Book of the day: The Valley - Crime and Punishment in a New Zealand City
Asher Emanuel: Names have been changed but the disguise is often tissue-thin. Photo / Supplied
Set in the district courts of Hutt Valley and Wellington, The Valley offers an unflinching nonfiction portrait of the criminal justice system at its most pressured and unglamorous. Asher Emanuel’s book follows three protagonists: two recidivist offenders, Rikihana Wallace and Nathan Morley, and their lawyer Lewis Skerrett, a member of the Public Defence Service whose efforts to keep his clients out of prison – and on some kind of constructive path – form the spine of the narrative.
The book’s most distinctive stylistic choice is its use of verbatim dialogue. Emanuel renders the world of the courts in the coded language familiar to anyone who has worked within the justice system, setting it against the equally coded vernacular of the street. The effect, although visceral and seemingly authentic, places real demands on the reader.
With little by way of exposition or scene setting, one is thrown directly into the machinery of the criminal process. A series of explanatory footnotes serves as a guide through the procedural maze, but this structural solution complicates rather than clarifies the narrative, and underscores how much contextual knowledge the uninitiated reader must acquire along the way. This material would have been better woven into the main text.
At the heart of the book is a depressingly familiar cycle. No sooner are Wallace and Morley released on bail, given the chance to participate in rehabilitation programmes and offered what looks like a genuine pathway forward than they reoffend, breach their conditions, or remove a court-ordered tracking anklet, and find themselves before the court once again.
Emanuel captures the way the district court – overworked, under-resourced and carrying the bulk of the criminal justice system’s caseload – struggles to respond meaningfully to individuals who seem unable to stay out of trouble. There are flickers of hope: specialist courts such as the Special Circumstances Court can offer individualised, therapeutic approaches to exactly this kind of chronic reoffending. But as the book makes clear, such options remain the exception rather than the rule.
The narrative raises questions it does not always choose to answer. What drew Lewis Skerrett to public defence work in the first place? Why, despite his evident commitment – legal, emotional and at times financial – does he seem almost as adrift as his clients? What lies behind Wallace and Morley’s persistent offending? Drugs, alcohol and dysfunctional family backgrounds are hinted at, but Emanuel keeps these elements deliberately shadowy until the epilogue. Whether this restraint is intentional – a mirror of the justice system’s own tendency to process rather than fully understand the individuals before it – is left for the reader to decide. It is a generous interpretation but not entirely convincing.
That restraint extends to the prose style itself, which is spare and reportorial. Events are presented in blunt succession: what happened, what was said, what followed. This journalistic flatness can feel confronting and occasionally thin.
The episodic structure compounds the difficulty. Many episodes peripheral to the main narrative take the form of vignettes featuring lawyers, court staff and police prosecutors. These figures display no discernible development; they are static, functioning as little more than bit players, and the sections devoted to them feel superfluous rather than illuminating.
More troubling than the structural deficiencies, however, are the ethical questions the book raises about its own genesis. Emanuel achieved a remarkable degree of access to people and places rarely opened to journalists – or, indeed, to most outsiders. Given that he is a lawyer, a writer and a former judge’s research counsel, one is compelled to ask how the project was pitched, and under what professional capacity he was operating when gathering his material. Some observations about judges, for instance, may have been obtained through formal interviews, but others appear to draw on a vantage point not ordinarily available to an author or journalist.
His access to the Public Defence Service – both in Wellington and the Hutt Valley, including office access and what amounted to an embedded relationship with PDS lawyers – was extraordinary. This raises serious questions about confidentiality. The extent to which deeply personal information about real individuals is discussed in a book available to the general public is striking. This is not an academic paper scrutinised by an ethics committee; it is a commercially published work. Whether confidentiality or non-disclosure agreements were in place, and what terms governed them, is mentioned in passing only.