NEW ZEALAND: ALTERNATIVE VIEW

Borstal is the best answer to the spectacular increase in crime reported by this newspaper last weekend. We must take a deep breath, acknowledge our foolishness in abolishing the system of making young criminals accountable as soon as they start their anti-social careers, and reinstate it.

Young and the reckless

We have to pick up on the three strikes and you're out principle of zero tolerance that has proved so successful in checking youth crime in America. Lock them up for a couple of uncomfortable years, then take another look.

Our self-qualified liberal policy-makers, their eyes so firmly fixed on their starry-eyed principles that they can't see the evidence at their feet, will be horrified. No, no, they will cry between swigs of the milk of human kindness. We mustn't go back to the bad old days when the prospect of borstal was enough to make most teenagers turn pale.

Borstal didn't fail. It was abandoned because of these do-gooders, who pointed out that borstal inmates, as soon as they were released, often picked up where they had left off and went back to crime. They said this was proof the borstal system wasn't working, but we shouldn't have let them abandon it simply because of their trendy vision of a caring society that endlessly forgives its trespassers. Borstal was in fact working. It was a hefty deterrent, as we now know from the huge increase in crime that has blighted the community ever since the system was abolished in 1981. Far more youth crime would have been committed in the borstal era if we had not had this deterrent.

In a move typical of this naive emphasis on caring, borstal was replaced by the corrective training programme, loudly trumpeted as a short, sharp shock for young offenders as an alternative to imprisonment. The three-month programme, a sort of boot camp, was the total flop any realist would have predicted. It had a 92% rate of reconviction, the highest of any sentence available to the courts.

With the fear of borstal removed, young people are now taking up our implied assurance that they may as well have a go at us because nothing awful will happen to them. We have to face the fact that some of our children are malevolent, anti-social, incapable of responding appropriately to kindness. We should stop kidding ourselves that such youngsters are reformable.

And we must remember, the aim of any self-aware prison system is not to reform law-breakers but to protect the public. High-sounding schemes of correction or rehabilitation must be well down the track. Deployed at huge cost to the taxpayers, they simply produce educated criminals better qualified to rob the public on release.

The end of borstal accompanied a turning-point in the justice system. Until then the victims of crime at least knew that some sort of justice had been done, and the people who had ruined their lives were going to suffer in their turn. Now the focus has shifted to the criminals, who are seen as the victims of events beyond their control, deserving of sympathy rather than the opprobrium and enforced discomfort they deserve.

The absurdity of this policy has long been the target of the Sensible Sentencing Trust, coming increasingly to the fore after years spent collating the stories of victims and promoting the reasonable idea that the first aim of the justice system should be to hold perpetrators responsible for their disregard of human rights.

In our hearts we know we should not have abandoned the accountability principle. We let the do-gooders use every imaginable excuse to get young perpetrators off the hook: the availability of P, broken homes, not enough jobs, overcrowding, TV violence. Everything is now blamed except the real cause -deliberate decisions to defy the law.

We've gone hopelessly wrong in pinning our hopes on the Children, Young Persons and Their Families Act, which aims to keep young criminals out of prison by hook or by crook. CYF's recent shamefaced admission that it has wasted $2.4 million on a harebrained scheme to reduce the offending of a sample group of 163 young criminals by saying nice things to them shows where we are going wrong. Youngsters of that sort always take advantage of any softness in the justice system, concluding with good reason that nice people are just weak.

When a pack of teenage girls puts a Christchurch bus driver into a hospital spinal unit with injuries inflicted as they bash and rob him, it's no good thinking about restorative justice gab-sessions. Borstal for the lot of them, as a warning to any other skanky ratbags thinking of trying the same stunt.

And we should forget suggestions that this is a race matter. We don't need to concern ourselves whether the young swine are Maori or non-Maori. All we need to know is whether they realise we mean what we say when we bring borstal back.

Frank Haden
6 August 2006

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3756339a1861,00.html

 
home / Previous viewpoint