Ex-youth offender sceptical new boot camps will help

• A Taranaki man says attending a boot-camp in the 1980s left him toughened-up and angry - but not rehabilitated.
• The Abuse in Care report highlighted a case study of the Great Barrier Island boot camp.
• Oranga Tamariki opened a new military-style Academy pilot in late July, with 10 teenagers aged 15-17 enrolled.

A Taranaki man who served time in a 'boot-camp' in the early 1980s says it left him fighting fit and angrier than ever - but not rehabilitated.

Now a successful business owner, Greg* fears the government is repeating the mistakes of the past with its military-style academies for serious youth offenders.

He says only the intervention of an enlightened policewoman prevented him going to adult jail almost immediately following his release from the Tongariro youth correctional facility.

"I was just totally angry with the system and I didn't trust the system. And, you know, I don't trust it now. I was way more aggressive, and I just think that there's a huge percentage of people that come out, and they're not reformed."

Toughened-up by three months of military drills and forestry work and sporting a Corrections-style buzz-cut, the then 18-year-old ran into a bloke he had bad-blood with shortly after getting out.

"I was leaving a bar and he went to attack me and I... I just swung in self-defence and he ended up with a piece of glass in his eye and, you know, collapsed to the ground and was taken away in an ambulance."

The man made a full recovery.

The policewoman was one of the first on the scene.

"She supported me in that situation, understanding that it was only like a week or two after I'd got out and that there was a lot of, you know, consequences if I ended up in court within such a short time."

Instead of heading to adult jail, no charges were laid.

Now in his early 60s, Greg said had a loving but difficult childhood and spent a period in foster care. When his parents eventually split, his dad remarried and he started getting into trouble with an older stepbrother.

Driving offences followed and ultimately a conviction for car conversion, which saw him sentenced to 12 weeks of corrective training.

It was traumatic and punctuated with violence.

"I found myself initially in an adult prison - Waikeria central wing - for two nights, which was terrifying, because it was amongst, you know, all sorts of people who have been convicted from literal murder, to rape, to common assault or whatever.

"Then I ended up in holding for 10 days at Waikeria borstal with hardened, hardened youth criminals, who'd already been in several times."

Greg and a group of young offenders - including two of his friends - were eventually transferred to the Tongariro youth corrections facility.

"It was based solely on a military training regime where you marched everywhere and your rooms, or your little sheds, were set up with bed rolls.

"You got yelled and screamed at by very angry ex-military staff, which were now Corrections officers… most of them were pretty angry."

Beatings were common.

"I got beaten up by one of the corrective officers, just through what I thought was miscommunication. He decided to just use me as a punching bag.

"And then another time, I was just leaning on a wall talking to someone, and I get one of the hardest slaps in the face I've ever had."

The daily routine involved a 6am call for exercise drills before inmates were marched back to their huts to straighten out their bedroll before marching to the mess hall for breakfast.

"Then you're back out on parade, put into your work gangs and marching anywhere from one kilometre to maybe six kilometres to work where you're doing menial work with axes or, slashers cutting down manuka scrub or waste in the forest."

After a nine-hour day it was back to camp to tackle an obstacle course, including getting over a 5m wall before being allowed to shower and go to dinner.

"And if you didn't manage to achieve the wall, you got ridiculed again, yelled and screamed at, and made to do press-ups instead."

Greg was pretty athletic, but others suffered - including a boy who had transferred with him from Waikeria.

"He was just pretty much in a state of shock. He wasn't a physical person at all and within two days, he'd tried to take his life. I know his attempted suicide wasn't a full-on, it was, you know, a cry for help from someone who wasn't handling the situation."

The teenager was separated from the other boys and transferred out. It was not an isolated incident.

"They seemed to be maybe shipping someone off back to wherever they were taking them... maybe once every two or three weeks."

In terms of rehabilitation, Tongariro offered little.

"The odd night you're allowed a movie or they had lectures, you know? The corrective officers would lecture on drug use and what it could do. Everyone kind of thought it was quite ridiculous.

"There was no rehabilitation. The boot-camp system was not about rehabilitation - it was actually built on hate and designed to break you."

Greg - a pākeha - said two-thirds of the inmates were Māori, some of whom seemed to think their time at Tongariro would be looked at favourably by the gangs on their release. He wondered where they were now.

The two mates he went to Tongariro with both ended up in adult jail, initially after breaking into a superette together shortly after their release. One would end up in psychiatric care, while the other straightened out after serving three or four short prison sentences.

"Boot-camp didn't rehabilitate them... there was no rehabilitation. And yeah, there was a long time, where they were still doing, you know, just stupid things, really."

After his close call at the bar, Greg's turning point came when his father helped him to get a job.

"Quickly once I got a job, you know, work became important, I focused on work. And that was at a freezing works. That was hard labour, but I wasn't scared of working hard."

Slowly he established a new circle of friends, got tertiary training and travelled around the world before establishing a business and settling back in Taranaki.

Despite the government's claim its new military-style academies would be different, Greg was not convinced.

"It's not a process that we want to go down again, because it's been tried, and statistically, all around the world, it has not worked.

"No matter how they sugar-coat it, they're going to end up with issues. And after the [Abuse in Care] report that's just come out, you cannot go down that road anymore."

He said if the government was serious about rehabilitating youth offenders it would establish opportunities similar to Outward Bound or the Spirit of Adventure.

"Getting them into things where they're challenged, and where they're going to have to open up and understand where they've come from and where they might be able to get to, as opposed to banging them up in a boot-camp."

Oranga Tamariki - the Ministry for Children - was responsible for establishing the new military-style academies. Asked how these would differ from the boot-camps of the 1980s, it referred RNZ to its website.

In a statement there, Tusha Penny, deputy chief executive residences and homes at Oranga Tamariki, said it had looked at evidence from previous military-style programmes - in New Zealand and internationally - to understand what would give the teenagers taking part the best chance of success.

It had embedded these elements in the pilot academy's design, including a focus on the teenagers' transition back to the community, making sure they had support and were well set up for the future.

This set it apart from previous iterations, Penny said.

"This isn't about a punitive or correctional approach. We want there to be accountability for proven serious offending, but the key to success is that this is also an opportunity for the teenagers, and their whānau, to benefit from an intensive circuit breaker. That includes getting joined up, multi-disciplinary support that is tailored for them."

A pilot was underway involving 10 teenagers aged 15-17 at the time of offending at Oranga Tamariki's youth justice facility in Palmerston North.

*Name changed to preserve subject's anonymity.

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