‘Adult time for violent crime’? What commitments should guide society’s response to youth crime?

ABC Listen, podcasts, radio, news, music, and more. They prayed, they preached, they rebelled. From God forbid, this is the religious rebels podcast. The stories of people who defied empires and sometimes paid with their lives. From Joan of Arc's battlefield visions to Malcolm X's final revelation, we tell the stories of those who defied faith and remade it. Religious rebels, the original disruptors. Search for God forbid ABC wherever you get your podcasts or on the ABC Listen app. Hello there, welcome once more to the Mindfield on ABC Radio National. Well, lead out his mind, I'm Scott Stevens, as we go about negotiating the ethical and moral dilemmas of modern life or something vaguely like that. Hello, Scott. Hey, I'm doing just fine, Willie. Thank you. Is this one of those perennial topics that we've just never really spoken about? Except the number of times that I feel like we've touched on it in the course of conversations. We've certainly discussed it off air, but this is going to be a relative first for us. We've never done quite this topic in quite this way with quite this depth. All right, we do have some housekeeping to do. Yeah, and it's actually a little more fitting than might immediately be apparent. The show that we're doing this week will, I think, be in many respects fully answered or fully explored in our final episode of the year before we go into our summer recess. So in the interests of, you know, people being able to do a little bit of kind of casual homework, a casual research before we get into that final program before summer. And in the interests of spending some time with certain pieces of art is just plain good for you. In our ongoing, what are we at now? Will it four, five years maybe? We kind of do this intermittent, not quite a book club series, where we look at things sometimes book, sometimes movies, sometimes television, we've done music, we've done albums. Once before, we've done a painting. And it was just about as spare and as sparse and as dark a painting as you could get. This is back in September, 2023. Christus Chulkis joined us to discuss Francisco de Goya's 1823 painting Saturn eating his son. Oh, so I know, no, no. Yeah, which is one of those paintings that can immediately be grasped in some respects at a first glance. There's a horror that's conveyed. There's not a great deal to study until you begin really looking at it. Which, man, it was great for our not quite a book club because-- It was perfect. Because the prescribed reading was very brief. Yeah. You could knock it over in literally a second if you wanted. But this time, I think we're doing-- I feel we're asking too much on this occasion. Is it a painting? Well, it is a painting. It is one of the greatest works of art, I think, in the history of Western culture. It's a little bit of a different assignment, though. It's a sequence of three murals that we're going to be looking at in the second week of December, if you want to put that in your calendar. Are you directing that at Macekut? Sorry, I'm going to have to turn it off. No, far possible. Three murals painted by the 14th century Italian painter Ambrosio Lorenzetti in one of the central chambers of Siena's Palazzo Publica commissioned by the group of nine, or by the order of nine, nine self-selected governors over the city of Siena. These three murals are best known as the allegory of good and bad government. The highest quality images that I can find, believe it or not, or on Wikipedia, will include a link on the website, unlike Goya's Saterno. These are an explosion of activity and concepts and ideas. They are pictorial representations of an entire political philosophy, even an entire civilization. And one of the things that struck us, I think, will lead so much of public sentiment has really, I think, turned away from the good that politics can do. Politics is something that is potentially dangerous. Politics is something that always comes up short. Politics is something that needs to be restrained. This is an extraordinary. So, Ambrosio Lorenzetti's three murals about what is it that constitutes good governance? We couldn't think of a better way of wrapping up the year. That's the important point as well. It's the last show for the year. And we always try to finish the year on a show that in some way wraps up or distills the essence or the most vital through line or something about the year. My favourite is that year we did, it's the year that nothing mattered. And then I think we did the next year on the year that everything mattered. Which shows the swings around about to all this. So, it's a meeting of various things, the not quite a book club thing, but also we do think it sums up the year. So, it should be good fun. I don't accept or at least I accept Scott Maynott, but this is not the Mona Lisa here. We are not asking you to look at something that you already know, Amidio. A lot of people would not have heard of this or would not be familiar with this. That said, I'm normally very suspicious of doing something like that, but this works. So, it really does. Should we perhaps pivot to today's show? Well, yeah, we should, but simply dimension. It is related to. Simply to mention that one of the things that is at the heart of Ambrosio Lorenzetti's depiction of what it means to govern the common life of the people well, is the way that various forms of not just civic care, but also punishment and security are necessary to ham in the possibility of prosperity, of conviviality, of enjoyment. And so, it's kind of appropriate, you're right, that this week we're talking about crime and punishment. And we're doing so because it's a debate or an issue that is simply, I mean, to some extent it's kind of always there in politics, right? There's the cliche of particularly state politics frequently descending into a law and order auction, etc. But this is not that moment, I don't think. This is a moment where it is assumed a certain vitality and it has seized the public imagination. In some parts of Australia more than others, especially I would say in Victoria, but I think that's how I'm in Queensland in the lead up to the last election. That was a very big issue. So, we're now seeing a phase in discussing this that has escaped what you might call it usual borders, where people who might not automatically be given to hyperbolic politics of crime are now concerned about it. And now thinking about it in ways that are really, I think, very central to the way that state politics is unfolding. And say this, by the way, aware of the irony that we are doing this show in the immediate aftermath of the Victorian opposition leader. If you live outside of Victoria, I don't know if you may not have clocked this, but just got rolled and replaced by actually the first female leader in the history of the Victorian Liberal Party. What's interesting about that is this is in a state where crime is understood to be, I think, fairly can be described as being a central, perhaps the central issue in state politics. And this is an opposition leader, Brad Baton, who had run very much on crime, and yet in less than a year he's out of a job because of the terrible numbers that his party was putting up against what is an unpopular government. So, there was a sort of weird tension. Wasn't he, well, he wasn't in the police? Yeah, so, in other words, the deck seems stacked. This is someone who really should have been able to press home a political advantage in these circumstances and yet couldn't. So, I just put that on the table as something to bear in mind. But nonetheless, I do think we are looking at a discussion of crime. In the context, also of globalised discussions of crime, coming out of, say, the Republican Party in the United States, certainly you're seeing it on the right wing of British politics, very often expressed in ethnic terms. Elon Musk's really quite strident fascination with crime in London, for example. So, this is all in the atmosphere, but there is simply no denying that in a place like Victoria, the crime statistics are putting up numbers that are disturbing to really anybody who's looked at them. And we're talking about record levels of youth crime that have, I think, now been achieved twice in Victoria in the last year. So, that's the context in which we're having this conversation. And in some ways, it'll be a bit similar to the conversation we had on migration a few weeks ago. There is no avoiding the conversation. The question is precisely how do we discern what in it is good, what in it is bad, what in it is necessary, and particularly the role of things that are not about driest statistics and so on, but about perfectly natural, and I think you would also have to say legitimate human emotional response to something that is elemental. Beautiful way of putting it. And look, just to cap off that particular point. So, in the best of the reporting, I think, that has been done about the changes that have taken place, that policy developments taking place within the Victorian State Labor Party over the last year, which has undergone a series of kind of remarkable either abandonments of policy or reverses of policy in response to, I mean, if we wanted to be really cynical, we could say focus groups, party political polling, where are this governance weaknesses, where are its vulnerabilities in the lead up to next year's state election. I think if we were talking a little bit more generously, you could say that this state government is being democratically responsive. It's, being responsive to certain concerns that exist, that are being felt, that they're being communicated very clearly from within the community. And those responses have to do with the prevalence of crime, particularly in outer suburbs of Melbourne, but not exclusively in outer suburbs. Some of which is violent, some of which is very violent. Some of which simply affects people in ways that are invasive in the sense of really leaving a traumatic or traumatizing stain. It's worth pointing out that that is one of the things that crime does. Crime ruins lives. It tears at the sense of belonging within a community. It tears at what we sometimes refer to as the social fabric. There is a kind of inherent violence to crime that makes people feel vulnerable, displaced, disconnected, exposed. I mean, so can I just ask you a very good question there. Do you mean to refer to crime in total or are you referring specifically to violent crime crimes against the person? So would you say the same thing, for example, of what color crime inside a trading or these sorts of things? To the extent that crime tears at social trust and it tears at our ability to delegate that trust to certain oversight mechanisms, that I think, yes, to some extent, there is a degree to which what all crime does as such is that tears at the mechanism or the environment of trust within which we live together. But I think various forms of, and here I think the way that we define or understand violent crime really needs to be carefully parsed out. So there is crime that's done against the body. But how would you describe, for instance, the robbery of someone's home where there is an unlawful encouragement to somebody's house? Yeah, I still describe that as in the broadest sense, violent because it carries with it a threat of the possibility of violence. So you could say it's psychologically violent, et cetera. I'm a little worried it walked down that road. You can then begin to categorize everything through the prism of violence. And at some point that becomes analytically slippery or even just unconvincing. But I think what comes with something like a home invasion like that is, well, what if I was there? So the potential of direct violence, the easily imaginable potential of it, rather than just some theoretical thing, I think, changes that. Same with car jacking and-- And it does ultimately revolve around the use of force in a way that something like insider trading doesn't. Yeah, I think that's right. I would be more than happy to place all these things on a spectrum or on a continuum and to say that at one end, there may be a sense of social violation, but it doesn't quite touch the emotive or the effective level that those more overtly violent forms do. Can I go even further with this idea? I'm just playing with this now. No, I don't know. I don't know how true what I'm about to say. Is the thing about violent crime that it actually raises the very reason that we have government or political structures in the first place? Even if you go right back to the salience or the indispensability of the tribe, tribe does many things to do with honor and belonging and all these sorts of things. But one of the things it offers is protection against violent transgression. And if this is a central aim of any form of government, that at the very least what it should do is provide-- let's call it security-- but let's just say some kind of protection against violent transgressions against the person. This is the reason that crime trips a very particular wire in all societies, and especially in democratic societies, where you can then do something about a government that's presiding over this situation. It evokes some things of the idea I'm playing with. It evokes something that is deeper and elemental than most, I would even say, other forms of poor governance. Yes, absolutely. That was far easier than I expected. No, no, no, look. I really think you're onto something, Mayor. But as soon as you say that, I think we also need to recognize the dangers that then exist on all sides. Of course, because dangers attend to anything elemental. OK, OK, so you would have to say that while a dramatic uptick in the occurrence of certain types of either violent crimes or certain types of crimes that really do affect the human person-- and here, I think we could include sort of card-jacking reforms of theft out of one's car being parked. Or we might want to put sort of robbery over to the side. But even so, we're talking about forms of theft that do bring with them the threat of the prospect of the possibility of violence that tends to leave people severely discomforted. You might have that as a kind of reality that certain statistics-- well, what we've actually seen, however, over the last seven years has been a per capita decrease of the occurrence of crime. And you can feel automatically that that sort of language doesn't really touch the human and the affective dimension that is being touched upon, that is being evoked by that type of sort of potential or possible violence. Yeah, it seems like a statistical expert led dismissal of-- That has nothing to do then with my actual experience, my actual sense of well-being within the world. But then you can see me-- Actually, if you studied a bit more, you would say that black is white. Yeah, that's exactly that. That triggers a particular reaction that's quite visceral. But-- And it also-- Yeah. --can I just add this? Yeah. That sort of intervention also occurs in a context that we really have to acknowledge, which is that our perception of crime, if we haven't experienced it directly, is mediated through things like-- well, sorry, this will be-- Tautological media. Yeah, no, that's right. And we know that the presence of crime in media has a stickiness with audiences at rates, especially in a country like Australia. It's interesting I've recently been in the UK where crime features a lot less in news bulletins, just culturally, just always does. And talking to people there who's seen Australia news have come out, they just go, it's just constant crime. It's just-- It's just what-- It's the same response. I will never be ungrateful to see reporting of gun violence in Australia. Because-- Because it reminds me constantly how unusual it is here. Yeah, right. OK. You are listening to the Mindfield, by the way, Radio National, with Adali Maynames, Scott Stevens is my co-host. I guess we'll be along very shortly. But when we report crime in Australia, we tend not to report it as though it's unusual. We tend to report it as though it's reflective. Yes. Now, that doesn't mean it's always wrong. No. And that doesn't mean it's not always pointing at a real phenomenon. But-- OK. But there's also something about the nature of the language and the luridness of it that can also give a false impression. About its own pervasiveness. About its imminence. I mean, this is where, I think, the very mediated nature of crime reporting can do something to bring the experience of crime closer to people than it otherwise is. And let me just-- can I just raise two points then off the back of this? Because I do want to pivot in just a moment ever so slightly to kind of take in, I think, one dimension of this we haven't touched on yet. I was-- it was remarkable to me. And it is worth pointing out for those who haven't connected the dots that the-- what is it, adult time for violent crime? Adult crime, adult time. Well, no, in Victoria. In Victoria, it's adult time for violent crime. Oh, OK. That's the proposal-- Was there a copyright issue? Yeah, there we go. That's the proposal that's being adopted by the Alan Labour government. And it seems to be a kind of riff on the proposal. And it was under the rubric of Making Queensland safer. The suite of proposals that was taken by the LNP government to last year's Queensland stay election. And its centerpiece policy was adult crime, adult time. And it was everywhere. And one of the things that was so-- let me just use the word lurid again-- about the way that the Queensland then opposition, the presumptive government or the hopeful government-- one of the things that they did in a context where a lot of people felt as though too much consideration was being given, especially to young offenders. Too much was being placed on the possibility of, say, community-based justice or rehabilitation or keeping young people out of detention. When so much seemed to be skewed away from fully owning and imposing the consequences of violent crime, one of the things that the current Queensland premier, then opposition leader did, is he made the victims of crime central in many of his campaign stops. Yeah. You often have a variation of this when, for instance, a particular-- the name of a particular victim-- is then attached to a form of legislation, yet as a way of personalizing that legislation around a particularly egregious crime in Queensland. We have it. It's called Jack's Law. I don't know how I feel about that, about which bit. Both. About the through media, the personalization of crime reporting. On one level, I think it's right. It's undeniably right that we can talk about crime statistics. But behind every statistic, there is a life that has been, in some cases, irrevocably changed. For many people who will see crime reporting, there will be powerful personal associations. I'll confess will lead as someone who has been a basketball coach of young teenage boys for a long period of time. I found the reporting surrounding the two stabbings of two young Sudanese boys in Cobblabank in Melbourne's Western suburbs. One age 15, one age 12, I found it excruciating and almost unbearable to watch. What did you find unbearable? I saw in their faces, the faces of young men that I was seeing every day, right, or every week, with the luridness, with the personalization of some of the crime reporting. There are two things that are being done here, one of which is undeniably correct, undeniably important. Crimes are not simply statistics. These are things that tear at people's lives, that leave people's lives, some people's lives irrevocably changed. And yet at the same time, by making certain crimes too personal, it's almost accentuating the already-livid, affective dimension. And it's then making us, I think, making citizens, I should say, easy prey to the sheer volatility of the emotions that are often exposed when it comes to crime reporting. In other words, these are emotionally raw issues, and there are emotions that are then evoked by them, emotions like the desire for revenge, the desire for some kind of recompense that even if it's not going to restore what it is it's been lost at very least fully, completely, punishes the person who, or the people who did this horrible thing. So when you were mentioning the tribal dimension to all this, one of the things that justice systems did is it also removed from the tribe the need to take revenge into their own hands, the need to feel that weight of emotional, and I don't just mean emotional, but let's call it moral emotional responsibility. I mean, the desire for revenge is a moral emotion. You don't actually have to go that far. I mean, this is one of the organizing principles of our criminal justice system as well, is that what the administration of justice and the application of punishment in whatever form, whether it's anything from fines to imprisonment through to execution, whatever form it takes, it's an institutionalized form of revenge. So it fulfills that function and other functions. Which also is meant to take the responsibility for revenge out of the public bloodstream. Yes, and therefore the possibility of revenge being privatized, if you like. I've got to feel like this the wrong way. But when all of these emotions are then appealed to by politicians, and I'm not sane cynically or irresponsibly necessarily, and when they're being appealed to by certain forms of crime reporting, in some respects, it's damaging the delicate balance that the desire for, let's not call it revenge, let's maybe just call it retribution. The desire for retribution, which is meant to be in a very delicate balance with what we believe punishment is for, which is not simply punishment. But there has to be some kind of forward looking and rehabilitative dimension that all should be. I hear that. This is the really interesting bit. All right. Because while what you say is obviously true, especially in a system like ours, we talk a lot about punishment as rehabilitation. The way we discuss the whole prison system is around rehabilitation. When we talk about it failing, we talk about it failing on the grounds of rehabilitation or something similar to that. So rehabilitation is a major part of it. To what extent do you think that the anger over the emphasis of the rights of perpetrators or even accused before they're even officially perpetrators? Not necessarily children, not necessarily those under the age of age. Children or otherwise. Right. Okay. To what extent do you think the anger with that is that the discussion of criminal justice, particularly from authority figures on it, so people who study it or you know, thinking academics, commentators, etc. Has tilted the field so much towards rehabilitation that it's forgotten the vengeance element. It's forgotten the retribution element. So in other words, what I remember that is if we start to conceive of criminal justice as being primarily about rehabilitation. Do you risk exactly what we're seeing now? Because it ceases to pay attention to one of the other major organizing principles of criminal justice. Look, just a brief answer and then let's bring in our guest. If you want to use the word primarily, then I think you're right. Just about everything in this delicate balance begins to go wrong. The ability for the public to continue to give their ascent to a well-functioning justice system, their ability to delegate the responsibility for revenge, for retaliation, for retribution, to a justice system knowing that it is an extension of society's desire to tend to keep itself, to preserve that which is most valuable, and it can then be left in their hands, left in the justice system's hands, to do rightly with. I don't think that the justice system is primarily, or primarily should be about rehabilitation. Do you think though that that's how we've been talking about for a long time, unless say you're running a show on talkback radio? So in other words, what I mean is that the only people who are talking at all really about the element of punishment, as punishment, as mediated retribution, although not necessarily using that language, but not me. The only people who are doing that, the people who are then emotionally on fire about crime. Do you think that's, is that an accurate description of what I think is happening? Look, I think that may well be the case. I think those who speak only the language of rehabilitation are probably falling into the same trap as those who continue to use the language of statistics. Well, there actually has been a per capita decrease in, and that don't fully recognize the extent to which so much of the balance of our common life is actually sustained by certain shared emotions, and certain shared commitments. I would just say, though, what criminal justice does, that there is an extent to which it has to be forward facing. It has to be future oriented, and deterrence is an element of that future orientation. But rehabilitation, knowing that that which is lost cannot be restored, especially when there's that kind of violent loss, when there's the loss of something essential to someone's life. There are things that are lost that cannot be restored, but also part of criminal justice is about severe societal appropriation. There is a denunciatory aspect. We do not condone these things as part of our common life. There is a retributive dimension to it. There is a dimension of punishment, but even then, I think, we need to be very clear about what we understand, the tell us, the goal of that punishment to be. And I guess one of my concerns will aid is that while we often hear the language of prisoner detention as having a rehabilitative element of it, that goes hand in hand with some pretty awful reporting, some pretty awfully expressed public sentiment, that kind of feels that, well, if something really horrible happens to someone while they're in prison or while they're in detention, okay, that may not be part of the official punishment, but deep down, we're actually kind of glad that these informal punishments in fact deserve to anyone. Yeah, which is why there is a kind of public revulsion to the idea often of education in prison, or even, I mean, one of the things that struck me recently is a kind of fresh wave of public discontent over whether conjugal visits should be allowed in prison. Even though we know that conjugal visits in prison are one of the vital ways of maintaining cords of connection between those who are in prison and their family outside. So there is this kind of idea that for those who are in prison, our desire for their punishment can never quite go deeply enough, which is one of those reasons why we need to hold all of these things, retribution right through to the forward facing or future looking rehabilitative element. We really do need to keep these things not just in policy balance, but I also feel in the way that we communicate and talk about it in a kind of emotional or affective or sentimental balance. Sure. I think what you described might actually be fleshing out the point I was making. I'm not going to say any more about that because we don't have time. We've got a guest who's got far more interesting things to say than anything I'm about to say. You're listening to the Mindfield on ABC Radio National. Well, let Ali, his name is Scott Stevens, is my co-host and as always, got we have a guest. A little bit star struck by the guest that we have this week. Kate Fitzgiven is a leading researcher on domestic and family violence on perpetrator interventions and criminal justice reform. She's a professor of practice at Monash University and honorary professorial fellow at the law school at University of Melbourne. Kate, it's wonderful to have you on the Mindfield. It is so fantastic to be here. I felt my brain is just bouncing everywhere at listening to that discussion. There's so many threads in there and I think to pick up on what you've been saying around that balance. It's such a tricky balance and, you know, well, he's already mentioned academics and the focus on rehabilitation. So I'll own that up front. But it must do you think it's accurate, by the way? Well, I think we need to, I think we always need to do a really good job of acknowledging the community harm. Right. And perhaps sometimes that's not done. And the community are hurting and there's people in the community that are legitimately scared, fearful, and have had some pretty significant harms perpetrated against them. So absolutely, canosh brush over that. What we're also talking about then, and I think Scott, you phrased it so well on a government that needs to be democratically responsive to that harm and to that fear. I would expect then a response that is effective and is evidence-based and that holds all these different balances that we're trying to tease out, holds, we have to be responsive to the harm. There needs to be accountability and I think I prefer particularly given the age of the cohort we're talking about here. This is predominantly children, young people, accountability, our prefer of punishment. We have to hold them accountable for the behaviors. But I think as a community, we also need to be really demanding that that accountability and the response is going to be effective at preventing harm because we don't want more of that harm. And I think that's where we've lost the balance recently in being responsive to the loud fears, to the media and the way in which it has made these acts of youth crime so ever-present in our imaginations. We need to ensure that the response is ultimately going to drive down those behaviors. So it's so interesting you use the word effective because effective presumes an aim or a goal. And the way you've described it there, effectiveness means reduction of crime, perhaps long-term rather than short-term. I don't know if that's what you mean by that. That's still a bit of both. Let's absolutely decrys it in the long term. But let's also make sure that intervention with that specific young person is as effective as a campaign. Well sure, but if I want short-term reduction in crime, this is where the idea of sending them to jail for a very long time as trying them as though the Renatole becomes instinctively appealing, right? They're not going to offend if they're still in prison short-term. But anyway, play with that if you like, but I want to make the broader point. What if part of what's effective is what acknowledges and satiates the emotional claims of people? So in other words, can you imagine a world, about, it's easy to imagine a world, I think, where something that might not actually be effective in reducing crime nonetheless attends to a really important emotional need in a lot of people. And if that's the case. For punishment, will it? So they may not be a normal reduction of crime, but the fact that there are much severe forms of punishment or sentencing does enough to kind of satisfy a certain social concern. Yeah, whether it's about vengeance or it's just about registering the seriousness of something. So in other words, could I call that effective? Even if it weren't reducing crime, do you see what I mean about that? Yeah, absolutely effective for who. And what there is going to be enough, how long do we have to lock up kids for? And we're talking about kids here for that effectiveness to be achieved. And in the majority of cases, except for some of the most heinous offenses and acknowledging the Alan government is proposing life sentences for kids, which can send us down a whole different discussion on the human rights of that. But these majority of these young offenders will come back out and will come back out of detention in the shorter term. They will not be any safer for the community. So those same community members should feel just as fearful if the government hasn't done their job of investing in rehabilitation in early interventions. We can actually get in in many instances and support these children, young people before their committed criminal activity. And we should absolutely be demanding that. We should be demanding a response once criminal behavior has happened, once that harm to the community has been an act of completely get that. But let's also put the onus on the government to say we don't want it to happen. So what are you doing to prevent this? What are you doing to stop this harm in the community? I think that's a pace where we're not loud enough. Okay, can I just ask you, you touched on it very briefly? I suspect we're not going to return to it. And so I just want to pick it up quickly here because this is a live conversation that we had in Queensland earlier this year, last year. When the adult crime, adult time, or the making Queensland safer legislation was being put through, there was a human rights statement produced by the state attorney general. And one of the striking things about this statement is it said that we realized that inimposing adult sentences on children who are committing a certain classification, certain type of violent crime. We realized that we are being more punitive than is necessary. We realized we are violating the human rights of the children. Nevertheless, we are responding to widespread community concern. In other words, there was a kind of democratic legitimation or explanation given for the violation of the human rights of children. It feels to me that something kind of similar is going on in Victoria. There's a kind of sweeping away of these human rights concerns. Are the human rights concerns something that are simply pro forma, that are simply things that are kind of top level legal issues that can be dismissed easily? In other words, what is the rationale for the human rights concern, the human rights protections that ought to attend to children between, well, I'll just ask you, between what ages and what are those concerns meaning to care for? What do they meaning to safeguard? Yeah. I mean, it's interesting in Australia because I think we've never had a strong tie to human rights based arguments. And we see that across immigration discussions, for example, and a range of others. So I'm not surprised. I think it's deeply concerning how quickly we brush to the side children's rights and how quickly we dismiss the importance of upholding what are, you know, there are international obligations. We are a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the rights of the child, which amongst a range of different things make clear detention should always be a last resort option. In both Queensland and if these reforms go through in Victoria, that'll be gone. That children should be imprisoned for the shortest period of time. That'll be gone amongst a range of other children's rights obligations. And it's gone quickly. I can Queensland, I think it was about three or four days, consultation. And no significant outcry afterwards. So I think this is interesting. And I think this is where we wrestle with our moral obligations. So children are, you know, if we go back historically, children are the innocent. If we think about some of those, you know, classic statements around children, children are seen and not heard. And here now we have a problem that is very loud, where children are very visible and are making the community extremely uncomfortable. And our response to some of the most disadvantaged and at-risk children is to ask how we'll punish them, not potentially what I'd love to say, how have we already filed them? So take the principle detention as the last option. Why? What is the reason for the human rights protections in the first place? Because if it's a straight-up contest between political democratic emotions, democratic consent on the one hand versus human rights limitations on the other or human rights protections on the other, we know what's going to lose every time. Why is it that there is a particular danger for children to be incarcerated, to be detained, to be in detention for excessive periods of time? I think it's a recognition of the moral development and the mental development and capacity of children at that point and that they've made the decisions and engaged in this behaviour when they don't yet have a full potential foresight of the consequences of those actions. So part of it is that as adults, we need to show the compassion. I'd like to think also it's about not giving up on children. It's about not, you know, we think about the new South Wales under Bob Carr, the cement laws, but I literally said, you know, throw them in their cells, cement them to their cells, throw away the key and we had children in new South Wales in prison to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole under those laws. What we have in the obligations is a requirement to say that if a child needs to go to prison and that that is a public safety, a community safety imperative, it should always be for the least amount of time possible and rehabilitation and a plan to reintegrate, to bring that child back, that hope, bring the child back, bring them back better, allow them to recover, to heal, to thrive, that should always be our North Star, our guide. So, probably you've seen then, so sorry, well, the last question just along these lines. So, are you saying that we have substituted the quality? What it is that happens in detention? We have kind of swept that to some extent to the side and we've replaced real discussions about what ought to take place in detention during imprisonment for one of a better term. We've substituted that for duration. In other words, by making detention a kind of goal in itself, serving that one function of criminal justice, namely retribution. We've lost track of what ought to be the undergirding or underlying tell us the function that would lead to rehabilitation in the first place. Yeah, I think we've lost track of our responsibility for some of these behaviors as adults. You know, we look at some of the stats that are coming out. These young people are more often than not. Some programs and practitioners are telling us up to 80% victims of domestic and family violence, child sexual abuse. They are young people who have experienced significant trauma. in their lives, often by adults, and have never had an effective response, or even just an accessible child-centered response to those experiences of harm. But my gosh, the second they do something wrong, the system sees them and is now going to come down so hard on them. So every adult's allowed to fail them, allowed to enact harm on them, with seemingly no therapeutic response and no accountability that they can see. But when they do something wrong, suddenly all responsibility falls on them. So it's interesting, I think, as adults, how quickly we've abdicated our responsibility to these young people who have been failed. You know what's interesting? I've seen these arguments play out online, and in response to the point you make, the robust is usually something like, sorry, we've been hearing about intervention programs for ages. And governments throw all sorts of money at it. Half of them don't seem to work. There's no guarantee that the next one will, how long do we need to keep throwing money after this theory with no guarantee of success? Given we are where we are, the problems are here, instead of actually dealing with it, as it stands, right now, in a way that makes perfect sense to solve a problem so that my friend, my family, someone else doesn't get killed or stabbed or something next week. And that's that balance piece, isn't it? And I totally get that. I get the frustration. I think the reality is we've never fundage, invested, supported those interventions at the scale for them to be effective. But there's been quite a lot of funding, hasn't there? There's been some. There's been nowhere near the amount of funding we're putting into now building youth detention beds. Right. Well, that's so out of whack, we're not going to see the effectiveness of those early interventions. But there are examples. I can point you to, for example, Jesuit social services over 50 years of working with boys and men, oftentimes involved in the youth justice system. They can do some fantastic evaluations of programs that they've done to turn around the lives of young people through restorative justice or other earlier interventions. So they're absolutely there. Those programs are there and could be funded at scale. That doesn't mean we don't do the accountability piece as well. I think that's bringing us back to that important balance because I totally get someone that is experiencing harm, has had trauma and acted upon them. Absolutely, they need to say a response. And we need to hold that young person to account. That is an important part of the process. We are just so far out of whack. I think the problem that we have in discussing it this way, especially as I've seen the debate play out in Victoria. You can tell me if it's the same in Queensland. Is that the way police talk about it, the spiking crime rate isn't reflective of a spiking criminality across the community, especially amongst youth, the youth crime rate. It's recidivism, repeat your repeat offenders. A fairly small number of offenders. Why are they repeat offenders? Because they go over for a court, court ultimately locking them up to the last resort, and then they come back out, they go to it again, they come back, rinse and repeat. And so I understand your argument, but it has a particular difficulty, doesn't it, in this moment, with that phenomenon, as acknowledged by the people that were dealing with this every day, that certain programs are not going to stop, certainly not in the short term, are not going to stop this phenomenon of repeat offenders. The only reason that this repeat offenders is possible is that we have this last resort rule. So that's the obvious thing that has to go, right? Even if you were then to have an argument about whether you could tailor it in some way, so that it was only applied to certain categories of people, so it was a very small number of people, so whatever. However you wanted to knock the rough edges off it, but the principle itself, the argument goes that it's the principle itself that is to blame for the spuck that we're saying, for the phenomenon. You're saying. There are two things unfortunately that go along with this. Number one is putting many of these kids before the county court, in others, before adult courts, and imposing certain forms of mandatory sentencing. In other words, removing two forms of institutional support, one being the particular forms of institutional support that are present within children's courts, and second being the element of, for one of a better term, judicial discretion, a judge's ability to say, to take all of the issues that are involved with this particular case into account when imposing certain forms. Yes, but partly because the application of that judicial discretion seems to have resulted in leaning. Repay defenders. Yeah. I think it's super interesting, you know, that rinse and repay, the recidivism that we're saying, you know, what's the definition of insanity during the same thing over and over again, expecting a different response. My question would be there, how we expecting a different outcome when we're doing nothing to address the underlying reasons why that young person is committing these behaviors. So how absurd to be expecting that to change when we haven't done anything. And part of this, you know, goes out more broadly. We need to look across the whole community, the whole system, disengagement from education. That's a really significant problem. We know that so much more broader than the youth crime problem that young people are not engaged in school at the levels that we need them to be. Hums within home where young people don't have safe homes to go to, untreated trauma, which simply just do not have for a country where we now have evidence to and five children are growing up in homes with domestic and family violence. Yet, we don't have specialist service system responses to treat that trauma. Untreated trauma becomes risky behaviors, becomes intergenerational violence. We know that time and time again. It's why we often say a lot of marginalized children young people that experience that violence or greater rates involved in these behaviors. So I think with that rinse and repeat, it's not simply about giving bail. It's not simply about the court decision. It's about the inability for us to address the underlying drivers. Granted, yeah. But it's also about the hard end of it, isn't it? Let me approach it in a slightly different way. I don't know if this will work or not. But one of the things that struck me in that period from about late 2010s, maybe 2020, for a few years, where you had this really strong focus on domestic violence, violence against women and particularly on bail. So offenders who were out on bail. One of the things that struck me through that period, and I think it still exists actually, is that the discourse you heard from people who might have identified politically on the progressive side. It suddenly started to sound very much like the discourse that you would hear from what let's all I'm just going to call them, "Laure an Order Conservatives." It's just that it was applied to a particular thing that changed their attitude on it, right? And so we need to look at bail laws. We need to look at all of these sorts of things. I just wonder if something that tells us something. Just to turn up in that environment and say, "Actually, what we want is a focus on the criminology of perpetrators of violence against women, and I'm going to defend bail laws to that end and blah, blah, blah." Well, another woman gets killed by someone who's out on bail. You would have not only been laughed out, of course, you would have been vilified in the process of that. The fact that you see this from the people who have kind of not swapped positions, perhaps embraced positions that were opposite to what their instincts would have been in other cases. I don't know. I want you to help me complete this. Yeah, not, I mean. Something is happening there. It is telling us something very important about the way in which we respond to these things. And no amount of evidence led discussion or whatever would have sated that concern. Absolutely. And I know this is an error. You know well. Oh, absolutely. And something I'd really tussle with. The killing of women by male intimate partners, current and former, for over a few decades, we've been on average at a woman a week. And last year we saw that rise to a woman every four days. And you know, sitting in the ABC studios, you know, what you're talking about, particularly the community outrage and the genuine fear after the killing of Jorma, by Adrian Bailey and the Bail reforms that followed. There's a couple of things there. I think, you know, in criminology, of course, we often hear like bad cases make bad law. Yeah. And we know that. On the other hand, women are scared. And they have very good reason to be with the rates of men's violence against women and children in this country. What we see though, in the fact that 10 years later, violence against women continues to be a national crisis, is it we're not going to jail our way out of that problem. It absolutely has to be a component of the response. But I think we have seen a sophistication of our response to violence against women and children, predominantly men's violence over 90% perpetration. So that applies if we're going to throw it over to youth crime as well. We know that we will not purely police arrest jail our way out of this problem. We have to look early. We have to look at prevention, earlier intervention and then critically, because we're talking about children, young people, recovering healing. Who are we as adults? Who are we as moral humans? If we give up on children and young people, if we give up on children and young people, particularly, who have been at risk, disadvantaged, experienced trauma, just who are we if we do that? And it just strikes me then that the focus on sentencing, maximum sentences, bearing the full consequences of what it is they've done, really is kind of pushing at the wrong emphasis. It's pushing at the wrong point. It's all about what it is that's going on in the process of detention or in the process of imprisonment, which means that instead of a certain period of time being served and that being the tell us, that being the goal, rather the extent to which the person is being led to a particular point where they can in fact re-enter and where they can rejoin those connections with the community. Kate, just before we go, I do just have to ask you about one element of this that really strikes me. It was one of the things in Queensland's youth justice reforms. It's the emphasized in Victoria as well. Judges being instructed to place the damage done or the consequences on the lives of victims. Victim centered approach. Victim centered approach, which also means certain forms of transparency. So for instance, victims being informed when the perpetrator of a violent crime is being released or victims being able to attend certain judicial proceedings or have access to the results of, that does communicate. I mean, that very dimension to these reforms does communicate the extent to which all these resources are being poured into. All this consideration is being poured into one end of the equation, one end of the ledger. And as a result, in this particular case, because it's vulnerable children who are involved, because it's children who themselves have been the victims and many instances of trauma and of violence, there is a degree to which the victims have also been erased. I'm just wondering about the element to which acknowledgement becomes part of, in other words, being rendered visible becomes part of the proper functioning of justice. I think we've always known that there's a symbolic element of the justice process and the justice system and its outcomes that's really important. Like justice is functional, but it's absolutely also symbolic. And I think that's where we do have a loss of confidence in the justice system. That symbolic piece has been lost. And I feel like we're coming full circle now. We're coming back to that balance, but it requires the balance. We need victims to feel that the harm against them, the trauma they've experienced, has been seen, has been responded to, that someone has been held to account. And then Scott, you mentioned it before, on the flip side, the process also needs to be just, particularly so when we're talking about such significant outcomes for children, young people, the idea that we're stripping away all the protections that are put in place in that process like the children's court for a young person who is in conflict with the law when the stakes have never been higher is absurd. We should have all the protections in place to ensure that if we do get to an outcome where we are sentencing a young person for a significant period of time, that we are really confident it was done through a just process because the stakes are so high there. And I think that's where we're saying the balance really fall off, really for everyone involved. Yeah, it's interesting because I suspect what you would end up with there is a big argument over what constitutes a just process. Absolutely. And I think those who are pushing for the adult time, adult crime, whatever we want to call that now, I think their whole argument would be that's a just process. But unfortunately, their numbers are just going to grow if we don't do anything to prevent this. And in 20 years, we'll do another show with you and we can point to it and say, I told you exactly what I was thinking that with your introduction where you were saying, you remember earlier episodes of the year where nothing mattered, everything mattered. Like, can we have the year where children ran? Yeah, yeah. I think that would help us. It's an interesting idea. Yeah, I felt this so stimulating. Thank you so much for coming in Kate. Thank you so much for having me. That is Kate Fitzgibbon, who is professor practice at Monash University in honorary professorial fellow with the law school at the University of Melbourne. I guess for this week's edition of The Mindfield, which is now at an end. 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