Armon J Tamatea
University of Waikato, New Zealand
Title: Indigenous offenders- The crisis and the challenges for forensic and correctional psychologists
Biography
Biography: Armon J Tamatea
Abstract
Forensic and correctional psychology as applied disciplines, have made significant advances in its efforts to develop more empirical, standardized, and consistent approaches to managing offenders. Despite this, these psychologies derive from a cultural basis that privileges certain types of knowledge and promotes certain forms of practice that are incommensurate with the outlook and realities of some offenders and their communities. Just as crime occur in a cultural context, so do community responses to crime. This presentation discusses cultural difference in relation to the services that correctional psychologists offer to indigenous peoples. It is argued that peoples who have experienced the significant, long-term, and often negative, impacts of colonization warrant special attention due to the sustained injustices that have been endured – and yet, the application of psychology to criminal justice concerns, as is currently practiced, has not reached the level of conceptual maturity required to address the spectrum of localized criminal justice issues that offenders from these communities often present with.