Punishing kids: the rise of the ‘boot camp’

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the rise of ‘the boot camp’ as a means of addressing ‘the problem’ of troubled youth’ in contemporary industrialised nations such as Australia and the UK. Drawing on a corpus of publicly available material including press releases and policy documents, media reports, and programme websites, the paper explores the legitimating discourses surrounding boot camps and suggests that they are a symptom of what Giroux [2011. “Youth in the Suspect Society and the Politics of Disposability.” Power Play: A Journal of Educational Justice 3 (1): 3–21] calls the ‘punishing state’. Such discourses work to construct young people as an escalating and uncontrollable problem, to frame this problem as individual rather than structural, and to suggest that state responses to problematic youth have been inadequate. Furthermore, we suggest, as the rationale for these boot camps indicate, that within this ‘punishing state', the militarisation of schooling is deemed to be an appropriate solution to this problem.