The deputy children's commissioner believes an amendment to the Crimes Act will send young people down the wrong track.
The bill would allow ram raid sentences of up 10 years in jail and give police the power to prosecute children as young as 12.
It is a Labour government bill that was announced in the lead-up to the election and submissions on it closed last week.
Deputy children's commissioner Dr Claire Achmad said although ram raids were very threatening and frightening to communities there was no evidence the bill would address their worries.
"There's no evidence that this bill will actually address some of these key concerns that communities and Parliament have and in fact evidence shows that responses to offending that safeguard and uphold the rights of children and young people are actually most likely to be effective in responding to crime and to preventing youth offending."
The bill took a punitive approach which sought to punish children further by forcing them into the criminal justice system, she said.
"All the evidence is very clear right now that that leads nowhere good, this is not a track that we should be sending our children and young people down."
The bill was introduced in the heat of an election period, she said.
Achmad said the data showed that youth offending had been tracking down over the last 10 years, but there had been a spike in some particular types of youth offending such as ram raiding.
It was a response that had been experienced around the world, she said.
"When you sit and talk with these young people what they will tell you is the reason they've gone down this path is out a sense of wanting to feel a sense of belonging."
Often these young people came from households that are not well-resourced, they may have experienced intergenerational trauma and the children did not feel a sense of belonging in their communities, she said.
"We need to focus on putting these early preventative approaches in to play, so we're actually responding to this type of youth offending but also to prevent it from happening in the first place."
One such programme which had success is Kotahi te Whakaaro in Manurewa, which provided wraparound support for children and their whānau, she said.
"It's an early intervention approach which involves government, iwi, community and youth organisations and critically it works with children and with their whānau within the first 24 hours within one of these offences occurring."
She said 82 percent of the young people who have been referred to Te Kotahi te Whakaaro have not reoffended.
Every child in Aotearoa needed to grow up with a sense of inclusion, belonging and hope for their future, she said.
The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child in February this year said that New Zealand was out of step as a nation with its low age of criminal responsibility and it should be raised to at least 14, she said.
But the bill would see children as young as 12 going into the criminal justice pipeline, she said.
