sorry for, and I have a lot of empathy for, [are] the kids who were only kids with me who never made it. That’s a lot of people we’re talking about, too — thousands have been institutionalised. And you know, they went on to have their own children and stuff but they never see them, so their kids are, you know, they’re the ones out murdering fucking pizza people and stuff like that. And people ask why. People don’t know what happened to create all this anger.’

T
he following item appeared in a Wellington newspaper on July 3, 1972:

At a lunchtime address to a local chapter of the Rotarians a few weeks earlier, Maurie Howe had struck what for him was becoming a typically gloomy note. ‘A lot of people might shudder,' he told the Petone gathering, ‘but I can tell you with all honesty that
there are some eight- or nine-year-olds who have a foolscap page of crimes attributed to them. Children of this age,' he continued, ‘shouldn't know about these things, let alone be involved in them. It reflects a pretty serious disturbance in the home background.'

Fortunately, Howe indicated, the institution was doing its best to steer things in another direction, a big ask when one considered that it had the task of turning around the lives of a group of boys and young people whom the principal variously described as hardened toughs or borderline psychotics.

This was hardly pure hyperbole. Gone were the days when the institution made a practice of never referring to an inmate as ‘bad' or, worse, a ‘little criminal', but rather ‘troublesome' or at most ‘disturbed'. By now Epuni was far more involved than ever before in handling crisis cases, the kind of kids who had been taken into custody on a police or social welfare warrant or because, in the wheezy language of the time, the court had determined that behavioural symptoms were such that the community demanded the temporary removal of the child.

This changing reality created something of a vicious circle: if the residence had become, almost without realising it, an operating arm of the youth justice system, the residential realities at Epuni meant the institution was creating further work for the courts. The economics of the place meant that housing different individuals according to their experiences and problems was out of the question.

So somebody with a relatively stable disposition, including those sent down by the courts for fairly light offending, would therefore find himself in the daily company of others with serious criminal records. This included Epuni's first known killer, a
baby-faced
14-year-old Pakeha who in 1977 abducted and murdered a six-year-old, Lynley Stewart, whose body was later found under the floor of the nearby Johnsonville School.

The arrangement also had the potential to cause serious problems among the boys who were simply in Epuni because they required temporary shelter. If a kid of 10 whose worst offence was having a violent mother ended up living cheek by jowl with a 17-year-old murderer — or future murderer, as was the case with Epuni ward Jules Mikus, who in 1987 went on to rape and murder five-year-old Teresa Cormack — it didn't take a Harvard-trained criminologist — or so it could be argued — to figure out who was going to come out the worse for the experience.

But Howe's immediate problems weren't confined to his wards. A rift was also brewing between the institution's management and its governmental masters. Some of the officials who might once have been counted among its warmest admirers would soon be openly expressing their doubts about what had formerly been the department's poster-child residence.

Howe's problems first came to a head barely a week after he had offered his gloomy assessment to the local Rotarians, in an episode that by rights ought to have been a relatively humdrum case of disobedience and punishment. It began when a housemaster caught a group of inmates smoking cigarettes that appeared to have been stolen from a colleague. The boys were told they would lose a few privileges; one of the culprits didn't like this, and promptly flipped his lid, and for his efforts got frogmarched off to the cellblock. Feeling the treatment of their friend had been a bit harsh, a number of wards made their way over to Howe's private residence to protest the imposition. No joy.

As the day wore on, the feelings deepened; by the time evening rolled around many of the 37 inmates had decided some form of direct action was now necessary. When the housemaster who had earlier spurred the discontent turned up to supervise the
early-evening
duties, he was promptly jumped by three of the boys, who in turn were jumped by another group of inmates attempting to
save the housemaster from any further physical damage.

Watching the unfolding action from a short distance, the duty matron let out a terrific scream before waddling off at breakneck speed to call the cops. Another staff member sprinted across to the kitchen and armed himself with a carving knife before calling in reinforcements, even as the housemaster who had originally been set upon, his three assailants and those who were trying to save his bacon continued struggling in the passageway.

The cops arrived. Rather than restoring order, though, their presence only prompted a fresh round of pandemonium as the officers strode towards the wings to subdue the ringleaders, with the first of them on the scene suffering a broken nose for his effort. Some of the kids had barricaded themselves inside. Others ran out into the garden and yanked out the wooden stakes to use as makeshift weapons. The fight for Epuni Boys' Home was on. It lasted half the evening. At least one inmate suffered serious facial injuries and a number of police vehicles were extensively damaged. In the end the leaders of the uprising were restrained, sedated and put into the cells, and order was restored. But it had been a close call.

THE INCIDENT ONLY STRENGTHENED THE
DEPARTMENT'S
perception that one of its flagship correctional facilities was out of control. Howe had been nowhere to be seen during the strife, it was noted, and the chief's eventual presence did little to calm matters. Moreover, his absence on this particular night only seemed to underscore a far wider problem: the institution on his watch seemed to be turning loose as hell.

A suitably sarcastic communiqué was duly dispatched by the department's assistant director-general, Lewis Anderson. He complained loud and long about, for example, Howe's insistence on rigid punctuality on the part of his wards being in almost
inverse proportion to the lack of timeliness he had long observed toward colleagues and his departmental superiors — this type of inconsistent attitude in no small way was felt to have contributed to the recent fiasco. The relationship between these two men, in particular, was clearly spiralling downwards. ‘Personally,' Anderson raved in the memo, ‘Mr Howe is a nice chap, one can't help liking him.' But, as ‘a principal of a boy's home he doesn't measure up … One outstanding deficiency in Mr Howe's make-up is his complete lack of any sense of time. Punctuality is not a word that exists in his vocabulary. If given an appointment, he is likely to turn up one or two hours later and it never seems to enter his head that he should apologise. Those of us who know him well make allowances for his shortcomings because he has been subjected to stress over the years through the mental health of his wife.'

Anderson was shirty about other matters, too, of course, not least the news media. Newspapers and television ‘played up the irresponsible, anti-authority but colourful personalities in our midst', he reasoned, and it ‘is no wonder that impressionable children think it is smart to be in revolt against decent standards of morality and good citizenship'.

Such criticisms of course need to be seen in the light of Anderson's reputation — which was made much of in a book of departmental reminiscences published in 1994 — as something of a windbag whose fondness for dispatching slightly hyperbolic judgements from head office was well known within the operation. Outside the department he was perhaps best known for having airily dismissed a group of concerned parents protesting against the use of ECT on some wards as ‘silly people' and ‘dangerous cranks'. Within the department it was sometimes said that one had not really arrived in the service until a thunderbolt of such criticism, presented in Anderson's tiny, meticulous handwriting and sage with the author's intellection, had been received and
duly pondered. Recipients sometimes didn't know what to make of these missives, and were often bemused. Yet whatever the sociological and literary merits of the chief's insights, the problems he was writing about on this occasion were real and could no longer be swept under the carpet.

The persistent issue of inmates absconding had also taken a depressing turn. In the course of just one month no fewer than 22 boys had escaped from Epuni — more than half the entire cohort — leaving in their wake a slew of burgled houses, converted cars (in one case, a Porsche uplifted from a local showroom) and ransacked commercial premises. Some kids had been known to escape as many as six times. One of the little criminals had fled the country altogether, to Australia, whereupon he proceeded to mail postcards back to the institution boasting of the time he was enjoying.

Indeed, had the correspondent not grown careless and left a return address on one envelope, he might never have been located and shipped back to the Hutt Valley. Another boy, embarrassingly for the department, decamped for the Wellington Town Belt, building himself an impressive bivouac near Duncan Terrace, an arrangement that only came to light weeks later after he was nabbed for the last of 18 shop burglaries, three home burglaries and an assortment of car thefts.

SHORTLY AFTER THE RIOT, ANOTHER MAJOR INCIDENT
convinced the department that Epuni Boys' Home had a full-blown crisis on its hands.

Charlie was the reason for the incident. Charlie was a 15-
year-old
who had earlier escaped the institution by way of a stolen truck. Charlie was the big kid who really ought to have been hundreds of miles away but instead decided to return to Epuni with a
runny-nosed
13-year-old companion with the intention of freeing all his
comrades, or at least those who wanted to come with him.

Utu. There's just no end to those crazy thoughts …

This was the Charlie who came barrelling down Naenae Road seated behind the wheel of a stolen van (the truck had got dumped
the day before) at 2.30 am on Friday, September 15, 1972. Riding shotgun sat his younger sidekick cradling a .303, one of a bunch of firearms the pair had stolen the previous evening from a house in Taita. It was their second visit back to Epuni. The first trip had been aborted at the last moment after they caught sight of a senior patrolling the property.

The van pulled to a sudden lurching halt on Riverside Drive. Switching off the ignition, Charlie leaned over and grabbed another weapon, a .22 rifle, checking to see both guns were loaded before giving the nod. Quietly they opened the doors, slipped out onto the street and stood for a moment near the streetlight, two little Jimmy Cagneys in baggy trousers with their collars turned up against a cold westerly breeze, cradling their weapons as they peered toward the nearby institution set under the half-moon.

Talk about luck. A door, almost invitingly left open, was clearly visible just underneath the main night-light.
Perfect
.

The place was theirs.

Unbeknown to the newcomers, though, the rather inviting scene they beheld was intended to appear that way. Tipped off to their possible presence, crafty old Mr DeJhers had left the door open and illuminated. No doubt the nightwatchman felt well rewarded when he heard the first of the faint footfalls coming from the doorway, whereupon the hulking Dutchman tiptoed off to rouse one of the housemasters to help him secure the troublemakers. As a precaution, they also called the cops.