The report
presents the first collection of data on juveniles' contact with the criminal justice system as both alleged/convicted offenders and complainants/victims in New South Wales, the Australian Capital Territory, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory. Its primary objectives are to outline data from each of these jurisdictions on juveniles' contact with the policing, courts and correctional systems and to determine what we do and do not know about juveniles’ contact with the criminal justice system.Media coverage (eg here) has highlighted the implications of the disadvantage experienced by many Indigenous youth, with the Australian for example commenting that the report
paints a disturbing picture of young Aborigines' contact with police. It may go some way to explaining why indigenous 10 to 17-year-olds are 28 times more likely to be in detention than non-indigenous youths.AIC director Adam Tomison was quoted by the Australian as commenting that the fact that many young indigenous Australians lived in disadvantaged circumstances went a long way to explaining their increased contact with police.
In terms of whether there is bias or racism in their treatment, I think you would need to do further studies looking at police contact in disadvantaged communities where there are kids of different backgrounds.
Then we would start to tease out how much of this is an issue of Aboriginality and how much is poverty and disadvantage.
Also geography comes into play. Authorities in states with more remote communities have fewer options to divert juveniles from detention. If there are two young offenders, and one is from a relatively good home in an urban environment with plenty of treatment options around him and the other is from a remote location where similar options are extremely limited, who is more likely to be put in detention?The same issue of the Australian highlights questions about identity, reporting that Queensland law allows 17-year-olds to be treated as adults and locked up in prisons instead of juvenile detention centres.
Community Services Minister Karen Struthers yesterday admitted that the estimated $200million capital cost to extend existing facilities to house 17-year-old offenders in juvenile facilities was the major reason no action was planned to redress the practice. This makes Queensland the only Australian state to imprison 17-year-olds in the adult justice system, a situation youth advocacy groups point out is clearly in breach of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child.
The founder of the prisoner advocacy group Sisters Inside, lawyer Debbie Kilroy, said the Queensland Labor government had legislated in 1992 to bring 17-year-olds into the juvenile justice system but it was "horrendous" they had never enacted that part of the legislation.
"They are young children who are children in many different ways in the eyes of the law, except for the criminal justice system," Ms Kilroy said.
"These teenagers, particularly the boys, are brutalised in the adult system.
"They are not allowed to do 'adult' things such as vote or smoke a cigarette, but the Queensland government treats them as adult prisoners, even on remand. It is totally inappropriate and unsupportable." ...
Latest figures provided by Corrective Services show that at midnight on September 23, there were 30 17-year-old males and two females held in Queensland facilities. They are kept segregated from other prisoners, but can choose to enter the general prison population.
The offences committed or alleged to have been committed by the 32 in custody include one for murder, three for grievous bodily harm, five on assault charges, four on armed robbery, eight on robbery with actual violence, four on breaking and entering a dwelling and one on going armed to cause fear.Conflicting placement of the borderline between childhood and adulthood - and the implications of those markers - might be borne in mind in considering proposals in the Green Paper on Electoral Reform (highlighted here) to allow voting in federal elections from the age of 16.
Fear or favour: sexual assault of young prisoners (Southern Cross University Press, 1998) by David Heilpern and other works on life inside carceral microsocieties of course indicate that new infrastructure isn't a silver bullet and that 'brutalisation' is a common, unremarked feature of juvenile offender institutions. Young offenders, such as those noted in the newspaper report, will brutalise and/or be brutalised by their peers whether they are in a youth institution or among adults. Perhaps we should aim to ensure better treatment for everyone in custody, irrespective of ethnicity or age and without needing to derive legitimacy from citation of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child.
