ABSTRACT
It is only since the industrial era (between 1700 and 1750) that prisons have been used as a primary means of punishment in Western society. Indigenous populations worldwide have used other systems of redress in response to offending against accepted laws and customs prior to their being colonised by European settlers. For New Zealand Maori prior to colonisation, justice revolved around the concept of Utu—which is closely related to reciprocity and mutual obligation and requires a process of compensation to a wronged party by an offender (Mead 2003). In New Zealand and around the world, the colonisation process has led to the dominance of an imposed settler process for justice, and hence, today few people of Euro-Western extraction would imagine any other response to crime than imprisonment, despite much evidence as to its ineffectiveness at reducing it (Foucault 1979).
