Culture of Tonga - Crime

Crime

Violent crime is limited, but increasing, and public perception associates this with returns of ethnic Tongans who have been raised overseas. A few notable cases involve young men raised since infancy in the USA, whose family neglected to obtain citizenship for them and who were deported on involvement with the American justice system. At this moment crime increases faster than the police force and will remain a serious problem for the years to come. Increasing wealth has also increased the gap between the rich and the poor, leading to more and more burglaries.

At this moment most prisons in Tonga still abide with the old laissez-faire attitude. Usually having no fences, no iron bars and so forth, that makes it very easy for the inmates to escape. This system may be required to change, adapting for the influx of foreign born/raised criminals who may treat such a system with contempt, alternatively a minimum/maximum security prison system may need to be developed placing escapists and/or repeat offenders into closed prisons, but for the moment the jailors can trust on the goodwill of the inmates. Some are glad to be in prison, not to be bothered by demanding family members. There is no social stigma on being in prison (although that may change now too), but then of course it also does not serve as a deterrent against crimes.

More troublesome are the youth offenders "schoolboys who want to have money to show off" and are apprehended in burglaries. As there are no juvenile prisons, they are to be locked up in the main prisons together with hardened criminals. For a while it was tried to confine them on Tau, a small island offshore Tongatapu but that was not ideal either.

In the 1990s Chinese immigration caused resentment among the native Tongan population (especially those from Hong Kong, who bought a Tongan passport to get away before the Beijing takeover). Much violent crime nowadays is directed against these Chinese.