Australian Boot Camp Tried – And Failed

Opponents of the National Government’s boot camp policy usually draw on problems in the US, a nation with a completely different set of law-and-order values. Consequently comparisons are flawed. The critics don’t need to go so far: The idea was tried in Western Australia in the mid 1990s in a culture and political system much closer to our own.

At that time the State was experiencing yet another media-stoked ‘youth crime wave’ and Laura Norder was getting a good run.

The focus was on poorly educated Aboriginal kids from welfare-dependant broken homes, school drop-outs who’d got into gangs, grog and drugs. Many were repeat offenders. Sounds familiar?

For Mr Key read Liberal Party Premier Richard Court, also elected on a get-tough law and order platform that included a US military style boot camp. However once the election was over the rhetoric was diluted to ‘work camp’, though few electors noticed the semantic shift.

The camp was set up in March 1995 in the WA goldfields and given a fancy name, Camp Kurli Murri. According to the penologists’ buzz-phrase at the time the camp would be a ‘circuit-breaker’ for repeat-offender kids who’d gone off the rails, though in reality many had never been on the track

The camp’s success was assured according to the parade of experts marshalled by the government. The public drooled over the idea of young thugs learning discipline and respect, forced to do push-ups by screaming sergeant majors – though that was only in the voter’s imagination, never in the fine print.

Instead they’d be taught the rubbery concept of ‘responsible citizenship’.

Escape was almost impossible, though one kid tried. The desert camp was 850 kilometres north east of Perth and the urban delinquents would surely perish if they tried to get back to their city haunts. Out of sight and out of mind.

In August 1996, just 17 months after it opened, Kurli Murri was given the boot after a judge-led inquiry found the camp had ‘failed to provide an effective sentencing option.’

Attorney General Peter Foss said the camp was too remote for families to visit their imprisoned kids and culturally inappropriate for city-based Aborigines. There were also no ‘quality-work opportunities’. In plain speak this meant there was nothing to do.

The ‘responsible citizenship programme’ was unsuitable for Aborigines, he said.

Other factors were the huge costs of sending and keeping professional support staff at the camp

Particularly telling was Mr Foss’ statement to Parliament that ‘the programme format had little emphasis on restitution through community work and changing offenders’ thinking and behaviour’.

In other words the whole idea had been born in the heat of an election campaign and hadn’t been properly thought through. It was a quick fix that appealed to the frustrated middle class determined to tame unruly kids. Few listened to the critics.

These included criminologist Lynn Atkinson who wrote an issues paper for the Australian Institute of Criminology just after the camp opened. She concluded that young offenders needed:

‘Properly resourced programmes which increase their educational and vocational skills and improve their employment prospects; which teach problem solving, anger management and relationship expertise, and enhance self esteem….

‘But the boot camp context is inappropriate and arguably alien to Australian history and cultures.’

The figures for Kurli Murri were starker than the words. Just 44 kids went to the camp. After release 25 went on to re-offend and 20 ended up in jail.

That was the same rate of recidivism experienced in the State’s prisons.

Maybe Mr Key’s version will be different. Maybe NZ social workers have learned from the mistakes of their Australian counterparts, though the language, reasoning and expectations of 2009 sound much the same as those voiced 14 years ago.

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