KEY POINTS:
Without exception, every generation believe that they were better behaved, better educated, showed greater respect to their elders, families and were harder working than the current generation. If only it was true!
It is a currently held belief that there are more young people committing crime than ever
before. In fact, youth crime has remained relatively stable over the past decade, bar a recent increase in serious offending.
However, this increase has occurred across all age groups and is not isolated to youth. We shouldn't be fooled by politicians and political groups who can't count, or quote statistics inaccurately and are keen to make political mileage at the expense of today's youth and instil a climate of fear across our communities.
We seldom hear good-news stories in the media and yet it's clear that the vast majority of young people grow up to have productive lives and become good citizens who contribute to our society in a healthy way.
It is also a currently held belief that the only way to effectively punish anyone and prevent further offending is to jail them. Wrong again. We have one of the most "jailed" populations in the Western world.
Does it ever occur to anyone that putting more people in jail simply results in fuller jails? Recidivism does not decrease as the prison population increases.
Research dating back over 40 years clearly shows that jails don't work for offenders, and particularly for youth offenders. This is not simply "liberal opinion" - it is cold, hard fact, albeit a somewhat inconvenient truth for those who simply advocate longer and more punitive sentencing regimes.
If you want to create an adult criminal, then lock a teenager up with other young offenders during his youth, the most formative years of his life, and remove him from society. Force him to live in close proximity with other antisocial youth, and his view will simply come to reflect that which he sees everyday.
Let's be clear. There are some people, youth and adult, who are so badly damaged that they must be kept away from the rest of us. These people are clearly a danger to the community and our first step must be to ensure that we reduce the likelihood of creating more victims.
Tragically, some of these offenders may never see the light of day again. But they are a very small group and should be seen as the exception, not the rule.
Putting young people in prison does nothing more than school them in a culture of resentment, anger, distrust, alienation and further offending. It is nonsense and yet we continue to have calls for our youth to have tougher sentences, be placed in prison more readily, to spend time in boot camps, and be "scared straight".
The evidence about all of these "attempts to fix the problem", from several countries, is that they do not work, are a waste of money and in many cases actually cause more damage than good.
It is a sad reflection on us all that in a country that is supposed to be enlightened and liberal in its approaches to social matters, we continue to maintain that the more damaged someone is, the more we should continue to damage them in the hope that it will bring about a miraculous cure and "deal to them".
It never has and it never will. It is policy driven by ideology and politics rather than objective reality.
So what does work? There is a wealth of research evidence indicating that for most youth offenders the best treatment involves comprehensive family interventions based in the community.
Such programmes involve parents who receive training and supervision and who are paid well for undertaking such work. We need practitioners who receive specialist training to work with these challenging youth and families.
Surely it is better to spend money on changing these sorts of kids rather than building more and more prisons?
But without a doubt, the thing that is clearly needed is early intervention provided to children and families as early in the child's life as possible. Not only is this is a more humane way to address the problem, it also gives the young person a "chance" in life, without which they will be just another statistic, and more innocent members of society will have to bear that cost.
So let's not bury our heads in the sand hoping for some quick fix. And let's not label youth as hopeless.
We should remember our own adolescence and how we struggled to be accepted, how we struggled to stay on the right side of the law, and to know who we were and what this world was all about.
The youth of today are our future. Let us not forget this.
* Dr Ian Lambie is senior lecturer in clinical psychology and Dr John Langley is dean of education at the University of Auckland - and both are also members of the Independent Advisory Group on Youth Offending, which acts as a watchdog to the Government.
