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Kerre Woodham: Not a great start for the Government's boot camps

Author
Kerre Woodham ,
Publish Date
Fri, 6 Dec 2024, 12:31pm
Photo / Simon Baker
Photo / Simon Baker

Kerre Woodham: Not a great start for the Government's boot camps

Author
Kerre Woodham ,
Publish Date
Fri, 6 Dec 2024, 12:31pm

The Governments’ boot camps - the controversial boot camps, have got off to the worst possible start. One young man, a graduate of the camps, is dead. Another is on the run after attending the funeral of the young man. Oh, and one of them had already reoffended last month, after graduating from the boot camp. There's only 10 young men in the camps at a time, so you can't get much worse than that.

The military style academy scheme is intended for serious youth offenders. The 10 taking part at any one time are aged 15 to 17 at the time of the offending. This iteration of a boot camp -there have been many, many previous iterations of boot camps - includes a period of three months in a youth justice residence, followed by 9 months transitioning the participants back into the community.

National costed the academies at $15 million a year for 60 places and said the big difference between its boot camps and others that had been failures, was that they would provide wrap-around support services to the graduates. When they entered the community, that's a tough time for anybody, whether you're doing rehab or prison or youth justice, when you go back into the community, you haven't got the controls around you, you haven't got the security around you, that's the tough time.

The camps themselves are based off the Limited Service Volunteer Programme, which is a six week motivational training course run by New Zealand Defence. At the moment, if you're a young person who's not studying or working, you can actually apply to go on the LSV course if you think that's going to do you some good.

When Mark Mitchell was campaigning in 2023, he said National’s boot camps, based on the LSV, would be focused on numeracy and literacy skills, life skills, teamwork - allowing young people, he said, to have a good fighting chance to come and re-join society. This would move them into either meaningful employment or training and keep them out of the adult justice system, which sounded great. And I was all for them. Despite the fact that other boot camps had failed, and by failed I mean the recidivism rate for young offenders who graduated was up around the late 80’s and 90%, which is far higher than the general prison population.

But then young people haven't got responsibilities or children to help them turn their lives around. So previous boot camps had seen recidivism up around the late 80s and 90s. I thought that the difference would be the wrap around support out in the community and you would have to say that if the boot camps do, if they keep going with them, prove successful, it would have been cheap at twice the price.

To keep 60 young people out of the adult prison system would be a phenomenal success. Even keeping 30 out would be amazing. But one dead, another on the run, one who's already offended. That's not a great start and I really don't know how they can be justified continuing.

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