Mike's Minute: Military academies - let them give it a crack

The Mike Hosking Breakfast

At the end of the week the Government's much debated military academies for young offenders will be underway.

They are probably the headline aspect of this weird, overall scrap we seem to have been having post the election around ideas that are to be enacted and yet don’t have a level of acceptance from the opponents, despite the fact that what those opponents propose and support doesn’t, and hasn’t, worked.

Crime and its offenders fit neatly into the category of issues that we face where we can all agree there is a major problem.

The stats are indisputable, so the idea is that, in part, if you take the most recidivist of these operators and put them in some kind of environment and try and turn their lives around you might well be making a decent sort of dent in said problem.

The soft approach, the hug-a-thon of the past six years, has been an abject failure. Yet, those who love the hug-a-thon cannot bring themselves to believe that trying something new might, just might, help.

There was another sneering piece on TV3 the other night in which, yet again, they rounded up the same tired, old favourites who run the line that this has been tried before and it didn’t work. They even went as far as to find a bloke who had been sent to one of these camps decades ago and was abused.

But they completely missed the possibility that in the ensuing decades the world might just have moved on a little bit and what we did in the 60's and 70's might just look slightly different now.

There is none so blind as those who will not see.

This is not to say the academies will be a hit or a revelation. They might be, they might not.

But like a lot of ideas in life, execution is the key and simply bagging an idea and ignoring its modern subtleties is lazy debate and lazy journalism.

Just for a minute think about this - what if it works? What if it helps? What if all the hand wringers are wrong?

This is how you solve issues. You don’t solve them by doing the same thing you know has failed. You try something different.

You shake it up.

Time will tell of course. But given we all know the state of crime and the kids who perpetrate it, how about we pause long enough to let them give it a crack.

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