I don’t believe it’s a controversial view to think that children shouldn’t be thrown in prison cells.
As a Bangerang and Wiradjuri Elder, I know it’s certainly not controversial in my community. In fact, it’s something we’ve been calling to change for many years now.
This week I heard the news about the Andrews government’s commitment to raising the age of criminal responsibility in Victoria — initially to 12 in 2024, and to 14 by 2027.
I had mixed views. I’m glad to see some progress, and this is a small step forward, but I am disappointed and confused about why we have to wait four years.
To have the age raised to at least 14 is something that I — along with many medical experts, legal experts and dedicated First Nations advocates and legal centres across the nation — have been campaigning for over the years.
Youth incarceration is a vicious cycle. If you lock up kids when they’re 12, they may never recover. I know this because it’s happened to my family.
When I was young I had a nephew, but we knew each other as brother and sister. When he was about 10, he used to steal from his teacher on occasion. Eventually he got caught.
He was taken from us. First, he was sent to Baltara Boys Home, then Parkville, then they put him in Malmsbury. After that, he went to Sydney, Long Bay Correctional, and then Goulburn jail. After some sorry business, he had to come home to Victoria but ended up in Pentridge, and when he finally got out, he moved back to the high rises in Fitzroy. But he was sick — he died young at the age of 36.
The trajectory of his life never recovered after the day he was put in Baltara. His life was irreparably destroyed for stealing 20 bob. Today things like this still happen.
In 2023, kids like my nephew can still get locked up at the age of 10 in several states and territories in Australia.
When you throw a child into a cell at such a young age, you run the risk of throwing their future away too. These realities are not something we should be waiting another four years to act on. It should have already happened.
Experts from all over, domestic and international, have called for the age to be raised to at least 14, not 12. It’s consistent with legal experts, medical ones and our own mob. It’s also an explicit recommendation by the United Nations.
Children aged 12 and 13 are way too young to send to prison. They need love and support to find their feet, not to be thrown into a cell.
I understand that changes can’t be made overnight — some things take time to plan and implement. But I do not understand why we have to wait four more years to make this simple change. We’ve been talking about it for a long time.
Staggering the reform is not unheard of — the Australian Capital Territory committed to raising the age to 12 this year and then to 14 within two years.
But four years? Not even within this term of government? It feels like they are kicking the can down the road for someone else to deal with. Or perhaps they hope we’ll forget about it, but we will not.
In the First People’s Assembly of Victoria’s treaty elections next month, I can imagine this will be an issue many candidates will intend to raise as part of treaty negotiation with the government. It’s a topic our community has strong feelings about. We know how painful and damaging it is to have our families ripped apart by outdated laws and unfair practices.
Delaying until 2027 is four more years of children being locked up — even though we know, and the government knows, that it’s not best practice and it ruins people’s lives.
As a society we are better than this, we are better than locking up kids. The Victorian government’s own attorney-general has admitted that the current plan to raise the age “falls short” of community expectations. It is very disappointing.
However, it is also important that we take a minute to acknowledge that we are making progress. I want to thank all the mob and allies who have worked hard over the years to secure this reform. But let’s be clear, the fight isn’t over. Children don’t belong in prison. It’s that simple.
I know our community will keep pushing until the age is raised to at least 14.
Is Victoria kicking the can down the road? Is it acting fast enough? Let us know your thoughts 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.
The Victorian government has admitted that the age of criminal responsibility should be 14 & that the current system of admitting children to prison is wrong. If it’s wrong why continue the practice for 4 extra years, has there been an explanation?
There has been, it’s something like not overwhelming the alternative services.
I’m a bit of a “do the crime do the time” sort of ratbag. But I was absolutely shocked to see how low the age of so called criminal responsibility is! Children aged 12 and 13. Horrifying in a nearly civilised community.
There’s clearly a difference between a kid with insecure sources of food stealing and a wealthy kid stealing for the fun of it. The problem with rhetoric like, “Do the crime, do the time, ” is that ignores individual circumstances.
We also have to remember that a lot of children (and adults for that matter) end up in the criminal justice system because they have cognitive impairments that have gone untreated.
That children are bring incarcerated is Dickensian. Our goal with offending children should be restitution and rehabilitation. Now. Education and healing the child should be the priority.
How about a goal of not offending?
Or re-offending
indeed, privileged kids also commit low level “crime”, they’re just either not detected, given a warning or protected by wealthy parents. i always laugh when i see reports of marijuana . Clearly people don’t know how much cocaine is circulating around Sydney’s private schools. Police just don’t dare to touch them. Easier to go for soft targets
No kid gets flipped into the prison system for ‘low level crime’, privileged or otherwise. It actually takes a lot of sustained (and usually violent) sociopathy for a child to score a ‘hardening’ custodial sentence of the kind eventually earned by Aunt Geraldine’s nephew. Invariably that kind of pathway leaves by its recidivist wayside strewn with wilfully, traumatically and often permanently impacted victims. Very often vulnerable women and especially other kids. This is of course not exclusive to the Indy and/or ‘non-privileged’ communities but it’s especially rife and destructive within some.
I support raising the criminality age, too, but the problem with these well-meaning conversations is they always skate over the difficult fact that kids as young as 13 often have, and will doubtless continue, to hurt, sexually assault, and even kill…our most vulnerable citizens. One of the complicated progressive realties to try to navigate in today’s intersectional hubbub is the current #MeToo/#Black Lives Matter split here. On the one hand, sexually abusive and violent young men and boys are being told by progressive feminist leaders there’s ‘no excuse’, they must ‘take responsibility’, ‘just stop’ etc etc. On the other, sexually abusive and violent young Indy men – like Kuminjayi Walker – are still being partially exculpated (if not outright lionised) by many of the same progressive feminist leaders, with their no less sociopathic behaviors largely ascribed to/blamed on socioeconomic, cultural and historical factors. Or at least regarded by progressives with far more understanding, as being exacerbated by a range of complex factors outside their control.
There are good reasons for both approaches to the hard problem of child and adolescent sociopathy/violence. But progressives need to find a consistent line of approach in these intersectional ‘tough areas’. There’s plenty of evidence that jail is a catastrophe for Indy kids in particular, but there’s also heaps (and has been for fifty+ years) that the opposite polarity – effective impunity for early sociopathy, which in practice, raising the criminality age ‘might’ risk – is just as disastrous for those who are just starting to stray off the right path, and could really, really use some timely intervening ‘tough love’. I suggest this is especially so for those Indy boys who have no adult male role models in their daily lives but drunks, addicts and violent abusers.
Clearly you do not recall the NT’s dalliance with mandatory sentencing. Of course children can, and do, do serious offences. That you’ve only just discovered how low the age of criminal responsibility is, you clearly are not well across the details in this area.
What a bizarre, incongruous response. No idea what to do with a non sequitur like that. I’ve supported formalising the Common Law’s doli incapax presumptions under common law at least since I ran AI’s local branch twenty years ago.
I’m well aware of the various ‘law and order’ interventions imposed by non-Indy Oz on Indy Oz since colonisation, thanks.
Using Kuminjayi Walker in this way is incredibly poor behaviour, particularly for someone who claims to be a disability carer.
As I understand it, Kuminjayi Walker found himself slipping through the NDIS “net” and didn’t receive the treatment he needed for cognitive impairment, just like a lot of children and young people from all kinds of backgrounds who end up in contact with the criminal justice system.
I understand that you have a deep need to express these views about #MeToo, etc but the people (living and no longer living) have family and friends who love/d them and you really should be considering their feelings and resist posting such cruel comments.
Look, Woke, soz, but I have no interest in your tedious passive-aggressive more-in-sorrow-than-anger shtick. It’s a tiresome pose and a transparent rhetorical manoeuvre, and frankly it’s a waste of both our times. You’re not in good faith. You give your inner Hyacincth Bucket curtain-twitcher away with your nasty little digs about my ‘claims’ to being a carer. (What sort of mind needs to harbour grubby suspicions like that, eh, Woke? Not a terribly woke one at all, you’d reckon.)
But whatever. None of what you say addresses the fundamental hypocrisy of #MeToo urban soft pap progs when it comes to Blak male violence. You’re all so terrified of intersectional transgression that you’d allow situations like this –
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/may/02/we-need-help-northern-territory-community-wracked-by-violence-as-residents-claim-government-has-abandoned-them
…and say the sustained abuse of Walker’s under aged ‘girlfriend’ Rikisha Robertson – he was known to beat her with an iron bar – continue with impunity. Until it inevitably ends in jail and lifelong, cyclic dysfunction.
There are tragic historical and socioeconomic reasons underpinning this sort of violent anarchy. But these (mostly) women and kids still need and are entitled to protection. And, as much the point, the only way to break the intergenerational dysfunction cycle is to square up to it, not coddle it in self-flattering soft pap prog cliches.
There you go, yet again, with that same old point about facing reality and personal responsibility.
When will you learn that such concepts are anathema to the bien pissants here, causing them to retreat to the fainting couch with a bad case of the vapours?
Yes, bad Jack. Habit of a lifetime, though, not going to break it now.
When even the Guardian starts reporting stories like that one, you know the sitch is sh*tty and, just maybe, one even has faint hopes that the Boomers will finally try some adulting.
‘A true light of this world’: families pay tribute to three killed in Maryborough crash | Queensland | The Guardian
No idea if this is an Indigenous 13 year old boy, a Whitey one, a straight or gay or rainbow one, etc. But he’s a 13 year old child, whose reckless, wilful and very grown-up act of criminal agency has never-the-less just killed three people, anyway. Now if that had been Grace Tame or Brittany Higgins or say Kate Thornton in that stolen car the 13-year old hit from behind, rather than 17 year old Kelsie Davies and two others…where would you soft paps all stand? What would you do with this child? What if it was your daughter killed?
What are we to do? Have these discussions, lift the criminality age by all means. But stop pretending kids’ crimes are victimless crimes, by swathing them in soft pap prog Motherhoodisms and partisan boilerplate. Every child that ends up in jail leaves a more or less awful trail of destruction, fear, pain, broken lives and often tragedy and heartbreak in their wake. That’s what makes this such a difficult policy matter.
stolen car that hit them driven by the 13-year old that hit from behind,
etc ‘pols.
Nobody is pretending these are victimless crimes. Claiming this is so just distracts us from dealing with the fundamental issues, and we adults owe children so much better than that. We are only in this position because adults let children down, and have been doing so for a very long time.
Again, it’s really important that we put the focus where it needs to be, and that’s not on our own personal prejudices and obsessions. I say these things as someone who has a gun put in my face and has been threatened by people with knives twice.
Can’t agree more that we adults have let these kids down, Woke. The two biggest failure have been a) among Blak parents, community elders and national leaders, for letting urban Whitey gaslight them into a negating agency and responsibility for their kids and b) their urban whitey progressive-paternalistic apologists, for airbrushing Blak sociopathic dysfunction because they’re terrified of being targeted as ‘racist’ (in the way they routinely target others as racist), as well as ‘noble savage’ fetishisation of Indy Oz.
We need to take away this kind of hyperbole and the indulgence of own prejudices, and focus on the fundamental issues. It is only changing those fundamentals that will change the problems we face. That is the only humane response and it is the only practical response.
We need to keep asking the Why? and How? questions until there are no Why? and How? questions left to answer. Then we know the actions to take.
The ‘why‘ & ‘how‘ of the ‘who‘ ‘where’ and ‘when‘ are not a mystery – it is the ‘wherefore art they‘ as Juliet might have cried from her balcony.
No arguments there. I’m up for it. Let’s both ask questions and suggest/compare answers. We might jointly work our way to some agreement on actions needed.
Q: Why do some children repeatedly commit sociopathic acts that accumulate and escalate until prison sentences are imposed?
Q: How does this sociopathic trajectory proceed, and why don’t most children follow this sociopathic path?
The first thing that needs to happen here is to consider your use of the word “sociopathic”. It’s a very emotive word used by the general public, and psychologists, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals counsel us against bandying it around for very good reason.
What does it mean and how does it relate to the age, health and cognitive development of each child who engages in anti-social behaviours? We need to ensure that our conversation is grounded in reality, otherwise words like this are just deflections at best and cause even more problems.
How can you pose your questions in a way that makes them more productive? It’s tricky because the questions we ask reflect our biases and our pre-existing knowledge. Such significant questions that have such a serious impact on real lives probably need to be preceded by serious critical self-reflection (by everyone who expresses an opinion).
You can’t help yourself, can you?! You just can’t resust critiquing me, rather than talk about the actual topic. It’s just…silly.
i’d argue that ‘Sociopathic’ – describing acts, a path, a trajectory (as opposed to dismissing the kids as innately sociopathic themselves – is the precise, and perfect, word we need to use. If we want to rescue these kids from said trajectory/path/acts before it’s too late, that is.
Let’s both move on, WW, I don’t think we’re going to get anywhere, huh. All the best.
Your forbearance resembles divorcees marrying, optimism in defiance of experience.
Ok. Let’s accept the word as something not at all value driven in its use. Now start to answer your questions. Put aside your SPP stuff (not reject it, just put it aside) and see if their are alternative possibilities.
One springs immediately to mind for someone who is a disability support worker. You don’t have an intimate knowledge of things like cognitive abilities and development (unless you got it elsewhere) but you probably do have at least a little bit of an idea of their importance to our behaviour. Certainly more than quite a lot of us. Does following that line give you new ways to consider things?
Fiona Stanley says it does and she has been trying to get us to think about this issue. If someone of Fiona Stanley’s vast knowledge and experience has research and practice based explanations built over decades, shouldn’t that also come into play in your considerations? She’s not the only person with expertise in paediatrics and related fields who offer this kind of evidence to consider.
Can you take Stanley’s evidence and think about it without the SPP foundation informing it? Think about that honestly and fully. Then, sure – put your SPP glasses back on and if you still think their relevant. Fair enough but you won’t need to reach for the kinds of statements that hurt innocent people the way you have a tendency to do sometimes and you won’t need the hyperbole as you will have a rational argument to offer.
That’s what working back with the WHY and HOW questions do. They help us challenge our confirmation bias and they help us explore alternative reasons fully and honestly. And, that helps us communicate our arguments so they’re better understood.
That’s it from me now.
Another good way to challenge your confirmation bias/prejudice is just try to disprove what you think. I do that when my confirmation bias is super duper strong (as your SPP bias is).
Our brains like to drag us back to our bias so our brains look for ways to prove the bias even when we’re genuinely seeking to consider alternatives. It can be easier to stay aware of what your brain is doing if you just seek to disprove your view and see where that takes you rather than finding alternative views which can feel a bit fluffy on inauthentic if you’re not used to doing it.
Social scientists deliberately set out to disprove their theories because it’s so easy to inadvertently manufacture a false argument.
Now, that really is the last thing I have to say. Hope it helps 🙂
Woke, I’ve already told you: I’m just not interested in vague jumbles of condescending, passive-aggressive soft pap prog dreck. That para above is completely disembodied from the very messy, difficult practical realities and imperatives of dealing with the blight of juvenile violent crime and its consequences, as it is occurring every day. I have no idea who you think you are trying to annoy and/or impress and/or bully with your sly little passing digs about my ‘prejudices’….but it’s silly, boring and pointless: the same tiresomely transparent strawman rhetoric I’ve rolled my eyes at one million, two hundred and fifty three thousand, four hundred and fourteen times across twenty five years writing online. Oops, hyperbole!
You’re obviously a decent, loving, engaged and very intelligent person. Why don’t you stop wasting your energy trying to ‘score points’ against me, stop talking in dull lefty cliches, stop worrying what all the other dull cliched lefty curtain-twitchers hereabouts might say about you if you do…and just tell me something interesting, and materially useful about how to handle juvenile crime without just chucking these kids in jail.
Something concrete and real, WW. What do we do with that 13 year old recidivist in Maryborough whose very adult (repeated) criminal agency has just shattered multiple families forever and left an entire community heartbroken? What do we DO with/about all the other child recidivists equally ‘known to police’ who may do the same somewhere else tomorrow…?
No vague lefty motherhood feelzzzzz, Woke! Concrete and specific jurisprudential ideas pls!!
I’ll try to use the word “biases” rather than “prejudices”. Hopefully that takes some of the unhelpful emotion out of the discussion.
Are you suggesting another ‘stolen generation’, or are you planning to get support from families?
People seem to think the choice is between incarcerating kids or letting them off scott free. It isn’t. We literally address behavioral issues with kids all the time, for some reason people hear, “Blak juveniles, lock ’em up.”
Sorry, but that’s a narcissistic strawman fantasy of urban, white, progressive invention.
Blak kids are incarcerated at higher rates first and foremost because a higher proportion of Blak kids’ young lives are blighted by parental neglect, instability, addiction, violence and/or familial and community dysfunction, leading to higher rates of unchecked sociopathic behaviour.
What these kids desperately need is parenting, not self-flattering soft pap prog cliches. Or imprisonment.
Where you get alienated because of your ancestry then taken up into a system that has been privatised to create profit and make government smaller you know Neoliberalism is at the helm, it doesn’t do empathy unless there is some kind of financial advantage for investors.
How about as part of the taxpayers money that gets spent on private schools they offer mentoring programs for all children from low socio economic backgrounds and gain funding according to success ie happy well balanced young adults, and gain their funding accordingly.
It could make inroads into an elitist culture and do something useful for the greater community.
A ‘culture’ more concerned with ancestry than descendants has no future.
No need to. Locking up kids isn’t just ineffective, it’s expensive. Redirect the funding. Programs will depend on individuals.
Strange country, this one. We don’t consider the young responsible enough to give them autonomy over their own bodies anywhere until they’re 16, and they’re certainly not to be trusted with the burden of citizenship until they’re 18, but when it comes to criminalising them, Hell! 10 years of age is old enough in some states.