Heather du Plessis-Allan: What were you expecting of the bootcamps?

If you're looking at the headlines about the boot camp trial today - these kids running away and one of them dying in a car crash, and your immediate reaction to this is to think that this is a complete shambles, then I reckon you are looking at this the wrong way.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Right on the boot camps. If you're looking at the
headlines about the boot camp trial today and these kids
running away in one of them dying in a car crash,
and your immediate reaction to this is to think, oh,
that this is a complete shambles, then I reckon you
are looking at this the wrong way. Same with labor
Labor today saying, ah, boot camps need to be shut down.
They are looking at this the wrong way. What we

(00:21):
ask yourself for this? Okay, what were you actually expecting?
I mean, these kids who go to boot camps are
not average kids. They're not like your kids, right, They're
not the kind of kids that you see just wandering
around going to school and stuff. These are really, really
naughty kids, the kinds of kids that most of us
don't ever actually get to meet. This boot camp trial
is supposed to be as close as possible to the

(00:42):
final kind of format that the boot camps are going
to be running in, right, which means that in order
to qualify to go to a boot camp, these kids
have to have committed crimes that would land them in
jail for up to ten years, and not just once.
They have to have committed those crimes twice, two crimes
of up to ten years in jail. We're talking about
things like ram raids and car theft and stuff like that.

(01:04):
So these are really naughty out the Gate kids. Now,
were you honestly expecting that you're going to take ten
naughty out the gate kids, You're going to chuck them
in a boot camp for three months, and every single
one of them is going to come out the other
side Angelica never doing anything naughty again. If you were,
you were completely dreaming, and you need to get real.
Flip the way that you look at this. Unless these
boot camps happened, unless there was some intervention in these kids' lives,

(01:27):
there was a good chance that every single one of them,
every one of the ten, one hundred percent of them,
would end up reoffending over and over and over and
over again. So what we've got at the moment is
a thirty percent failure rate, as in, we've got one
dead in a car crash and two on the run.
A thirty percent failure rate is still an improvement on
a one hundred percent reoffending rate, do you see what

(01:47):
I mean? And even if as a result of these
boot camps, just one of the kids turns their life
around as a result of the intervention, it's worth it. Frankly.
If none of them turn their lives around and all
ten of them end up reaffend, what have we actually
lost in trying. That's not a failure, that's just carrying
on the way it was going to be anyway, as
it stands, these are the numbers. One of them actually

(02:09):
has a job, one of them is in work experience,
one of them is about to get a job, and
several apparently are in education. Now that's an improvement on
the way that it was going to be. So I
reckon we're looking at it the wrong way if we
think these things need to be shut down and it's
a failure. These are very naughty kids. Chances are all
of them may have blips. Some of them may have
the occasional blip, some of them may fall off completely

(02:30):
and be lost to us altogether. But at least we're trying.
And if we change just one life because of a
boot camp, I think it's worth it, because the alternative
is to accept that every single one of those teners
carry on and they're lost to a life of crime forever.
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