NT moves to jail more kids despite evidence it creates 'career criminals'

The Australian

3 days ago

'If you want to make a monster, this is how you do it.' This was the warning three years ago from lawyer turned children's court president Hylton Quail after he examined conditions at Perth's juvenile detention centre. Judge Quail asked for the log books for one boy, a 15-year-old burglar, and learned he had been kept in a glass cell for 79 days over the previous summer.
Governments have been busy making monsters all over Australia since then, and rocketing Indigenous youth incarceration rates should terrify us. We are creating career criminals. Angry ones.
In the Top End, the public has had enough of youth crime so the Finocchiaro government is bringing back spit hoods. The jurisdiction that has turned failure into a business model wants to jail 10 year olds again. What could go wrong?
As the NT parliament prepares to consider legislative change that will make it easier to jail children and jail them younger, they are being urged to look at evidence on what works.
The quiet and careful work of crime prevention could be a night patrol in a remote town that takes children off the streets and into the care of youth workers who figure out what is going on in their lives. It could be a family responsibility agreement that delivers help and support to a struggling parent who has made a commitment to work towards change. There must be much more of it.
National Children's Commissioner Anne Hollonds acknowledged the angst in the NT about youth crime on Wednesday when she said: 'We all want communities to be safe places where children can thrive'. The NT government's proposed actions, she said, flew in the face of what is known about making communities safer. 'We know that making the justice system more punitive does not work to prevent crime by children. What the evidence shows is that when children are locked up and brutalised by the justice system, they are more likely to go on to commit more serious and violent crimes. This does nothing to make our communities safer,' she said.
Last year, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Katie Kiss took the trouble to listen to children from troubled families – many Indigenous – and wrote a report that caught the attention of Coalition Indigenous affairs spokeswoman Kerrynne Liddle.
She is enthusiastic about Kiss's Help Way Earlier report for its message from children that authorities should not wait. They should help, way earlier.
Back in Perth, the 15-year-old burglar is now 18. And in adult jail. Nobody is at all surprised. Paige Taylor Indigenous Affairs Correspondent, WA Bureau Chief
Paige Taylor is from the West Australian goldmining town of Kalgoorlie and went to school all over the place including Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory and Sydney's north shore. She has been a reporter since 1996. She started as a cadet at the Albany Advertiser on WA's south coast then worked at Post Newspapers in Perth before joining The Australian in 2004. She is a three time Walkley finalist and has won more than 20 WA Media Awards including the Daily News Centenary Prize for WA Journalist of the Year three times.