The Salvation Army have voiced disapproval with ACT's proposed youth justice policy, labelling it a 'backwards step'.
The ACT Party wants 17-year-olds to be charged as adults so they can face tougher consequences for committing crimes.
The Salvation Army's Ian Hutson says this reaction is over the top, as it's known incarceration doesn't work to curb crime.
"It doesn't deal with the intense kind of mental health and addiction issues that many of the young people are experiencing. For those and other reasons, that's why we don't want to go back down the track of using incarceration to solve all our problems."
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