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At the end of the week the Government's much debated military academies for young offenders will be underway.\xa0

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\u2019t have a level of acceptance from the opponents, despite the fact that what those opponents propose and support doesn\u2019t, and hasn\u2019t, worked.\xa0

Crime and its offenders fit neatly into the category of issues that we face where we can all agree there is a major problem.\xa0

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.\xa0

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.\xa0

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\u2019t 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.\xa0

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.\xa0

There is none so blind as those who will not see.\xa0

This is not to say the academies will be a hit or a revelation. They might be, they might not.\xa0

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.\xa0

Just for a minute think about this - what if it works? What if it helps? What if all the hand wringers are wrong?\xa0

This is how you solve issues. You don\u2019t solve them by doing the same thing you know has failed. You try something different.\xa0

You shake it up.\xa0

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.\xa0

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