Boot Camp Failure an Opportunity to Design a Workable Programme

“The Ministry of Social Development’s announcement that more than two thirds of those who have completed the Fresh Start programmes since the reforms were put in place have reoffended within six months, should not come as a surprise”, said Kim Workman, Director of Rethinking Crime and Punishment. “On that basis it is likely that the reoffending rate after two years would be in the 75 – 80% range. That is getting dangerously close to the rate you would get if you did nothing”

“However, it would be wrong to sheet the responsibility for this lack of success back to the Ministry of Social Development. “The original Fresh Start proposal with a heavy emphasis on military type camps was announced by the Prime Minister and Minister Paula Bennett, without any consultation with experts. The good news is that politicians will probably not pull the same stunt for another 30 years, after this failure has faded from public memory”.

“Credit is due to the staff at the Ministry of Social Development, who managed to dumb down the worst features of the proposal. The MAC camp component of Fresh Start, while unlikely to make any difference to long term offending, was also unlikely to cause any great harm, for the following reasons:

• They are not a stand alone sentence – you cannot be sentenced to a boot camp.
• They are an appendage to the sentence of ‘supervision with residence’ sentence, which has been around for about 21 years;
• It lasts for nine weeks – the residential sentence could last six months.
• It caters for ten boys at a time, and MSD runs 3 to 4 programmes a year.
• In those nine weeks, one week is spent on a five day “camp”.
• There is one Army officer at the residence every day for nine weeks, providing some exercise/activities and/or drills, during shorts breaks in the structured programme.
• On one day a week, the army leads involvement in some form of community activity or service – that also applies to all the residents.
• The five day camp is an Army supervised ‘outward bound’ programme , with wilderness activity, team building and so on. There is an emphasis on physical exercise and consequential thinking. Drill and army activity take up about 30 minutes a day.

“A camp of that kind, if it is well run, provides good role models, good team building, and instills a real sense of purpose and pride in those involved. What it does not do, is address conduct disorder, drug, alcohol and mental health issues, and all the other underlying issues that contribute to offending. For that reason it will have no impact on the reduction of reoffending, and it is unfair of the government to expect that it will.”

Ministry staff should now be mandated to design something that has a chance of working, and is evidence-based. That could involve such strategies as engaging whanau and family within the institutional setting, multi-systemic therapy, drug and alcohol treatment, and a community reintegration process designed to assist young offenders to desist from crime.

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