Face of Nation : Pauline Hanson has devised a three-point plan to tackle what she described as a youth crime crisis, including tough boot camps in the bush and mandatory home curfews.
There’s just one problem with the One Nation leader’s idea — countless past experiments and expert research shows none of them reduce repeat offending or crime rates. And in some cases, the model proposed by the Queensland senator has been shown to increase the likelihood of a young person committing further crimes.
Last week, Nine ran an exclusive interview with Senator Hanson and presented what it promoted as “Pauline’s Plan”, saying “she’s found the answer” to the state’s youth crime “crisis”. In it, she called for mandatory curfews for repeat youth offenders, fines for their parents if they can’t control them, and bush-based boot camps instead of juvenile detention centres. “These kids need discipline and authority in their lives,” Senator Hanson said in the news segment, which didn’t include the insights of any legal or youth welfare experts.
“We have given the kids their rights and they know their rights, they know that they can do whatever they want to, they can walk away, parents can’t deal with them, teachers can’t deal with them, that’s why we’ve got the escalating problems that we have in our school classrooms because the kids think they have their rights. “It’s out of control … you are the child, we are in charge here.”
Kelly Richards, principal research analyst at the Australian Institute of Criminology, said repeated trials of youth boot camps had overwhelmingly failed. “The evidence about the effectiveness of boot camps has been subject to rigorous analysis a number of times,” Dr Richards said. Katherine McFarlane, an associate professor at the Centre for Law and Justice at Charles Sturt University, said the idea of boot camps appealed to those looking for a quick fix.
“This is a really easy dog whistle to (use to) whip up talk of youth crime being out of control,” Dr McFarlane said. “These kinds of solutions come up a lot even though they’ve been shown over at least 20 years with lots of evidence to not be effective.
“Things like boot camps in the wilderness don’t work. The worst thing is they can often create more harm for the young people they’re attempting to help. They can entrench offending, which is of course completely counterintuitive.” Boot camps like those proposed by Senator Hanson, with a focus on regimented discipline carried out in an “isolated” setting, would be more likely to exacerbate feelings of anger and reinforce aggressive values and behaviours.
“Criminologists have also argued that authoritarian figures who give orders are inappropriate mentors for young offenders with histories of violence and anti-social behaviour,” Dr Richards said. The real conversation about youth crime should focus on why children and young people offend, Dr McFarlane said.
In most cases it’s because the child has been the victim of crime themselves, especially violence, and so a hard-stick discipline approach is “the last thing they need in order to stop offending”, she said. “Unless you have a program with a therapeutic element and understand what’s motivating a child or young person to get involved in crime, you can’t address the underlying reasons for these issues.”
Senator Hanson’s claims that youth crime is out of control and the juvenile justice system is in crisis are also misleading. In Australia, youth crime rates are relatively low, and children are more likely to be the victims of crime than the perpetrators of it, Dr McFarlane said.
“That’s not to detract from the seriousness of being a victim of crime when it does happen, and it’s important we try to reduce youth crime, but it’s not helpful to talk about a crisis or epidemic. Youth curfews would be extremely difficult to enforce and potentially restrict some children to risky home environments.
Sally Varnham, professor of law at the University of Technology Sydney, said there was emerging evidence that a “restorative justice” approach to youth crime was more effective than the “short, sharp shock” approach proposed by Senator Hanson.
“Schools are introducing restorative practice also in Australia and New Zealand in an attempt to keep young people in schools, as there is such strong evidence of the ‘schoolyard (instead of) jail yard track’,” Dr Varnham said. “For young people to stay engaged in their schools as long as possible — rather than school exclusion — seems to offer the best hope.”
