National double down on boot camps while criminalizing children
- The Government will introduce legislation later this year to create the Young Serious Offender category and empower Youth Court judges to send them to new boot camps.
- The camps will be informed by the current pilot for 10 young offenders, who have almost finished three months in a youth justice residential facility
- Oranga Tamariki officials supported the view of experts that boot camps are not effective. The way to make them better is to include rehabilitation and reintegration, which are not essential to the boot camp model.
- Cabinet agreed with this advice, and also signed off “intrusive” police powers for warrantless arrest, more electronic monitoring, and wider eligibility rules that could leave a $16.5 million funding hole.
It is obvious that the Boot Camps are a virtue signal designed too harvest voters anger and fear at young people ram raiding their local dairy and booze shop.
NZ has a crime class caste.
Disenfranchised Māori and Pacifica kids attacking booze shops and Dairy’s staffed by exploited Chinese and Indian workers while the shocked white suburbs living in relative safety demand ‘something must be done’.
Creating new classes of youth crime to justify shifting them off to National’s virtue signal Boot Camps will mar those kids and stigmatise them further. These kids are the ones being abused in State Care and are absconding from damaged families. A boot up the bum isn’t going to solve this!
Let’s have a discussion about what wrap around services for these damaged kids could do, let’s have a debate about investing into healing these kids from the trauma that drives them, let’s shovel money in – but we aren’t having that debate at all!
The whole purpose of this virtue signal is to look like it’s being tough on crime for a voting block outraged, angered and frightened by crime, this isn’t a solution to the problem, it’s a grandstanding of it.
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There is a path to private prison devised by CoC and backers…a war on the poor–“bottom feeders and losers” to quote Baldrick.
Working class NZers, particularly brown ones are getting hammered on all sides by Govt cuts to NGOs, food banks, school lunches, benefit sanctions…and you know the rest.
Kids not ready for school will be humiliated and marginalised, if they act out it is a short wait for boot camp and then adult prison.
You’ve put the nail on head
I don’t think it will work either, because by the time they get arrested, the damage is already done. It may turn a few around but not many.
All the research points to one main factor in youth criminality: Children born to solo mums living on long term welfare. Decades ago, the Youth Court commissioned an analysis of youth crime and found that they could predict future criminality with a 98% accuracy based on THESE BIRTH CIRCUMSTANCES ONLY.
Think about that.
An innocent baby is born, and pretty much doomed to trace a path in life of neglect, abuse and failure. They suffer from depression and are far more likely to commit suicide or become addicts. They fail in school. Lack of a father figure makes them an easy target and they look for male role models in the street and find it in the gangs.
Fix that and we fix almost every social ill.
Please send a link to the youth court analysis?
That was about 25 years old so long gone. Also fairly non PC by today’s standards.
But look around; there’s plenty of similar stuff online. Especially the US where solo motherhood in black families has reached epidemic proportions, and their crime rates have followed.
Couldn’t find your 98% future criminality evidence( not a reliable quote) but I did find this tidbit under youth court…
…Mechanisms” in Dodge et al Deviant Peer Influences in Programmes for Youth,, Problems and Solutions (New York, Guilford Press, 2006) at 14. 53 Dodge et al, above n 52. This research was developed over 3 years of collaborative research and systematic analysis of problems and solutions. 16 phenomenon occurs in groups designed to treat or reduce the behaviour. This is called the iotrogenic effect. It can also be argued that group placements should be a last resort only”
Read the last sentence out loud.
What you are suggesting is very open to conjecture due to lack of evidence.
As long as humans breath they will reproduce. You will never change that.
Think about that.
However..the following is the true impact of crime…
Crime can be closely linked to the conditions for children in our community. There is a strong link between reducing risk and building resilience in children and decreasing crime. Problems arise when the larger social, political and economic systems within which children live jeopardize the family’s resources and create stress on the family unit. As a result, the provision of appropriate care and required resources to all children will have great significance for their long term physical, intellectual, and emotional well-being and their development into independent, healthy adults. The offender of tomorrow is often the vulnerable child of today. Vulnerable children are those at risk for significant and enduring social, emotional, or behavioural problems.”
Social, political and economic are responsible and we know the right don’t believe in the social aspect and their political and economic beliefs worsen poverty.
Seems money is being shoveled in.
To the wrap-around service providers opposed to the vulnerable people that actually require it.
Boot camps: training grounds to teach potentially dangerous criminals how to use guns.
Not sure if they get firearms training but this would be very surprising if true. Also getting them fit and sober enough to commit more serious offending – brilliant.
It’ll certainly show them how to organise efficiently along military/militia lines. Will be a great prerequisite course for future gang membership.
There are families out there that should not be allowed to have influence on their children and should be kept at arms length. Unfortunately not all family units are like the Brady bunch
Modern day borstals