Most serious crime committed by young people is the work of a small high-risk group. But those at the coal-face say young offenders, and their victims, are on a hiding to nothing until their communities accept responsibility and the Government stops undermining those trying to help, writes Bruce Munro.
Some boxes should not be ticked. But some get ticked for you. It is what happens next that counts.
Tim Percy's confident, clammy handshake bears all the hallmarks of the bluster and vulnerability of youth.
A likeable, reserved young man who handles a skateboard as if it is an extension of himself, Tim has agreed to talk about his experience of getting into trouble with the law.
He was born in Brockville, Dunedin, where he and two siblings were raised by their mother after their father died when Tim was 7 years old.
''I was, like, really good at primary school and stuff,'' he says.
He is not sure why, when he started high school, he began mixing with peers who were regularly in trouble. But by the age of 14 he had been asked to leave two secondary schools.
Sometime late in 2011 he was introduced to ''legals'', synthetic cannabis. A few months later he was caught by police for car theft. Being caught again for car conversion and then burglary landed him in a Youth Justice home late last year.
By the start of this year he was feeding a $100-a-day synthetic cannabis habit. He liked the ''buzz'' but was struggling '''cause it was screwing with my head''.
At 16, Tim's life ticks all the boxes - young, male, low socio-economic neighbourhood, not at home, a history of getting into trouble, not in school or employment, with drug, alcohol or mental health issues. It is the perfect profile for a high-risk youth offender, say youth workers, youth court judges and the Government. The sort of profile which, with disturbing monotony, leads to a spiralling cycle of more frequent offending, prison and increasingly serious crime.
Tim has bucked the trend. Three months ago, with the support of his girlfriend, he went ''cold turkey'' to stop taking drugs.
He is now living at his girlfriend's parents' house and is enrolled in an employment skills programme at the Dunedin Training Centre, in South Dunedin.
But he is the exception. And it is the alarming rarity of ''exceptions'' that is causing concern.
New Zealand gets a big tick for the way it tackles youth offending. Youth crime figures are declining steadily, including in the South. The numbers of 10- to 16-year-olds apprehended by the police throughout New Zealand fell from 43,225 in 2002 to 29,153 in 2012, a 32% reduction. In the southern region, south of the Waitaki River, the reduction was 35% during that period. And in Dunedin, 947 youth were apprehended by police last year, 25% fewer than a decade ago.
In fact, New Zealand's youth justice system is so well regarded internationally, several other nations have adopted this country's strategies. Last month, John Elferink, who is Minister of Justice in Australia's Northern Territory, was the latest foreign politician here viewing Department of Corrections and Youth Justice programmes.
What New Zealand has grasped is that the majority of young people committing crimes are one-time offenders who will get the wake-up call they need without going through the formal criminal justice system. Now, more than 70% of all police apprehensions of young people are dealt with using alternative action plans which do not involve the courts.
But where this country, along with every other developed democracy, is struggling, is preventing those most at-risk from becoming hardened repeat offenders.
Half of all youth crime is committed by just 10% of young people. And most New Zealand youth court prosecutions, reserved for more serious offences, relate to a small group of about 3500 young people.
These more serious crimes are, for the most part, not decreasing. Statistics New Zealand youth apprehension figures reveal a 38% drop in sexual assault and related offences nationwide in 2012 compared with 2002, but a 35% rise in the southern region.
Acts by young people intended to cause injury rose 3% nationwide and 7% in the South.
Nationwide, six young people were apprehended for homicide in 2012, compared with seven in 2002. In the South during the past decade, two young people were apprehended for homicide, one in Dunedin in 2006 and one in Oamaru in 2010.
It is too long to wait until at-risk young people appear in court, Acting Principal Youth Court Judge John Walker says.
''We are not identifying these young people early enough in their lives, and if we do, we are not delivering effective interventions in a lot of cases,'' Wellington-based Judge Walker says. Minister for Courts Chester Borrows agrees. Speaking a year ago when he announced a full review of the decade-old Youth Offending Strategy, Mr Borrows said it was a ''travesty of our history ... that we've been able to identify those who have every chance of failure for a long time and only relatively recently have we been working pre-emptively instead of post-fact''.
''We know that's where some of the biggest gains can be made, dealing with risk factors before young people ever offend,'' Mr Borrows, who is also Associate Minister of Justice and Social Development, says.
Key areas of the review are: how to get young people out of the criminal justice system and keep them out; the over-representation of Maori in youth offending; encouraging family and community groups to develop solutions; and improving the way government agencies work together to tackle youth offending.
The new Youth Crime Action Plan is due to go to Cabinet soon, for public release in the middle of the year.
But some who work with at-risk youth have concerns which call into question the Government's understanding of the issues or its ability to work across ministries.
The managers of tertiary education training providers contacted by the Otago Daily Times said the Government was making it increasingly difficult to help high-risk youth offenders.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, they said the problem was funding contracts that required them to ensure 80% of their clients reached stipulated educational outcomes.
The pressure to tick the boxes in order to retain programme funding was making it harder to continue working with their most at-risk clients, they said.
One manager said they had even been asked by a funding body that reported to the Government to take on a more capable type of client to improve outcomes.
Youth Justice providers, under the Ministry of Social Development, are not funded using outcomes-based contracts. But tertiary education training providers, under the Ministry of Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment, are. The tertiary education training providers' managers said their staff spent a lot of time with at-risk clients and often saw them before their offending became serious and brought them to the attention of Youth Justice. They should be helped, rather than hindered, in working with those young people, they said.
The competitive nature of the outcome-based contracts was also working against co-operation between providers, they said.
''We would love to have a really robust discussion about this,'' one manager said.
''But if we go public with any of this, there goes our funding. We're gone.''
In response, a spokeswoman for Steven Joyce, who is Minister of Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment, said the outcomes-based contracts were improving the performance of providers and clients.
''Educational achievement enables progression into meaningful employment and lessens the likelihood that students will continue to offend or become reliant on the social welfare system,'' the spokeswoman said.
Laura Black, who is chief executive of Dunedin's Methodist Mission, said she had experienced three cycles of successive governments restricting and then loosening their funding of services for at-risk youth.
''Yes, at the moment the funding targets are a little bit wilfully ignorant,'' Ms Black said.
She was pleased the Government was ''getting some of the structural things right'' but believed more recognition needed to be given to the many factors beyond providers' control which affected desired outcomes.
Ms Black identifies the economy and the lack of jobs for young people as vital pieces of that puzzle.
The environments in which high-risk youth offenders are raised also play a definitive role in determining the lives they lead. If New Zealand is serious about reducing offending by high-risk youth, it has to find ways to transform entire families and communities.
Darcy-Ana Kim was first in state care at the age of 15 months.
Her mother was, and still is, involved with drugs and gangs in Porirua, north of Wellington, Miss Kim says.
''My mum is a drug addict. It meant I never had a mother.''
She speaks matter-of-factly and with surprisingly little bitterness, given what her life has been.
Raised by a relative in Auckland until she was 6, Miss Kim was then passed on to a friend of the relative who was living in Brockville, Dunedin.
''They didn't give a s*** about me,'' she said.
Beatings occurred regularly. Gangs and drugs were an everyday reality. She ran away when she was 13, living on the streets for the next four years.
Stealing was the way to get clothes and food and to fund a daily drug habit.
Rachael Hill, who was the Brockville guardian, disputes Miss Kim's version of events. Mrs Hill says she brought up Miss Kim "as my own'' despite finding her difficult to keep and raise.
She did slap her, sometimes hard, but it was not often and "it wasn't a slap for nothing, it was only when she lied and stole''.
Mrs Hill said she had no gang connections. If there were drugs in the neighbourhood, she knew nothing about it and would have had nothing to do with it.
When Miss Kim did run away, which Mrs Hill says was when she was about 15, she stayed in various people's homes moving on frequently, Mrs Hill said.
The bottom line is Miss Kim got in to increasing trouble with the law. Arrests included theft, assaults and, at 15, threatening to kill.
She rebelled during periods in Child Youth and Family homes and Youth Justice residential programmes, but looking back says they were positive times.
''They offer you stuff to do, a bed, something to eat ... security.''
It is stories like Miss Kim's which Rethinking Crime and Punishment executive director Kim Workman is thinking of when he says a lot of attention has been paid to addressing individual offender's needs and not enough has been given to the families and communities they come from and return to.
Every community, no matter how marginalised, will have some members who want change, Mr Workman says.
Those often informal leaders need resources to lead the change in their settings, he says.
In Brockville, where Tim and Miss Kim spent significant chunks of their lives, church minister Andrew Scott says he can see that process already beginning.
Mr Scott spearheaded the Brockville Community Development Project, a capacity-building venture that will soon enter the final of three years' Department of Internal Affairs funding.
''If you look at the range of leaders in Brockville, there are a few formal leaders, but there is a whole group of others taking leadership roles of all sorts of different kinds, and they are making it happen,'' Mr Scott says.
One such initiative is the Brockville Men's Group - eight men who have known each other for years and have decided to meet regularly to see what they can do for their community.
''We came together in April to deliver free firewood to 26 households in Brockville,'' group member Tagiilima Feleti says.
The men are also beginning to mentor ''some of our young men who have been through the justice system''.
Group member Chris Roy said one reason young people in his neighbourhood ended up offending was because ''whanau life may not be what they want''.
''It might be on a bit of a downer,'' Mr Roy said.
''So they do what they can to stay away, which includes staying out at night and end up getting in trouble.''
The group has run its first fathers-and-sons camp.
A lot of people in the suburb had skills and influence, sometimes born of hard experience, he said.
If they all ''put their hand up'' to work with just one young person each ''it would make a big difference''.
But lasting transformation takes a long time, Mr Scott warns.
''If you want to change a community that's been on a down for 20 or 30 years, it's not going to be changed in two or three,'' he says.
''You've got to be prepared to expect a 15- to 20-year life-cycle to these things. Because the changes you need to be making are whole-life changes, and they take a whole lifetime.''
For Miss Kim, ongoing contact from the age of 14 with staff at Kokiri Training Centre, South Dunedin, was her saving grace.
''I call the people here aunty, mum, nana,'' Miss Kim says with a shy smile.
''They are my real family.''
She has been drug-free for two years, rents a house, runs every morning, and has casual part-time work at a rest-home.
''My friends know I've changed. That I'm not that person anymore. So they don't do crime or drugs around me.''
Changes did not come quickly but Miss Kim persisted, drawn by the idea of a life no longer at the mercy of other people.
''I wanted to become independent of people. Now I'm the one making my choices.''
- This article has been altered to include Rachael Hill's comments.
