Big lies everyone tells about Youth Crime
Courts are no longer able to deal with youth crime.
Some years ago I was asked to examine two seventeen-year-old boys who had killed an indigenous man with a large rock while he was sleeping on a riverbank. Today they would be dealt with in court as children. The pair spent fifteen years in prison and were then released. I saw them again to confirm their suitability for parole. Jail was not a positive experience, and they were much chastened by, but, not destroyed by it.
They learned a trade in prison and were determined to make a go of the rest of their lives. They intended never to break the law in any form again. Having spent their youth in prison they would now have to carry their criminal history around for the rest of their lives, a frightening prospect. It is a myth that imprisonment is inevitably destructive. Although a large percentage of offenders who go to prison return there, it is not the majority and around 60% never go back.
Reformers who want the abolition of jails mistake risk for causation. Having been in prison may be statistically associated with, but it is not a proven cause of reoffending.
These two offenders were in an adult prison. They were literate and took advantage of the limited reform processes and courses in adult prisons. This article makes it clear that in the Youth Criminal Justice System, the picture is totally different and the situation is grim.
Recently, while representing a fifteen-year-old boy who stabbed a family man in the stomach, piercing a major vessel and killing him almost instantly, a barrister stated that his client had made some “bad choices in life” and was not a “murderer”. He stated that the boy needed rehabilitation and not prison. Lawyers say strange things in court and these statements are good examples.
Having been an advisor Involved with cases of serious offenses like grievous bodily harm and murder I would say to the lawyers, during the hearing of the case or after, who had said exactly these sorts of things in other cases,
“What is rehabilitation?” Their response was not always positive and sometimes hostile.
“You’re a forensic specialist and you are asking me that?”
Some would say things like, “I would expect it would involve counseling, maybe a psychologist, and retraining.”
“Retraining?”
“Yes like learning a trade, getting literacy skills.”
“You mean like learning to read and write?” I would ask.
At least this idea shows that lawyers are aware of how unskilled their clients are.
Most young offenders are illiterate or semi-illiterate. Most have never worked in a regular job.
But you see there is no rehabilitation. There is no training. There is no schooling and gentle hand-holding by a psychologist. These are all lies.
Professor Brown, a law expert, from his lofty academic perch, proclaims to us that imprisoning people does not work. Harsh sentences do not deter people from committing crimes, he notes. He says in his article written in 2022 that what is needed is rehabilitation, restoration, and "redefining” the criminal process.
There are many articles like those of Professor Brown and other researchers, if you care to look, thousands of days of academic research and writing declaring there must be something better for youth offenders than locking them up.
“Imprisonment is not the solution,” says James Christian, another advocate for rehabilitation and training as an alternative to jail. It is traumatic, he says and takes away their childhood. He says that children under 14, who offend, need loving, supportive environments.
Professor Brown and James Christian would be quite right if such environments existed in the criminal justice system, but they don’t. There is no rehabilitation and there is no restoration. As for “redefining” the criminal process, what does that even mean?
What happens to young offenders in this country? Depending on the seriousness of the offense and the sentence, two things happen.
Firstly, if placed in custody, they are thrown into a large pen with other young offenders. These are called Youth Detention Centers. There they bump up against each other. They may play a little ball sport. They watch television, usually smashing the screens after a week or two. The rule, in most jurisdictions, is that these televisions must be immediately replaced. The yearly cost of this is extraordinary but not published.
If they are especially fortunate, they are allowed out in supervised groups to a movie or some other entertainment. They fight a lot. They fight their guards a lot as well, recently putting out one detention officer’s eye.
There may be a little group education including some reading or math to which they pay little attention. But teachers are rare in the general community, much less in prison.
Rarely, they may see an exhausted psychologist who sits opposite them and asks them if they have anything to say. I have been in these consultations. This is usually greeted with a shaking of the head. Sometimes the young inmate asks, “When am I getting out?” They ask this because they have no idea of time or schedules. That constitutes the extent of most of the exchanges between inmates and counsellors.
The second thing that may happen to young offenders is that they are placed on bail. This is negotiated for them by a junior solicitor from a legal aid organization because their clients have no money.
The bail conditions are strict; no drugs, no alcohol, report daily or weekly, no going out after dark and so on. These conditions are set by the magistrate. Once out on bail, they do drugs, whatever they can find, they go out at night, they drink, and rarely report in. If they breach the bail conditions, they are dragged in again and given the same bail conditions, and released again. The cycle continues. There is no rehabilitation here either.
There are many myths and lies told by advocates of reform about young offenders. One of the most brazen is that whilst in custody they will be exposed to hardened offenders who corrupt them and make them worse.
Who do these advocates think young offenders are mixing with when they are out on bail? Have they not seen the violent street gangs smashing things at night and stealing cars? The most dangerous and violent offenders are not in custody. One young boy managed to kill three of his mates locally in a smash in a stolen car. The driver who survived was only fourteen.
The community is becoming more and more skeptical about the Youth Criminal Justice system the more they realize that they are being lied to on every level. Sympathy for young criminals especially in the hardest hit communities is running out because the public has begun to discern that these pleas from legal counsel to let the offenders out to have rehabilitation, rather than incarceration, are deception. There is no rehabilitation.
The other problem with these young offenders is that they are very dangerous. It is also deceptive to offer the heart-rending appeal that they are only children after all and that they are spending their precious childhood in prison. James Christian makes this plea in his article that locking children up is depriving them of their childhood.
The boys who murdered Emma Lovell in her home in North Brisbane by stabbing her to death are classified as children, but not only have they deprived Emma of her life but have deprived two young children of their mother.
CTV camera footage of young offenders shows that most often they are prowling around private premises armed with large knives. Fortunately, they are not often interrupted otherwise we would be seeing many more Emma Lovells.
The offender who killed Emma Lovell was on bail when he stabbed her. Undertakings had been given by his lawyer. What these were are yet to be published but they would not have included allowing him to wander onto private property armed with a large knife. Lawyers tasked with defending him will point out that as a child he is not fully responsible for his behavior and would not have fully understood what these undertakings were and how much he was bound by them. Why give them?
This is all one big lie. But who is this lie for?
The lawyers who stand up demanding rehabilitation for their young clients know it’s a lie. The magistrates know it’s a lie. The government corrections department given care of these young offenders knows it’s a lie. The politicians demanding harsher penalties know it’s a lie.
Why are so many responsible people and people in power lying about Youth Crime and claiming that there is such a thing as rehabilitation? There are two obvious reasons. The first is the cost because even if it were possible to find psychologists, teachers, and trade technicians to counsel, educate and train these youths the costs would be astronomical. Professor Brown was complaining that the daily cost of keeping a young person in jail is $300.00 per day but this amount would be a tiny fraction of the daily cost of providing trained specialist services to youth offenders most of who are illiterate and all of whom have no trade skills.
The second reason politicians talk about incarceration rather than rehabilitation is that no one has been able to demonstrate that the latter works. In other words, there are no large-scale studies showing any comprehensive programs of rehabilitation do anything, either keeping people from reoffending or keeping them out of jail.
In fact, the largest and most recent study in the journal Lancet in 2021 by Beaudry and her colleagues proved that almost all programs addressing reoffending are a dismal failure.
There is a campaign to prevent children below the age of 14 from being incarcerated. James Christian mentions this in his article. That seems on the face of it to be an entirely humane and reasonable position to take were it not for the subject of this article.
But what are they to do with children incarcerated under 14? Some of the offenses they are accused of are horrific including murder and manslaughter. This question needs to be answered urgently because the outspoken advocates demanding their release will not provide alternatives. The public is entitled to know what is to be done.
Other countries are calling on Australia to end the practice of incarceration of children, among other human rights violations, including Mexico a country that has to worse record in the world of killing human rights advocates.
An honest, public debate is required about this issue. So far, the opponents of incarceration have been loud in their condemnation of Australia as a whole, accusing the nation of locking up children. They are being dishonest. If we are to have a genuine debate, they need to inform the public exactly why these children are locked up and the nature of their offenses. They are obliged to provide safe alternative management instead of just dumping them in the street to re-offend as I have previously illustrated has been the case with bailed offenders.
The public once fully informed, will insist on some form of detention, albeit a more constructive and humane one, that provides real rehabilitation instead of the fiction that is currently sprouted by lawyers and the Government.
During the pandemic lockdown, the authorities were able to clear the streets, isolating whole cities to prevent exposure to the virus. We are more than capable of clearing the streets of young offenders, taking illegal drugs off them and insisting that their families care for them, and above all making sure that they attend school on a regular basis. Truancy was once an offense; not any longer it seems.