Anguish Over German 'yob' Crackdown

The view from Hans-Joachim Sommer's office window is as wintry as you can get on a spring morning: a few stunted fir trees, a wire fence and the blank grey of a Baltic sky. His conversation is as bleak. 'The teenagers here are all highly criminal,' said the 47-year-old former sports teacher. 'Their problems are very complex and their re-socialization is not easy.'

Sommer is the director of a camp for teenage criminals near the village of Frostenwalde a few miles from the border with Poland. The camp - and a handful like it - are now at the center of a fierce debate in Germany over policies to tackle youth crime. After an attack on an elderly German by two teenage immigrants earlier this year, conservative politicians called for 'boot camps'. Now there are plans - backed by the Chancellor, Angela Merkel - to build dozens of camps like Sommer's.

'We are still working on pushing the legislation through,' Wolfgang Bosbach, a senior politician in Merkel's ruling Christian Democrat Party, said last week. 'We expect at least two more camps like that at Frostenwalde to open this year.'

The policy has proved controversial. Some say the whole issue is being whipped up by the media and right-wing politicians. 'The statistics in fact show that the level of youth crime has been stable for at least a decade,' said Christian Pfeiffer, of the Criminological Research Institute in Lower Saxony. 'Germany is flailing around, looking desperately for a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.'

The adolescents in Sommer's care are all either from Brandenburg or from Berlin itself. Many are from immigrant communities, where problems of teenage delinquency are most serious. They have all been sent to the camp by judges as an alternative to pre-trial detention.

Woken at 6am, their days are spent in an intensive regime of schooling, instruction, counselling, sport and communal tasks such as cooking and cleaning designed to teach them basic social skills.

Nearly two thirds are charged with theft, burglary or drugs offenses; most of the rest expect long sentences for violence, including murder or manslaughter.

'Many have skipped school, have no understanding of how to live in society and no idea of structure or authority,' said Sommer. 'We give them an intensive programm, in some cases about basic socialization.'

According to Sommer, only 40 per cent of those who attend the six-month courses at Frostenwalde go on to re-offend, compared with 80 per cent of those who go directly to prison. For many, from tough urban backgrounds, the camp is the first taste of a different environment. 'I had never been to the countryside before,' one inmate said. 'I am really enjoying the silence.'

Germany's local authorities have been experimenting with a range of solutions. In Hesse, which has pioneered the idea of harsh 'boot camps', one boy is to be sent for 'intensive re-education' in Siberia after behaving violently in school and attacking his mother. For six months, he will live in a village several hours drive from Omsk, collecting firewood, digging his own toilet and drawing water from a well. Once back in Germany, he will be monitored for two years. Hundreds of other German youths have been sent on similar programs in Romania, Greece and Kyrgyzstan.

Pfeiffer, a former regional minister of justice, advocates placing 'problem teenagers' in specially trained families.

'The problem of youth crime among migrant communities can be dealt with in part through better integration. Where young migrants have "German" friends, or a sister or brother to copy, their behavior improves,' he said.

Last week Pfeiffer released the results of a survey of 23,000 young Germans that showed a connection between poor results at school and exposure to TV and video games. 'If there is one thing that should be done, it is to stop children having screens in their own rooms,' he said.

Inmates at Sommer's center admit they have little to look forward to once they leave the cabins and empty fields. 'I am scared of going back,' said one.