Venu Menon
Wellington, March 6,2023
As youth offending surges, the coalition government has acknowledged laws need to change “to enable stronger consequences for young people who are committing crimes.”
Minister of Children Karen Chhour said those legislative changes were “currently being worked through.”
In a March 5 announcement, the minister said the government will deliver on the promise to create young offender military academies as part of the crackdown on serious youth offending.
The establishment of “military-style academies” is part of a pilot that will go into operation from July. The plan hopes to integrate a “military-style component as well as a rehabilitative and trauma-informed care approach” to wean young people away from crime and “reduce their risk of reoffending.”
Oranga Tamariki will spearhead the programme and work with providers to raise their expertise and capability. Other government agencies will also be involved, making for a multi-agency approach.
The programme aims to show youth offenders that “there are consequences for their actions,” that the “discipline and structural environment” of the military-style academy will help young people “turn their life around.”
The government has sought to put the onus for spiralling youth crime on the predecessor Labour government, with Childrens Minister Chhour saying in Parliament on Tuesday (March 5) that “the approach to serious and persistent youth offending over the past six years has clearly not been working,” and that “something needed to change in how we respond to this group of young people to help them turn their lives around and break the cycle of offending.”
The minister recapped the genesis of the programme. Parliament heard that the Military-style Activity Camp Programme, or MAC Programme, ran between 2010 and 2016 as a partnership between Child, Youth and Family and the New Zealand Defence Force.
The programme yielded mixed results. While there were improvements in attitude and motivation among young people during the programme, outcomes sagged once they left it.
“That is why this pilot is going to have a focus on rehabilitation and take a trauma-informed approach alongside the military-style component to ensure these young people receive the full wraparound support they need to turn their lives around and reduce the risk of reoffending,” the minister explained.
Chhour said young people would receive counselling, drug and alcohol treatment, mentoring and cultural support under the programme.
New legislation will be brought to establish the military academy programme as a “stand-alone sentencing option for judges, [along with] a new serious offender category to enable stronger sentencing powers and monitoring requirements.”
It is worth noting the move may fall short of the expectations of dairy and business owners’ associations who have lobbied for harsher penalties for youth offenders.
A report published by the Ministry for Social Development in September 2016 tracks the outcomes of earlier boot camps set up for youth offenders.
Titled “Reoffending patterns of Military-style Activity camp graduates:2015 update,” the report tracks the impact on offending outcomes of 79 young people who graduated from 11 Military-style Activity Camps (MACs) held between October 2010 and December 2013 in Christchurch.
Over a 12-month period after their release, 11 (14%) of the 79 young people “did not come to the attention of the police with a new offence.” Sixty (76%) of the 79 released “offended less often,” and 62 (78%) reduced “the seriousness of their offending,” compared with the 12 months prior to their graduation.
There was a 54% drop in violent offending, and a majority of the 79 young people reoffended less often, while one in five showed an increase in their offending after attending MACs.
Twenty-four (30%) of the group of 79 were imprisoned or served a SWR (Supervision with Residence) order in the 12 months after leaving MAC.
The report calls for allowances to be made for variable factors such as actual time spent by the MAC graduates in the community, effects on recidivism due to aging and maturing, and so on.
Deputy PM and New Zealand First leader Winston Peters, standing in for Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in Parliament on Wednesday (March 6), reaffirmed his faith in the government’s reliance on boot camps to address youth offending:
“Well, obviously, the present Government has learnt from the past experience, learnt from the mistakes, has got the record of the Limited Service Volunteers success story, and, more importantly, in the Māori world, where so many people are so disconnected, this is one utility that will connect them to the rest of the country and make their lives real.
“We believe, as punanga and all those great Maori leaders believe, that the military can transform and change people’s lives and make them law abiding at the same time.”
Venu Menon is an Indian Newslink reporter based in Wellington
