In my new novel, Judge Rosa Somberly, which plays (havoc) with the concept of justice, there’s a thief and urban explorer called Chaz who is the son of African refugees.
While his parents struggle, Chaz is smart and adapts to the city, but without much support he survives through crime until arrested and sent to boot camp.
I really don’t know if they do “boot camps” in my fantasy Europe – I just made Chaz’s professional criminal trajectory up.
What I did not make up is how ineffective so called “boot camps” are for young offenders.
As the narrator Benji (and Chaz’s childhood mate) says:
“At 14 he was sent to by a dumb judge to boot camp to “knock some sense into him” and he did two weeks in the mountains at an outward bound where he learned ropework – climbing, rappelling, hitting those ledges like a chamois goat. That changed him from a lippy stand-over kid in one of the drug gangs in the city’s east, into a proficient cat burglar. So much for “sense being knocked into him”. The only sense he acquired was a sense of space and body strength, and the boot camp trainers taught him how to plan meticulously.”
Chaz may be an exceptional graduate of a juvie boot camp but his character comes from a throwaway line at a criminology conference I once organised.
The comment about the usefulness of boot camps was in a Q and A session with renowned Australian criminologist Professor Ross Homel who said, and I paraphrase slightly – You teach them to climb, you help them bond with other juvenile offenders, you just make good cat burglars out of them.
Why did he say that? Because all the criminological and psych research shows boot camps don’t work for offenders. Evaluations point to some benefit only when run in conjunction with intensive family support, assistance in schooling and provision of basics – such as proper nutrition. And you don’t need the camps to help young offenders – just the good stuff.
Only the most dysfunctional kids need intensive cognitive behavioural therapy to wean them off destructive impulses and that takes a long time. With Indigenous kids, their communities and culture must be engaged big time too.
In fact, the groundbreaking Pathways to Prevention research at Griffith Uni from last decade showed that early childhood education was the most effective way of reducing crime – helping kids from low socio economic backgrounds navigate the education system, way before offending starts.
These remedies take lots of government money and professional help but make things better. Stamping down hard on kids makes things worse.
The latest brain fart from the Queensland Liberals is mandatory solitary confinement for juveniles (i.e. as young as 10) who assault prison guards. Imagine the psychological harm inflicted on a 10 or 11-year-old, especially if the guard concocts the accusation (and it has happened before).
In 2015 the Queensland Labor government closed two boot camps down because the rate of reoffending was 63% and double the cost of basic juvenile detention. Bad stat indeed. Other research shows straight-out disciplinary boot camps are “criminogenic” – they produce more crime. And most participants are male, with male instructors, and hypermasculine goals which does nothing for the issues around respect for women.
Boot camps in the minds of the CLP and the Katter Party (two parties vying for the same voter) are simply a mechanism for mass removal of young offenders from urban areas.
These parties want to round up First Nations kids and “knock some sense into them” and keep them out of built-up areas for a while to reduce the crime stats to make their Government look good. This will not work.
Punishing children is criminogenic. It’s as if these politicians want unlawfulness to flourish so they can look tougher and tougher while children suffer and suffer. Sickening, eh? And Northern Territorians will suffer into the future, as these more draconian measures harden young offenders.
Politicians and bureaucrats should attend Justice Policy Boot Camps, look at the evidence base and “knock some sense” into themselves. And then spend taxpayers money on the good stuff so the politicians don’t cause more crime.