Ex-minister warns boot camps not solution
Former National Party minister Chester Borrows says the solutions to youth crime are better social supports, and we must be prepared to pay for it as a society.
National’s leader Christopher Luxon on Thursday announced the party’s youth crime policy, which includes a plan to create a new criminal category for those aged 10 to 17 who committed serious crimes such as ram raids and armed burglary more than once.
These would face sentences including electronic monitoring like ankle bracelets, community service — or, for those aged 15-17, being sent to new military academies.
Left-leaning parties were outraged at the idea of such boot camps, saying they had been tried by National before and all the evidence showed they did not work.
Borrows said while National’s boot camps proposal may or may not have some kind of effect, the best approach would be to test and analyse programmes and expand those that work.
Minister for the courts in John Key’s National government, Borrows has spent 45 years in the sector, including as a police officer, lawyer, member of the parole board, and writing “those muchmaligned section 27 cultural reports”.
He also chaired the work on the Uepu¯ Ha¯pai i te Ora review of the criminal justice system — a system he said was well and truly broken.
He said the camps trialled under that government were run at youth justice precincts in Christchurch in partnership with the military, and included psychological assessment.
They had some positive effect, but it usually didn’t last long.
“They responded very well to the role modelling that was going on around them, the problem was that obviously this stopped and then they went back into the environments that they had been offending in,” he said.
“So the good stuff lasted for a little while in some cases, for a long time in fewer cases, and in some cases it didn’t really do much at all.
“The other thing was that there were only small numbers, so it was difficult to get a very good headlook at what was happening.”
Reviving that kind of policy looked good on a poster or billboard, he said, but would not get to the root of the problem.
Borrows said he did not know why National was not putting more focus on some of the other aspects of its 2008 youth justice approach, including having young people appearing in adult courts for sentencing which he said helped cut the number of young people offending.