Bootcamps: Christopher Luxon acknowledges youths could be in facility for longer under legislation

The Prime Minister has acknowledged the Government’s bootcamp legislation could allow for serious young offenders to be placed in youth justice facilities for longer than the current three months.

At his post-Cabinet press conference on Monday afternoon, Christopher Luxon said the current pilot allowed for participants to stay in youth justice residences for three months, but the Government could look at extending that further as the regime is made permanent.

“It is just an option,” Luxon said. “We need to go through the full pilot evaluation.

“That is one of the questions we could legitimately ask for as we think about the legislation that will start going through the House.

“I am not saying we will do that. I am just saying there will be more optionality as we think about the balance between residential versus community care.”

Asked if that could see young people stay in the facilities for possibly six months, Luxon said: “I don’t know. We haven’t had those conversations because we want to go through this pilot.”

However, the legislation, which passed its first reading last month, already would allow for the Youth Court to send serious youth offenders to facilities for longer than three months and potentially up to a year.

Asked by the Herald on Tuesday morning whether he was aware of that, given his comments yesterday about a lack of conversations, Luxon said he was.

“In the initial pilot, we had a three-month residential and nine-month in the community, under the new legislation going through the House ... we would have the flexibility to extend the residential period if we felt the individual was not ready to go back into the community.”

He said, “we haven’t locked and loaded on a discussion around that”.

Luxon later acknowledged it would be the Youth Court with the flexibility to make someone’s stay in the residential component longer.

Prime Minister Christopher Luxon spoke to media on Tuesday morning. Photo / Mark Mitchell

The legislation says the Youth Court can make an order for eligible young serious offenders to participate in a military-style academy programme for no less than three months, but no more than 12 months.

During this period, the offender would be in the custody of the Oranga Tamariki chief executive and be placed in a residence to undertake military-style activities in accordance with a plan approved by the court. That could be varied on application by the Oranga Tamariki chief executive to the Youth Court.

The Government has been on the defence about its military-style academy proposal after it emerged last week that two participants in the pilot had absconded while in the community stage of the programme. They left the youth justice facilities in October.

It’s understood they were found and arrested on Saturday with allegations they were involved in a Hamilton crime spree that included carjacking.

Luxon on Tuesday wouldn’t say exactly what “success” would look like for the pilot, but believed “saving one person” from being the victim of serious violent crime would be a “fantastic thing”.

He said those involved were “our toughest, most persistent serious young offenders” and doing nothing would mean the “community is not safe”.

But Labour leader Chris Hipkins said it was a “failed experiment”.

“The very definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and again and expecting to get a different result,” Hipkins said.

“Bootcamps don’t work and they’ve been proven not to work. This failed experiment has once again proven that bootcamps don’t work.

“Saying we’re going to do more of them and we’re going to do them for longer is just going to prove the same thing.”

Labour children’s spokeswoman Willow-Jean Prime was critical of the Prime Minister saying the Government would evaluate the findings of the pilot, when it had already introduced legislation to entrench the bootcamps.

“What that tells me is that they were never genuine about the bootcamp pilot in the first place ... what is the point of a pilot and telling us it is just a pilot, you will take the learnings, when they have already introduced the legislation.”

Labour MP Willow-Jean Prime. Photo / Mike Scott

She also said the Government was trying to look “tough on crime”, but “they are letting these young people down by going down a pathway of insisting on doing what has no evidence to support it works”.

Both Prime and Hipkins said the previous Labour Government had set up a circuit-breaker programme to get young people in front of the right agencies within two days of offending. Prime said this had a 76% success rate.

Last week at a select committee, Oranga Tamariki deputy chief executive Tusha Penny said there “absolutely” would be future offending, but also pointed to some bright spots from the pilot, such as one of the participants being in fulltime employment, another in work experience, and others in education courses.

Jamie Ensor is a political reporter in the NZ Herald Press Gallery team based at Parliament. He was previously a TV reporter and digital producer in the Newshub Press Gallery office.