That’s not to say any of these experts excuse the horrific examples or threats of violence which comprise some youth offending,or believe there shouldn’t be consequences for the actions and better support for victims. Nobody does.
But their message has also been constant and clear for many years,withlimitedprogress only really made when community outrage fuelled adifferent kind of political pressure.
In the committee this week,pressed by at-times combative LNP and Labor MPs,Queensland Human Rights Commissioner Scott McDougall agreed there was a logical argument in the short-term solution to the claims (thoughquestioned) of a youth crime “crisis”:lock up the group of about 400 so-called serious repeat offenders,most Indigenous and many in thecare of the state,to stop them reoffending.
“Clearly that is the intention behind this bill. However,those children will eventually get out and what we know from the evidence is that they are going to be more likely to reoffend and cause harm to other victims. I do not know that I can make it any clearer than that,” he said.
McDougall referred to theevidence cited by Griffith University’s Ross Homel that remand triples the risk of reoffending. On the other hand,research from the US shows the states that achieved the largest reductions in youth incarceration saw the greatest drop in arrest rates,with intervention programsmore effective than believed. The list goes on.
Despite all this,a key Labor MP even went so far as to question the“soft science”. Experts,meanwhile,have rejected some ministers’ claims of “evidence” to support the U-turn to criminalising breach of bail,something Labor previously opposed. Youth Justice Minister Leanne Linard hasall but conceded that evidence does not exist.
Members of the LNP opposition,led by David Crisafulli,have also used statistics stripped of key context – like the decades-delayed introduction of 17-year-olds into the youth justice system – to misleadingly claim the number of youth offenders had risen.
The result of thelast bipartisan “race to the bottom” to toughen laws in response to genuine community fears about safety during well-knownsummer youth crime peaks was,unsurprisingly,that more kids were held inmostly pre-sentence custody for longer without rehabilitation.
Deputy Premier Steven Miles almost said the quiet part out loud in January,before hisinflammatory spray at the courts,when he acknowledged some new measures were to help mop up the mess left by that anti-evidence,band-aid solution.
“They respond to the effects that have occurred in the system as a result of the changes that we’ve introduced previously,” he offered.
Those effects?Nation-leading detention centre capacity pressures and a reliance on police watch houses to hold kids.
Many,includingfederal Labor MP Andrew Leigh,say rapidly rising prison populations amid decades-long slides in offender rates for adults and kids show the issue is not crime but how we deal with complex and intergenerational societal challenges.
One defence barrister this week described it as an “entrenched ... social welfare crisis” which governments should be leading the community through.This was echoed by a team of academics from the Queensland University of Technology.
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Ruby Wharton,a Gomeroi Kooma woman and community development officer at Sisters Inside,told the committee of the police contact she had experienced but said herself and others had managed to avoid the system because of such organisations and their communities “building a bridge in order for us to create opportunities for ourselves”.
Debbie Kilroy,chief executive of the organisation supporting criminalised women and girls and aformer youth prisoner herself,said:“What you are basically saying is that as adults—I think we are intelligent adults across this state—we cannot support 300 to 400 children in a way where harm is ended. I think that is a sad indictment on all of us.”
It shouldn’t have to be.
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