The Australian Lawyers Alliance (ALA) says boot camps are not the way to keep young offenders out of jail.

The Liberal National Party (LNP) has pledged to spend $2 million trialing the program for 80 young offenders if elected.

Mr Newman announced the policy in Cairns yesterday, saying it will help rehabilitate offenders without sending them to jail.

"It will be tough - I make no apologies for that - yes, it will be demanding," he said.

Mr Newman says the location and structure will be worked out after the election.

"The program will be devised and put together and it will be implemented in the 2012-2013 financial year - the details will be worked out," he said.

But ALA president Greg Barns says it will take a lot more to change criminal behaviour.

"It is a simplistic solution - what you need with young offenders is you need to address hard core educational health and housing and familial issues," he said.

"They can't be addressed over a one or two-week boot camp - they need to be addressed over a long period of time.

"The state needs to put a lot of resources into those.

"[LNP leader Campbell] Newman is on the right path in keeping people out of incarceration, but he is on the wrong path in thinking boot camp is the solution."



Criminologist Professor Chris Cunneen, from James Cook University. says the LNP's proposal to trial boot camps for juvenile offenders is a 'cliche'.

Professor Cunneen says camps in Western Australia and the Northern Territory failed because they were expensive to run and had no positive effects.

He says more detail is needed on how they would be run in Queensland.

"The problem is that every time there's an election, politicians trot out these cliches like boot camps without really thinking about what may be involved," Professor Cunneen said.

"Certainly if the idea is a military-style, punitive, legal-enforced requirement that offenders attend these camps, then the evaluations that have been done, particularly in the US, show that they don't have a positive impact.

"It's very easy to go out and beat the drum at election time around being harder on criminals and more tough on law and order, without thinking of either the financial cost to the community or thinking about what's likely to have a beneficial and positive impact in terms of increasing community safety."