Experts have been clear for some time: incarceration of children does not work. But Commonwealth, state and territory governments continue to bury expert advice that children as young as 10 should not be behind bars, an ABC Four Corners investigation has revealed.
The horrifying footage of guards pinning down, cuffing and “folding up” juvenile inmates at Western Australia’s Banksia Hill Youth Detention Centre triggered emergency crisis talks in the state and reignited calls for the nation to stop locking up kids.
As pressure mounts on the Commonwealth, states and territories to raise the age of criminal culpability from 10 to 14, Crikey unpacks why prison, and the justice system more broadly, is no place for a child.
“Imagine how much energy it takes for a 10-year-old to behave to a level that results in incarceration,” neuropsychologist and youth counsellor Warrick Brewer said. “A child attracting the attention of police or welfare is a child in distress.”
The cohort of children in youth detention is the country’s most traumatised and cognitively impaired. Research from the Telethon Kids Institute found 89% of sentenced 10- to 17-year-olds at Banksia Hill had at least one form of severe neurodevelopmental impairment, while 36% had foetal alcohol spectrum disorder.
They’ve lived through volatility and violence, “passed from pillar to post” through child protection services, and been deprived of fundamental needs. It’s a recipe for “powerful expressions” of emotion, Brewer said, and yet the Australian justice system is intent on calling that “criminal”.
“We are socialising children to make a link between their social need or hunger and criminality,” he said. “We’re socialising them into believing that the expression of that need is wrong or bad. It’s like not feeding a young child when it tells you it’s hungry.”
Children and adolescents rely on relationships for their cognitive and emotional development. Hauling children through foster care robs them of any chance to develop a “stable, organised, single attachment”, Brewer said. The alternative is a string of “superficial attachments” that prompts an equivalent response from the brain.
The absence of any meaningful attachment is only entrenched inside the justice system, with many managers and high staff turnover. One case worker for anger management, another for drug and alcohol abuse, another to manage criminal proceedings, another to deal with their family… and the list goes on. Brewer said it was not uncommon for kids in the system to be unable to name a single person they felt “watched over them” or taught them something because staff chopped and changed so much.
Without the opportunity to lay down an attachment, a child-turned-adolescent-turned-adult is locked into a pattern of broken relationships, crisis and oppositional defiance. Brewer said that was why you got a young adult presenting with the emotional maturity of a 12-year-old.
“They grow into big hulking 20-year-olds physically and cognitively, but emotionally they can’t keep up,” he said. “They act impulsively, can’t regulate emotional responses, and have poor judgment. It’s much like people describe a narcissist: they’re unable to think about the way their emotions impact others.”
University of Melbourne criminologist Dr Diana Johns said that incarceration of youth was “antithetical” to the way we understand a child: “They develop a sense of identity and who they are through social interactions. If you lock up a child, you tell them they are unloved, uncared for, and unworthy of investing in. You’re essentially saying you don’t belong and never will belong.”
Brewer said it’s a system “hyper-fixated” on outputs rather than root cause, and an indictment on Australia.
“It’s unconscionable to me that in a country like Australia, with the sum total of our resources, we have to show we have failed by locking up children who haven’t reached puberty yet,” he said.
Were you outraged by the Four Corners story, or do you think some of these children need to be locked up? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Would appear to have been essentially reverse-engineered, probably by a long process combining accumulated case law and many multidisciplinary, evidence-based studies. Fourteen appears to be the age below which it’s become universally accepted that kids can’t simply be assumed to understand the consequences of their criminal actions. Many jurisdictions reflect this simply by making 14 the age of criminal culpability. But many others, including all of ours in Oz (where culpability is age 10), explicitly accept it by incorporating into their legislation actual or derivations of the doli incapax principle (‘incapable of deceit’), which requires that if a 10-13 year old kid is charged with a criminal offence, the prosecution must prove that they were aware of the implications of their actions as part of securing a criminal conviction.
Critics of this ‘defacto’ 14 year culpability age point out that’s it’s a confusing, inefficient, risky, contested mechanism that often sees 10-13 year old kids slip through the cracks anyway, with all the well-recognised downstream cumulative destruction jail time brings. On the other hand, defenders of the status quo point out the relatively low rate of 10-13 year old convicted kids who receive custodial sentences; outlier cases that still need criminal sentencing options (such as that of the 11 year old who stabbed 26 year old Patrick Slater to death in WA in 2017 with a screwdriver, as part of a gang attack); and the fact that raising the criminal culpability age (even to 18) isn’t going to address the ‘criminality’ root causes for these kids one bit.
The case for change is more ambivalent than it’s being portrayed but if Arthur Moses SC supports lifting the culpability age of 14 that’s good enough for me. But to have any impact it’s got to come with a concerted effort to make sure that the kids currently getting swept up onto the juvie-to-jail trail bloody well ARE by 14 years old well and truly taught – preferably by their own parents and communities – to understand the consequences of criminal actions. That means Blak and Whitey activists alike are going to have to bloody well stop rote-excusing Blak kids’ criminal behaviour on default moot (and b/s) grounds, like ‘intergenerational trauma’, ‘colonisation’ and ‘cultural (or actual) genocide’.
If we want to keep our kids out of criminal jails, the best thing we can do is to raise them to not commit crimes in the first place, Blak, Whitey and Rainbow parents alike.
Watch it, that sounds suspiciously like advocacy of personal responsibility – the Great Boomed Heresy.
Bad Whitey, Jack! Bad Whitey! ‘Steve’ him blackfellah, him always and only helpless victim.
I do humbly apologise, Leth, and hereby duly undertake to submit to the efficiently emasculating, permanently ghettoising, State-funded ministrations of an appropriately useless, platitude-spewing, Whitey Indigenous policy consultancy ‘not-for-profit’, quietly paying its Boomer principals high six figure salaries these last few decades.
I am fair skinned and fair haired and green eyed as are all my siblings and cousins.
I fail to find your condescension amusing..
My intention isn’t to amuse you or anyone else, champ, be they Blak, Whitey or Rainbow.
You’ve made a number of incredibly aggressive comments on this topic and I think aggression is a big part of the intractable nature of the problem – in invasion and colonisation, attitude towards women (which is particularly repellent when we think about the role grandmothers play in trying to keep children loved and safe), the adversarial legal system, using children as political pawns in an attempt to attack people and so much more.
You have asked someone what they are going to do. I ask you if your aggressive contribution helps at all? I think politicians who don’t want to be bothered with children will be very happy to read your comments. You demonstrate exactly what they want to see – to keep our society paralysed and unable to find ways to force meaningful, long-term change – when the hoi polloi are attacking each other, there’s no real pressure on politicians to do anything.
No I haven’t, ElCee. Criticism and disagreement is not aggression.
But since my replies to you are of course now moderated – comments are now indicating ‘closed'[ – as usual those of us who suffer these slanders are rendered unable to protest. So let us both move on. If this reply is allowed, all the best.
He actually demonstrates the aggressive, uninformed attitudes that caused much of it and now perpetuate the same problems.
Yes.
Chortle.
No I don’t, and that all you can do is flail about and fart nonsense platitudes to like-minded Urban Whitey ‘progressive’ racists, who objectify Blak Australians into political talking points, is a measure of how bankrupt your orthodoxies have become.
Your tyre-kicking undergraduate b/s has failed, OWAL and Ozstr. Get out of the way and let Blak grown-ups take their agency back.
Yes. I watched the Four Corners program and was outraged by what I saw.
How long is it since we had the Aboriginal deaths in custody Royal Commission? How many recommendations did it make? How many of these recommendations have been implemented? How many Indigenous Australians have died in custody since the RC?
As I noted here yesterday – now is truly a shameful time to be an Australian.
It’s not a matter of how many have died in custody – the proportion is no higher than non-aborigines in custody. The problem is the high number in custody in the first place. There must be a better way, but what is it?
Well, it’s not rocket science. To keep them out of jail, these kids need stable and functional households, ideally from birth. That is, households that are not destroyed by alcohol, addiction, sexual abuse and violence. They need to go to school. They need to eat well, and regularly, they need to be kept healthy, and clothed, and safe at home and engaged out in the world, and loved.
Put succinctly: they need parenting. Like every kid. Preferrably by a loving mum and dad, or an equivalent stable, loving household unit, within an extended familial and cultural community.
So everyone needs to stop grizzling about the intergenerational trauma of the past, which as legitimate and genuine a root cause as it is of Indy Oz dysfunction today, all the goodwill in the world can’t do anything about. And instead put our thinking caps on about how to improve prospects on the home front for the most vulnerable Indy Oz kids, as seen in the 4C program.
Sounds well nigh impossible to achieve though, doesn’t it?
No, not really. Not if you distance yourself from the worst of the bullsh*t of Urban Whiteys and Professional Blak Activists.
The Clontarf Foundation model, for example, is brilliantly successful. And growing. And it deliberately keeps itself well off the public and meeja radar, precisely in order to avoid getting swept up and into the poisonous victimhood vibe that dominates so much of Indigenous affairs. I think these do-ers just don’t want to get drawn into that sort of ghettoising politics (Indy and non-Indy), meeja coverage, policy debates…all the general Whitey hijacking and objectifying of Indigenous Australians, especially kids. That 4C report was much better than most Indy coverage (outside The Oz’s), but just watch the unfolding story it’s triggered, now: yet more of the same doomed passivity, the self-erasure of Blak agency, the hopelessness and helplessness that is being Indigenous. Apparently. And thus yet more relentless erosion of any possibility of giving these young Blak boys back their masculine agency, their identity, their male dignity, their sense of cause/effect, action/consequence, risk, obligation, opportunity, responsibility. Boys turn into men only by learning not to blame their own sh*t choices and actions on everyone but themselves. Blak boys are just not being allowed to learn this anymore. Blak boys like ‘Steve’ can only ever possibly be passive victims of Powerful Evil Whitey Men, to be ‘rescued’ by EnLightened (Emasculating) Whitey Women (with or without penises). This is part of the wider aggressive feminisation of society (not a gentle, subtle, sublimely needed snd welcome recognition and nurturing of men’s feminine qualities, but an imposed, destructive, punishing misandry). In these Blak kids’ cases the added intersectional bigotry of patronising ‘progressive’ racism is the inescapable killer blow. ‘Steve’ doesn’t stand a chance, between the brutality of some of the guards, the oily unctuousness of the likes of that ‘counsellor’ on the 4C program, (exculpating him of everything unconditionally), and the wider Whitey/Blak Victimhood Industry.
It’s all in Whitey’s hands, see, for the poor doomed Blak kid ‘Steve’. Poor little blackfellah, him waiting for Bossman Whitey to fix him all up, see. I despise this utter betrayal of our Blak boys. Hate it.
In contrast….If you ever get the chance, Woop, have a squiz at (or maybe even get involved in) the Clontarf approach. These guys – and the magnificent young Indigenous men they mentor – are heroes. They are trying to restore genuine self-pride in these boys, and a burning hunger to become First Nations men. And they’re succeeding.
I had never heard of the Clontarf Foundation but, as what you recommend about it is so inconsistent with the behaviour you demonstrated through your comments, I had a little bit of a read. It is POSSIBLE that your representation does not provide the full story – https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/budget-allocation-to-clontarf-foundation-undermines-indigenous-self-determination/ejp6qrw7f
Of course you haven’t.
Good grief, that NITV article illustrates everything I mean about the ghettoising, self-interested, territorially-ringfencing Urban Whitey and Blak Activist ‘leadership’ of the dominant Indigenous Victimhood Inc. orthodoxy. What it describes (so irksomely oily, so insinuating, so craven and roundabout)…just bears no relation to what Clontarf actually provides and represents, so successfully, in partnership with/alongside these kids. Good god, that article is so depressingly empirical, ElCee, in its confirmation of my sustained argument on this thread.
So thanks, I guess.
Look, please, ElCee: corrosive Urban Whiteys armed with their (your?) orthodox world view of Indy dysfunction and how to fix it really do need to keep away from organisations taking the more dignified, truly participatory, agency-affirming approach of the Clontarf model. It’s not the only mob treating Blak boys like any other boys – as full human beings in charge of their own individual choices and destinies – but it’s becoming a quiet flagship; an exemplar of a new, heteredox approach that – unlike the paralysing soft pap orthodoxies of the last fifty years – works. That works.
Please leave it be. Leave them alone. They’re doing fantastic work, mostly because most of it is done by – expected of, demanded of, encouraged in, enabled in, inspired in – the Blak boys themselves.
PS: And no, it’s not ‘inconsistent’ with anything I think, believe, do or say. Quite the reverse. Just asserting your bilge doesn’t make it so, ElCee. Chrs.
Your reference to measures (you said “empirical”) is critical. Appropriate qualitative and quantitative measurement is essential as it holds all services and programs (even those with the very best intentions) to account. First Nations people have been arguing for years that we need to start measuring properly to ensure strong outcomes. The lack of appropriate measurement is one of the reasons we have the tragic, seemingly intractable problems that we do. Worse still, it’s one of the easier things we can start to change.
No or inappropriate measures also let government departments off the hook. Taxpayer resources are limited and we all need them to be used to best effect. A point often made in relation to Closing the gap.
We do measure relentlessly, ElCee. We have done since at least 1991. And what the measurements tell us are the same things, again and again and again. That the lifelong misery, disadvantage and repeated incarceration of Blak children like Steve…starts with Blak household dysfunction. Drunk, addicted, violent or absent fathers. Addicted, beaten, sometimes abusive mothers. Abusive, often sexually so, extended family members. No schooling. No decent diet, health, love. No close contact intervention. Violence. Lawlessness. Abusive behaviour. With impunity. Communities that turn a blind eye to it all. Police, justice, allied health, welfare and other external agencies that try – again and again – to intervene, but too often come up against the same resources shortages, political pressures and ideological resistances, increasingly driven by Urban Whitey and Pro Blak Activist factional scrapping and ‘pseudo-progressive’ orthodoxies (which are in reality ‘progressive’ racism and ghettoisation). A petrification of creating another ‘stolen generation’, The fear of legal action. Whitey guilt for historical wrongs. A refusal or unwillingness to be adults, to say ‘no’, to advocate and apply/nurture (self)discipline, rules, regulations, building self-respect. A balking at accusations of ‘paternalism’, ‘racism’, ‘assimilation’. The whole suite of Victimhood Politics levers that the featherbedding incumbents who are making a ton of money from Indigenous paralysis – some Blak, most Whitey – cynically pull, any time a group like Clontarf says ‘to hell with victimhood, to hell with blaming Whitey forever, let’s take our agency and our responsiblity for our choices and actions back, and get on with making our kids learn to make good ones’. A huge part of this is consequence; a huge part of is the self-respect that comes from owning your own mistakes and failures. The vulnerable Blak kids are never allowed to learn these things. Victimhod politics shields them in a deluding warm blanket of impunity. Until it can’t anymore, by which time Whitey has long lost interest. Becasue they’re adults. At least superfically.
We know exactly what the numbers are, ElCee. We know exactly what the measurements tell us. All the dismal metrics of Indy disadvantage. The people who want to pretend that we don’t are just the people who…don’t like what those numbers say. Don’t want to face up to the failure of their Victimhood model those stubbornly nshifting numbers have advertised for at least thirty years.
Have a look at that NITV article. Two tenured, white, urban, male more or less ‘career-long Indigenous Issues’ academics, with a token junior Blak academic in gtow (Lee Sheppard is one of the Whitey men’s PhD students)…spouting tired orthodox tropes about ‘paternalism’ and ‘assimilationist models’, appointing themselves spokespeople for ‘our mob’, and lecturing the (many Blak) mentors at Clontarf on what is and isn’t ‘apropriate’ for Indy Australia. Really. And I just think that’s a perfect example of what I criticise so harshly in this thread. No doubt it’s all well-meaning. But it doesn’t help.
We are not on the opposite side of this debate, ElCee, at least when it comes to sought outcomes. I just subscribe to the principle that you don’t keep accepting ideas and approaches that have failed so badly, for so long. Chrs.
What was it that outraged/shamed you, in particular?
Potted bits from Wikpedia: The Royal Commisson started work in 1987 and reported in 1991. It examined 99 deaths in custody (in the eighties); it found that the immediate causes of death ‘…[did] not include foul play, in the sense of unlawful, deliberate killling of Aboriginal prisoners by police and prison officers…’ It found that 37 died of disease, 30 were suicides by hanging, 23 by other external trauma, and 9 the result of extreme alcohol/substance misuse. It found that while Aboriginal Australians weren’t dying in custody at a higher rate than non-Aborioginal Australians, they were taken into custody (police arrest, detention, remand, prison sentence) at a vastly higher rate, and so as a proportion of the overall population the number who died in custody was strikingly high. The Commission made 339 recommendations, many of them to do with keeping Indy Australians out of jail in the first place. Things like making arrest the ‘last resort’, decriminalising ‘public drunkenness’, improving statistical analysis and record keeping, founding a National Deaths in Custody monitoring and annual reporting body at the Criminology Institute, and so on. A 2018 government-commissioned Deloitte audit found 64% of the recommendations had been implemented, while the rate of Indigenous imprisonment had nearly doubled since 1991. A 2021 ANU critique of the Deloitte report disputed its ToR and methodology, and thus findings. Though the death in custody ‘likelihood’ for Indy Australians is now lower than for non-Indy Australians, as of the 30th anniversary the Commission tabling its report last year a further 474 Indigenous Australians had since died in custody.
So not exactly what you would call stellar progress. Despite a lot of goodwill, hard work, money and shared effort. Again, it’s why I think we need to start thinking and doing differently, if we really do want to keep Indy kids especially out of jail.
Does anyone know why 14 is the age for criminal consent? I would have thought it should be 15 or 16 at least.
Charles Dickens argued in Oliver Twist that 10 was too young but that 13 (traditional manhood) was too late, giving the Fagins & Sikes are valuable window of opportunity to exploit the fleeting impunity.
And nobody asks whether the problem is entirely one of the sense of racial superiority that brought the military invaders of 1788 to fire weapons at the residents of the Sydney area as one of their first acts on arrival; the same sense of superiority that drove the free settlers – of fine British stock – to believe they were entitled to slaughter vast numbers of first Australians as a means of stealing their land; that led to the imprisonment and enslavement of so many First Nations children, and the use of many of them as the sexual toys of “decent” property owners.
Nobody considers that the abuse and subjugation of so many and the breaking of spirits also has a lifetime effect on their lives, even on their parenting ability, which will be passed down through future generation and that what the invaders and their successor have created over many generations will now take many more generations to reverse.
Nobody ever notices that the same racial biases continue in some bigoted sections, and that they are most concentrated among police and prison officers and too large an element of our political class.
What load of useless bloody bilge, OWAL. Do you want to help these kids, or just rote-parrot tired ideological slogans? Ensuring that fifty more years on from the ’67 referendum than we are already, betrayed and abandoned Indy kids will still be getting themselves stupidly, helplessly locked up, and well en-route to becoming betraying and abandoning Indy parents themslves. All while some future carbon-copy pointless drone just like you parrots the exact same old ghettoising bilge.
Do you want to keep these kids out of jail, or not? If you do…adult up.
They will never be helped by incarceration under the jurisdiction of the thugs carefully selected by profit driven operators.
The Injustice system is a commercial incarceration and societal exclusion model.
They have perfected it in the US, where a third of the black population are incarcerated and denied a vote.
No, “…a third of the black population
are…” IS NOT incarcerated.A sizeable proportion of the males has been through the legal mill but not all as federal felons.
Those only having committed state crimes retain the right to vote federally.
Constitutionally state jurisdiction applies to voting regulations.
That the USA has more prisoners, parolees & probationers in toto than any other country (3M+) is a good indication of it being a failed state.
As the rools based order™® has it, failed states need to be bombed in submission and invaded to protect them from themselves.
Of course any natural assets & resources that happen to be there would be returned to the rightful owners who live elsewhere on big piles of money.
No, the bilge is yours. Generations of disadvantage and discrimination cant go without consequential childhood trauma for these kids. I lived in WA. There are lots of votes in the outdated “tough on crime” narrative. I worked with one clown who bragged openly of hunting for sport, wandering groups of Indigenous if roos were not abundant. Racist to the core, with a distorted and simplistic view, just like yours.
So you believe in race memory?
What is you question? Race memory?
Children go to school having had no breakfast, have no lunch and go home to no dinner. Teachers are not allowed to feed them. The system is broke.
Which jurisdiction, and on what grounds – can you amplify a little, drastic?
I have seen this in Alice Springs, Tennant Creek, Mount Isa and Logan in Brisbane.
Not an exhaustive list, but, witnessed with my own eyes.
The teachers “not allowed to feed the kids” is a WA special.
What a load of f**king garbage.
**
Foodbank School Breakfast program WA
‘About our School Breakfast Program
It is often a shock for people to hear that there are so many children in Western Australia going to school hungry. And it is our job to help change that.
Our School Breakfast Program is the largest in the state. We work with almost 500 schools across Western Australia, from remote Kimberley to Esperance. The program reaches over 21,000 children, serving over 68,600 breakfasts and 24,200 meals per week.
This program commenced in 2001 in response to the growing awareness that many students were going to school without eating breakfast. 17 schools registered in the first year and by 2021, 492 schools were involved.’
**
There are multiple similar programs in Qld. Whiteys making sh*t up to score political points on Indy issues demonstrates the racist, objectifying contempt with which they behold Blak Australians.
https://www.couriermail.com.au/questnews/logan/ymca-schools-breakfast-program-supported-by-foodbank-queensland-helps-feed-thousands-of-logan-children/news-story/dc829d9eb856b9146abb3d50fb8daa5e
That’s in Logan schools, ratty. Since 2006.
Stop making stuff up to entrench Urban Whitey’s lucrative, ghettoising Victimhood Model.
Meals are provided in at least some remote area schools.
Bowraville School ‘Mob Meals’. SA’s Kickstart for Kids and school breakfast programs. Victoria’s $60m School Breakfast Clubs expansion. Qld’s YMCA school breakfast program. Foodbank partners with organisations/schools all over the place. Individual schools run community based and supported programs.
There are myriad school-centred kid and family meal programs, driven by White and Blak Australians at all levels.
The problems in Indy Oz are not something as conveniently vague as ‘the broke Whitey System’. The problems are specific, and in individual, ruinously dysfunctional Blak homes.
This means they can be addressed. They can be fixed. It just takes work. And keeping poisonous Blak victimhood politics and ghettoising Whitey condescension the hell out of it. Plenty of Blak and Whitey people are trying their best to do both.
I have seen a 2 year old have a nap with a small can of coke under his t shirt, so that it was going to be their when he woke up.
I don’t doubt it, Ratty. And it’s heartbreaking.
But blaming it on Arthur Phillip stepping ashore 250 years ago isn’t going to turn that can of coke into a decent breakfast.
Christian Porter’s career highlight as WA attorney general was to lock up lots more aboriginal women for not having a driving licence, leaving their children to fend for themselves or get fed into the child welfare racket.
Are you ashamed yet?