Gangs settling down with Plato and Freud

New York-based New Zealand author and corporate psychologist John Wareham has returned to New Zealand to spearhead a meeting of gang leaders and the Sensible Sentencing group in Hastings.

Mr Wareham and Eagles Foundation of America New York chapter president Joseph Roberts will lead the 2 1/2-day summit Self, Race, Drugs and Justice, for leaders of the Black Power and Mongrel Mob starting tonight.

Sensible Sentencing patron Sir Russell Pettigrew and national spokesman Garth McVicar, whose organisation has led the charge for tougher penalties for violent crime, will also attend.

On the Eagles Foundation website, Mr Wareham said: "We'll be working from an eclectic set of discussion readings. We'll be looking at Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Freud, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, among others."

Co-ordinator and Napier gang behaviour consultant Denis O'Reilly said the programme was "ambitious".

"We'll be tackling issues of race, justice and individual rights," said Mr O'Reilly, who is a New Zealand Black Power Movement life member.

Mr Roberts, raised in Harlem and a high school drop-out who earned his high school equivalent diploma at night school, will present a paper on the close relationship between criminality and addiction.

He is a graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, the prestigious Ivy League institution, and a counsellor to inmates making the transition out of the world's largest penal colony - New York's infamous Rikers Island.

Mr Roberts wrote the book How to Break out of Prison, which focuses on empowering inmates to escape the prison of their minds and lead a better life in society.

On a visit to New Zealand a year ago, the book's title upset the Corrections Department and a planned visit to Waikeria Prison was scrapped.

Mr Roberts said that as an African-American counsellor to men whose predicament he understood only too well, he had a special message to get out.

Mr Wareham said they would be "letting the genie of big ideas out of the bottle". "I have no doubt, whatsoever, that this audience will be up for the challenge."

- NZPA