Military-style boot camps for children will pilot in late July despite no domestic or international evidence they work.
The pilot will include children who are in youth justice facilities and have committed at least two crimes that could result in up to ten years of jail.
“International and domestic evidence is clear that these types of approaches don’t work in the long-term,” Chief Children’s Commisioner Dr Claire Achmad said.
Te Ao Māori News asked Minister For Children Chhour what supporting evidence she had to suggest the camps would work. She replied there was an expert advisory panel that considered what worked overseas and, domestically, the military-style activity camps and LSV programmes run by the Defence Force were successful.
Labour MP Willow-Jean Prime disagreed and said there was no evidence boot camps had worked in the past. She said she believed they could do further harm: “The research shows that boot camps have failed over an 85% recidivism rate.”
Stigmatisation
These children will be officially considered ‘young serious offenders’, which Achmad said would lead to further stigmatisation and have “unnecessarily punitive” impacts.
“We’re talking about children who already feel as if they don’t have a place in our communities and society. Stigmatising them further by labelling them as ‘young serious offenders’ will be hard to move on from. This is not consistent with a children’s rights approach to youth justice, which emphasises community-based, preventative solutions. We can create accountability without having this new category.”
The category would especially impact Māori children and those with foetal alcohol syndrome or other neuro-disabilities.
But Chhour said the programme was “trauma-informed” and each child would have an assessment that would determine whether the programme was appropriate for them to be included and whether it would cause unintended harm, including in the event of a child with disabilities.
Working with mana whenua
The programme had worked with mana whenua and would work with mana whenua in Palmerston North where the pilot would take place.
Chhour said the government understood the importance of whakapapa to Māori children and reconnecting to where they came from and who they were.
Labour’s Prime said although there was an invitation for Māori to work with Oranga Tamariki and the government, the issue was that they were only invited to work on kaupapa the government decided, rather than having Māori strategies on how to address the problem within their communities.
Prevention
Chhour said right now youth offenders were either placed in a youth justice facility, which she described as a pathway to adult prisons, or returned into the community without stopping reoffending.
The military-style camps would also include helping older youth with getting IDs and bank accounts, writing CVs, applying for jobs and helping turn their lives around.
Each child would have their own mentor with three months in the boot camp and, for the rest of the 12 months outside residency, they still had the mentor there for them to turn to when struggling.
Te Ao Māori News asked Chhour whether the government had prevention programmes. Chhour said it had put $7 million towards the continuation of the fast-track early intervention programme, which was for 10 to 13-year-olds, and had now been extended to 14 to 17-year-olds.
However, the fast-track programme is technically an early intervention rehabilitation programme that aims to prevent re-offending rather than prevention of first-time offending.
Achmad said criminalising children wouldn’t reduce crime and the government had to focus on addressing the underlying drivers of offending by ensuring children had loving and safe whānau, access to education, safe and secure housing, and financial resources as poverty placed whānau under “constant toxic stress”.
“Let’s focus as a country on creating an Aotearoa New Zealand that provides a great offer to all our children and young people – so they can see themselves as part of it now and into the future, a country and communities that support their dreams and aspirations – so we don’t see them turning to crime,” she said.
