Physical growth and ethnic inequality in New Zealand prisons, 1840–1975

Abstract

The British colonization of New Zealand after 1840 was marked by an unusual concern compared to other settler colonies to incorporate the indigenous Māori population into the new society. But despite a continuing political rhetoric of protection and sovereignty, Māori have historically had lower living standards and, since the 1920s, higher rates of incarceration than European-descended New Zealanders (Pākehā). In this article, the authors examine differences between Māori and Pākehā over 130 years using prison records. Aggregate data from the Ministry of Justice shows long-term change and differences in incarceration rates. Using a data set of all extant registers of men entering New Zealand prisons, the authors show change over time in convictions and in height. The adult statures of Māori and Pākehā were similar for men born before 1900, but marked differences emerged among cohorts born during the twentieth century. By the Second World War, the gap in adult stature widened to around 3 cm, before narrowing for men born after the Second World War. Periods of divergence in stature are paralleled by divergence in fertility and indicators of family size, suggesting the possibility that increasing fertility stressed the economic situation of Māori families. The prison evidence suggests that inequalities in ‘net nutrition’ between Māori and Pākehā are long-standing but not unchanging – indeed, they increased for cohorts born in the early twentieth century. A subset of the data describing adolescents confirms that, among those born after 1945, the ethnic differential was already visible by the age of 16.

Keywords:

• height
• New Zealand
• Māori
• anthropometric history
• physical standard of living

Acknowledgements

Comments from participants at the 2012 Social Science History Association meetings and 2013 World Congress of Cliometrics, and several anonymous referees improved this article. We thank Archives New Zealand, the New Zealand Ministry of Justice and the New Zealand Police for access to prison registers restricted for 100 years after the final admission. Sam Ritchie, Tristan Egarr, Adeline Cumings, Anthony Gerbi and Chelsea Jack provided exemplary research assistance.

Funding

This work was supported by the New Zealand Health Research Council [grant number HRC 08/231] and the Marsden Fund [grant number UoC 0807]. Evan Roberts gratefully acknowledges additional support from the Minnesota Population Center (project number 5R24HD041023), funded through grants from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^1. Government reports since the early 1900s have documented the changing stature of children. Adult data was not published until the 1970s.

^2. Admittedly, the European experience is complex, in part because the timing of industrialization was earlier and varied. In Great Britain, for example, the adverse health effects of industrial growth were most evident in the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s. Heights by birth cohort appear to have been increasing either from the 1850s or 1880s. Elsewhere, men born in the early 1890s appear to have been taller than men born between 1886 and 1890 in Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden (Hatton & Bray, 2010). In contrast, many overseas locations saw declining stature during the 1890s.

^3. Gibson (1973) attributes fast urbanization beginning in the 1930s to ‘an increased rate of population growth, the lack of opportunity for advancement in agriculture, and the demand for labor in the cities’ (p. 83). Hill (2012) states that the ‘reasons for this demographic phenomenon are complex, but the main push factor was the inability of a burgeoning population (demographic revival had begun at the turn of the century) to find sustenance from the remaining lands in Maori ownership. Among the several pull factors, state encouragement came to be important, with a Maori urban workforce needed to boost wartime productivity and postwar industrialization’ (p. 259). Keenan (2013, ch. 5) and Metge (1964) emphasize the social as well as labor market aspects of the Second World War.

^4. The limited regional variation in Pākehā stature implies that a spatial distribution favouring Māori does not generate an unrepresentative Pākehā sample. Other prisons in our sample held men from across the country.

^5. Inquiries with archivists suggest that, in the case of the Mount Eden (Auckland) prison, a major prison riot in 1965 contributed to reluctance on the part of prison officials to transfer records to Archives New Zealand.

^6. Cranfield and Inwood (2015a) confirm a considerable degree of occupational persistence in this period by linking soldiers with their fathers (admittedly for another country and for soldiers rather than prisoners). Prisoners are more likely than soldiers to have experienced a degree of downward mobility. A life-cycle evolution of occupation is a further complication. Incarceration or enlistment often occurred at a younger age than that of the father at the birth of the soldier or prisoner.

^7. The calculation is based on a summation of the omitted 1890s Pākehā stature (constant term in the regression) and cohort-specific effects. For Māori, we sum the omitted group, general cohort effects and Māori-specific cohort effects.

^8. In this period, occupational differentials may reflect labor market selection as well as early life conditions (under the assumption of occupational persistence) and, if so, the relative importance of the two effects is unknown.

^9. This is a simple regression of stature on age, with no occupational controls, in order to identify an average growth curve for each cohort.

^10. The divergence in stature broadly coincides with a divergence in incarceration rates. There is no evidence that the latter influenced the former, although Bodenhorn et al. (2014) argue that, in some circumstances, jailing a broader share of the population may increase the mean stature of prisoners relative to the entire population. If this influence were at work here, the prison data would understate the true divergence in stature between Māori and Pākehā.