Latest / Early Edition with Ryan Bridge / Willow Jean Prime: Labour's Children's Spokesperson on bootcamp pilot programme for serious youth offenders starting today
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Pamadegi's boot Camp pilot program for serious young offenders starts today.
- 0:06Speaker 1: The twelvemonth military style program will see one to one
- 0:09Speaker 1: mentoring for each teenager with a focus on routine physical
- 0:13Speaker 1: activity and education. Willow Jene Prime is Labour's Children's spokesperson
- 0:18Speaker 1: and joins me, now, thank you for being with me
- 0:20Speaker 1: this morning. First of all, this this sounds like quite
- 0:23Speaker 1: a good thing, particularly for those serious repeat young offenders.
- 0:28Speaker 2: No, no, it doesn't sound like a good thing, Ryan,
- 0:33Speaker 2: and that is because what we have here is the
- 0:35Speaker 2: government running a pilot. Essentially, the pilot pilot is an experiment,
- 0:42Speaker 2: and that is despite evidence, experts and people with experience
- 0:46Speaker 2: all saying that military style academies or boot camps do
- 0:51Speaker 2: not work for these young people.
- 0:53Speaker 1: Karen Shaw says they have learned from past boot camps.
- 0:56Speaker 1: The focus this time will be more on rehabilitation and
- 1:00Speaker 1: re entering the community.
- 1:04Speaker 2: They say that they have learned, yet they are ignoring evidence,
- 1:08Speaker 2: experts and people with experience who say that the scared
- 1:12Speaker 2: straight and boot camp style programs do not work. And
- 1:15Speaker 2: that was the most recent report on them by Sir
- 1:18Speaker 2: Peter Glickmann in twenty eighteen. And this just last week
- 1:23Speaker 2: we had the Royal Commission report on Abuse in Staycare
- 1:26Speaker 2: and it includes an entire chapter on boot camp and
- 1:30Speaker 2: in there many of the same issues are raised in
- 1:35Speaker 2: that report, and they continue to ignore that and insist
- 1:38Speaker 2: on their tough on crime, punitive rhetoric and approaches to
- 1:42Speaker 2: dealing with these young people.
- 1:44Speaker 1: Can you see why they might be wanting to try
- 1:47Speaker 1: new innovative things like pilots, given that, according to the
- 1:50Speaker 1: Ministry of Justice, there was a twenty six percent increase
- 1:54Speaker 1: in fourteen to sixteen year olds undergoing serious and persistent offending.
- 2:02Speaker 2: The issue that we have here is that when the
- 2:05Speaker 2: government came in, they were prevent a briefing which showed
- 2:08Speaker 2: that the circuit break up program was having a seventy
- 2:11Speaker 2: six percent success rate. They have decided to cancel the
- 2:15Speaker 2: Enhanced fast Track program instead in favor of their boot
- 2:18Speaker 2: camp pilot, where there is ample evidence, decades of evidence,
- 2:23Speaker 2: recent evidence from nineteen eighty nine to two thousand and
- 2:27Speaker 2: four that boot camps do not work. Yet they insist
- 2:30Speaker 2: on experimenting once again with young people instead of acknowledging
- 2:35Speaker 2: and supporting those programs that do and can work.
- 2:40Speaker 1: How would you rate Labour's performance in supporting young people
- 2:44Speaker 1: who might be at risk of offending. Given that four
- 2:47Speaker 1: thousand children were living in motels and there was a
- 2:50Speaker 1: two percent increase in material hardship child poverty figures under
- 2:54Speaker 1: your watch.
- 2:56Speaker 2: These are extremely difficult challenge is that we all have
- 3:01Speaker 2: and that we have to face as a society. That
- 3:04Speaker 2: is what came out of the Royal Commission's report. Labour
- 3:07Speaker 2: invested significantly in the Circuit Breaker program, which evidence shows
- 3:11Speaker 2: was having a seventy six percent success rate in working
- 3:16Speaker 2: with our young serious offenders. We invested further into the
- 3:21Speaker 2: Enhanced Fast Track. I was so disappointed when this government
- 3:25Speaker 2: canceled that program in favor of failed experiments of the past,
- 3:29Speaker 2: the boot Camp.
- 3:30Speaker 1: Wellogen Prime, Labour's children's spokesperson, Thanks so much for more
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