In the opening chapter of his first, remarkable book, Wellington lawyer and journalist Asher Emanuel shows us the gap he is writing into. “No account of statistics or arms-length analysis of policy can quite get to the truth of the matter: that the criminal justice system is operated by people, upon people.” The Valley is the long view, the story that daily journalism, with its focus on the new and different, doesn’t usually tell.

In late 2020, with enough grant money to give him a significant chunk of time, Emanuel began his passion project, haunting courts, the Wellington Public Defence Service offices, boarding houses and lawyers’ cars. After filling 40 spiral notebooks and recording hundreds of hours of audio, he has produced this relentless, 476-page epic and set a new standard of immersive journalism in New Zealand.

The Valley chronicles 18 months in the lives of two men—Emanuel calls them Rikihana Wallace and Nathan Morley—who are drowning themselves in whirlpools of crime and punishment. It recounts the best efforts of their exhausted legal aid lawyer, Lewis Skerrett, and the huge cast that swirls around the men, for better or worse: family, landlords, WINZ, police, Corrections staff, judges, social workers.

The story was hard-won. Emanuel spent more than a year, going through three chief judges, to simply get to talk to those on the bench without a minder—it helped, he says, that he is trained and practising in law, and had worked at the High Court.

In a calm and bloodless tone that is lifted by lots of lively verbatim dialogue, Emanuel meticulously explores the creaking ship of the system. He shows how tired the workers are, how they bend small rules to help Wallace and Morley turn their lives around. One WINZ worker treats Wallace like a brother. A probation officer accompanies him to Kmart: “Jean wouldn’t normally assist with something like clothes shopping but she could tell that Rikihana needed help and she knew he had no one else.”

So much depends on this well of compassion, and Emanuel’s own; early on, he is disabused of any notion of pristinely objective reporting and dragged instead into messy humanity. When Wallace, freshly released, is trespassed from Countdown, Emanuel buys him food. He gives Skerrett $5 so Wallace can catch a bus. At one point, it looks like Wallace might end up using Emanuel’s bank account to receive WINZ payments—the bank had closed his own when someone got hold of his debit card while he was in jail.

Emanuel’s broader work of compassion is in showing his readers that the main drivers of crime are not individuals themselves but poverty, housing instability, lack of education, addiction, and racism.

He makes clear, as well, the forest of tripwires in escaping this kind of life. Wallace and Morley suffer just about every social disadvantage and the courts can’t fix that, so the men keep stumbling. Emanuel details the sixpacks of bourbon and colas, the fractious relationships with partners and parents. Brain injuries, the sexual abuse that Morley has endured, his ADHD.

There is not enough money for food, so the men shoplift it to eat or sell. The landlord demands rent, but WINZ is weeks late in paying the benefit, and a loan shark charges 42 per cent interest.

This is a story about people, and people—not just Wallace and Morley—make petty mistakes that build to be consequential. Wallace loses his keys at one point and they’re his third set. The keys are in the backpack police are holding after another shoplift. Wallace’s boarding-house landlord is charging him $10 every time to open the front door and another $10 to open his bedroom door, and he has only $115.42 a week after rent, child support and debts. The police said they gave him the keys, but they didn’t. Skerrett waits on hold to scold them—it’s outside his remit, but what can he do?

As Emanuel writes: “the basic problem with which the system grapples—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—is at once deeply practical and deeply moral: how to make right the wrongs that people do to one another.” But we can’t fix what we can’t see, and Emanuel has made it impossible to look away.