Minister defends piloting boot camps in controversial youth justice facilities

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.

Four workshops have been held this year featuring representatives from many agencies including defence, police, housing and community providers to assess how the pilot and the wider academies programme would be run.

Chhour told the Herald the first pilot would begin from the middle of this year and would include about 10 teenagers at one of the youth justice residences. It hadn’t yet been decided which facility would host the pilot.

Children's Minister Karen Chhour wants to improve on programmes run in the past. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Under National’s policy, a teenager sent to a boot camp would be there for 12 months.

However, Chhour said detaining someone of that age in a boot camp for that length of time was not currently legal, so she suspected the pilot would last “about four or five months”.

“We’ll be looking at expanding the programme ... but right now, under the current legislation, we have to just run one pilot programme.”

Chhour hoped to bring the legislative amendments to enable the running of boot camps to the Cabinet before the end of the year.

She couldn’t detail how long it might take for the changes to make their way through Parliament but said it was her “intention” to have the fully fledged academies operational before the next election.

This was reiterated by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, who said in a statement that the Government intended to have academies up and running within this term.

National has costed the policy at $25 million a year for four years, including $15m a year in new funding for setting up and running the academies and $10m a year in reprioritised funding for community providers as part of the party’s “social investment” model.

Studies found previous programmes did little to reduce reoffending. Photo / Simon Baker

Chhour said she had not been advised of the pilot’s cost, nor had Oranga Tamariki provided her with an opinion on the boot camps policy.

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”.

Chhour accepted the MAC programme hadn’t adequately supported graduates when they re-entered the community but promised her academies would be different.

“We want to show that we are committed to this young person from the very beginning of the journey to the very end of the journey.”

She suspected there would be a target set relating to the level of reoffending from those who had gone through the academies but said it had not yet been determined.

Adam Pearse is a political reporter in the NZ Herald Press Gallery team, based at Parliament. He has worked for NZME since 2018, covering sport and health for the Northern Advocate in Whangārei before moving to the NZ Herald in Auckland, covering Covid-19 and crime.