Boot Camp Evaluation Released: Reoffending Rates Aren’t the Real Story / A.J. Hendry

Instead of investing in solutions, the Government has cut critical community and public resources, making successful transition difficult to achieve...

Photo by Fitsum Admasu on Unsplash

The first evaluation of the Boot Camp pilot has come out. Much has been made about the number of children who have reoffended since leaving the residential component of the program. However, reoffending rates are not the real story here.

On a journey of healing, we should expect young people to make mistakes. You don't undo a life time of truama in a couple of months.

The opposition should be careful of making to much of young people reoffending so early on in the program. Personally, I would not put my name behind any program that told me that they could hit a 100% drop in offending in only a few months.

These things are complex, and in my experience, for some young people it can take several years, with a lot of support, healing, and a community that loves and cares for them, to be able to fully move into a healthier environment and way of being.

Critiques of the Government's approach should be careful, that in critiquing the Boot Camps, they do not inadvertently make a rod for their own backs.

The real story, and the area deserving a lot more scrutiny is in the Transition. Oranga Tamariki did a lot of important work attempting to put in place a robust transition. However, the Government's political goals have hampered Oranga Tamariki's ability to plan appropriately.

A robust transition plan takes time, resource, and coordination across various Ministry's (from health and housing to education and social development etc).

It also requires the Government to invest in building the capacity of the community, while at the same time pouring significant resources into addressing the long standing environmental factors that increase the likelihood of a child coming into conflict with the law (i.e ensuring whānau having liveable incomes, have safe and stable housing, access to health care, mental health and disability support).

The real story here is that the Government created the pilot to achieve the political goal of appearing to be decisive and tough on these children, however rather than investing the resources needed to make the pilot work, they have stripped funding from frontline community services, reduced the available resources within Oranga Tamariki and other Government agencies, and cut services (such as the 20mill to house young people experiencing homelessness) which would have supported them to make their own program a success.

I don't believe the Government is wrong to be slow to produce play by play accounts of the children's actions. We need to remember that these 10 children are going to carry this with them for the rest of their lives. They will be the boot camp kids, the children who the Government deemed to be so bad, they changed the entire law in order to lock them up and provide the state greater power to punish them.

Anything we can do to protect them, and reduce the public pressure and scrutiny on them, we should do.

However, the Government also needs to be accountable for the manner in which they have created the environment which has placed 10 children under the national microscope. The Government chose to make this program, and these children, the centre of their political campaign.

They have used these children to galvanize public support, ignoring all the evidence and expertise available to them. They chose a strategy that could be easily sold to the public, showing no concern for impact their rhetoric would have on the children at the centre of this conversation.

This was irresponsible, the Government's actions have shown little concern for the well-being of these children, while also neglcting to acknowledge the states own responsibility to ensure these children and their whānau could access their basic human needs.

This all needs greater scrutiny, and the Minister's responsible and the Prime Minister himself, should be held accountable for the political decisions they have made, to use these children's trauma as a tool to get themselves into power!

A.J. Hendry is a Youth Development Worker and rangatahi advocate, working in the Youth Housing and Homelessness space. He leads and co-founded Kick Back, a youth development organizations responding to youth homelessness and is also an advocate working collectively to end youth homelessness in Aotearoa. He is also the curator and creator of When Lambs Are Silent.

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