22-03-2024, 03:02 PM
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/politics/m...7IBOBLXPE/
"Minister for Children Karen Chhour is defending the decision to pilot boot camps for young offenders at youth justice residences, despite calls for the detention facilities to be abolished.
Chhour admits issues have arisen at the Oranga Tamariki-run facilities in the past, which included staff-facilitated fights, rooftop standoffs and allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour, but she maintains improvements will occur on her watch.
“I’m not denying that there have been issues in the past that have been brought up about these youth justice facilities because I’ve been one of the firm advocates of the issues that have happened in them in the past when I was in Opposition,” she said.
“I can’t control what’s happened in the past. All I can do is set my expectations of what I want to see within these programmes and within these facilities going forward.”
Different Children’s Commissioners have regularly called for the five youth justice residences across the country to be phased out. Last year, a review found they were significantly under-resourced, some staff lacked necessary skills and there was a sense of “review fatigue” that compromised Oranga Tamariki’s ability to improve its services.
Despite this, one of the facilities will house the first pilot of the Government’s “Young Offender Military Academies”, commonly referred to as boot camps, which was a policy National announced in 2022 as a way to target 15- to 17-year-old recidivist offenders and reduce crime.
The Herald recently assessed the efficacy of past iterations of the boot camp proposal alongside commentary from experts in social psychology and criminology.
It detailed how the Military-style Activity Camp (MAC) programme, introduced in 2010 and run by the NZ Defence Force, showed some initial promise but eventually led to more than 80 per cent of graduates reoffending within a year.
Victoria University criminology lecturer Dr Sarah Monod de Froideville said research indicated boot camps could be effective in the short term but did not address drivers of crime. Otago University social psychologist Professor Joe Boden described such programmes as a “finishing school for criminals”.
America
https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/cgi/v...ticefacpub
"Research on the recidivism of releasees from correctional boot camps has not been particularly helpful in settling the controversy over the camps. Neither adult nor juvenile boot camps appear to be effective in reducing recidivism. In general, no differences are found in re-cidivism when boot camp releasees are compared to comparison samples who served other sentences or who had been confined in another type of juve-nile facility (MacKenzie 1997; MacKenzie et al. 1995)."
https://www.martybeyer.com/content/juven...make-sense
"Although juvenile crime is not on the rise, the public, misinformed by politicians and the press, insists on increasingly cruel methods to punish young offenders.1 Since 1980, younger and younger teenagers have been treated as adult criminals. Boot camps for juveniles are the latest in this dangerous trend and will be as ineffective as wholesale locking youth in adult facilities. Yet the message has not gotten out to state legislatures and corrections departments that juvenile boot camps will neither reduce crime nor save on prison costs.
There have been surprisingly few voices against juvenile boot camps. Paul DeMuro has drawn attention to deaths in boot camps, the use of military discipline to disguise staff mistreatment particularly of minority youth, and the absence of follow-up supports when youth return to their communities.2 He has predicted an increase in adult court referrals as youth who fail to complete boot camps or are re-arrested after their release are no longer viewed as eligible for juvenile court".
"Minister for Children Karen Chhour is defending the decision to pilot boot camps for young offenders at youth justice residences, despite calls for the detention facilities to be abolished.
Chhour admits issues have arisen at the Oranga Tamariki-run facilities in the past, which included staff-facilitated fights, rooftop standoffs and allegations of inappropriate sexual behaviour, but she maintains improvements will occur on her watch.
“I’m not denying that there have been issues in the past that have been brought up about these youth justice facilities because I’ve been one of the firm advocates of the issues that have happened in them in the past when I was in Opposition,” she said.
“I can’t control what’s happened in the past. All I can do is set my expectations of what I want to see within these programmes and within these facilities going forward.”
Different Children’s Commissioners have regularly called for the five youth justice residences across the country to be phased out. Last year, a review found they were significantly under-resourced, some staff lacked necessary skills and there was a sense of “review fatigue” that compromised Oranga Tamariki’s ability to improve its services.
Despite this, one of the facilities will house the first pilot of the Government’s “Young Offender Military Academies”, commonly referred to as boot camps, which was a policy National announced in 2022 as a way to target 15- to 17-year-old recidivist offenders and reduce crime.
The Herald recently assessed the efficacy of past iterations of the boot camp proposal alongside commentary from experts in social psychology and criminology.
It detailed how the Military-style Activity Camp (MAC) programme, introduced in 2010 and run by the NZ Defence Force, showed some initial promise but eventually led to more than 80 per cent of graduates reoffending within a year.
Victoria University criminology lecturer Dr Sarah Monod de Froideville said research indicated boot camps could be effective in the short term but did not address drivers of crime. Otago University social psychologist Professor Joe Boden described such programmes as a “finishing school for criminals”.
America
https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/cgi/v...ticefacpub
"Research on the recidivism of releasees from correctional boot camps has not been particularly helpful in settling the controversy over the camps. Neither adult nor juvenile boot camps appear to be effective in reducing recidivism. In general, no differences are found in re-cidivism when boot camp releasees are compared to comparison samples who served other sentences or who had been confined in another type of juve-nile facility (MacKenzie 1997; MacKenzie et al. 1995)."
https://www.martybeyer.com/content/juven...make-sense
"Although juvenile crime is not on the rise, the public, misinformed by politicians and the press, insists on increasingly cruel methods to punish young offenders.1 Since 1980, younger and younger teenagers have been treated as adult criminals. Boot camps for juveniles are the latest in this dangerous trend and will be as ineffective as wholesale locking youth in adult facilities. Yet the message has not gotten out to state legislatures and corrections departments that juvenile boot camps will neither reduce crime nor save on prison costs.
There have been surprisingly few voices against juvenile boot camps. Paul DeMuro has drawn attention to deaths in boot camps, the use of military discipline to disguise staff mistreatment particularly of minority youth, and the absence of follow-up supports when youth return to their communities.2 He has predicted an increase in adult court referrals as youth who fail to complete boot camps or are re-arrested after their release are no longer viewed as eligible for juvenile court".
in order to be old & wise, you must first be young & stupid. (I'm still working on that.)