Darroch Ball
Co-leader Sensible Sentencing Trust.
Another week of lockdown and unfortunately, with the majority of us doing our part for the country, the feral thugs seem to be out taking advantage. Of course, it’s no surprise that those who are antisocial, anticommunity, and antiauthority couldn’t care less about anyone else and are happy to continue to act in a feral-like manner.
One of the ‘sleeper’ issues that usually goes under the radar and that has been especially highlighted this week has been the sharp edge of youth crime in New Zealand. For some strange reason, successive governments have continuously either blindly ignored how poor our youth justice system is or have bought into the narrative that it’s ‘the best in the world’ and made us all drink the Kool-Aid. Even a cursory glance at some pretty basic statistics highlights that it is failing – and at the very least should give cause for concern about the direction in which it is going.
One of the most fundamental of those statistics is the reoffending rate. The statistics show that youth court has a more than 65% reoffending rate. That means that two out of every three young people who step into youth court end up in an adult court within two years. That percentage is even higher if the time period is pushed out. Think about that for a second. Is that really considered ‘successful’? That reoffending rate is even higher than it is for adult criminals going through the district court.
One of the results of a youth justice system that continuously fails to hold offenders to account is youth who end up offending for years before being hauled in front of a judge – then what do you think the result will be? Rainbows and lollipops?
Young people don’t just wake up one morning and think it’s OK to gouge an elderly person’s eye out. Or rob a dairy with a screwdriver. Or steal a car with a firearm and go on a police chase.
Obviously, there are multiple and layered reasons why a young person ends up in those environments but one fundamental aspect of it all is to ensure there is a system that properly holds them to account for their actions – and early. Most importantly, it is to have a system that instils a sense of personal responsibility and accountability – not continue with the current penchant for making excuses and justifications for their bad decisions. There is certainly a time and place for flexibility – just not after the fifth, tenth or fifteenth time they flip the bird at authority and continue committing crimes.
Anyone with an ounce of experience will know that thirty years ago you would never hear of a bunch of 14-year-olds beating an elderly bus driver because he asked them to pay their bus fare. You would never hear of a bunch of 12-year-olds stealing a car with a firearm and going on an hour-long police chase ending up on the rims and being arrested at gunpoint – then laughing about it. Or hear of an aggravated robbery of a dairy with a golf club by a 15-year-old for smokes and a chocolate bar. The fact is these incidents all happened over the past few days and are only the tip of the iceberg of the level of violence and spread of youth crime occurring in our communities.
We have allowed this to become the norm through decades of creating an environment for young offenders to continue to offend and accepting the narrative that young people shouldn’t be held to account. It is exacerbated by an undermanned police force having one hand tied behind their backs dealing with these young offenders under legislation that continues to treat them with cotton wool.
Every single police officer bar none, who has spoken to me about the youth justice system, thinks it’s a joke and knows we have gone too soft. The only thing we are doing is continuing to blindly create a rod for our own backs.
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