Here we are, again.
Another awful high-profile crime in Queensland; another debate about youth crime led by fear and anger, rather than facts.
Psychologists warn us not to make decisions, particularly important ones, when we are in the heights of emotion or the depths of grief. And yet that is how youth justice policy has been made in Queensland for the past few years – after every incident, a suite of new policies to meet “community expectations” that are invariably worse than the last.
The result is an incoherent system – one where the state’s youth justice strategy is to keep kids out of custody, and its policing strategy is to arrest more and more.
It’s not just policy on the run. It’s policy made while being pursued by an angry mob, whose fears are being stoked by rightwing newspaper columnists and opportunistic politicians.
This week, the fatal stabbing of Vyleen White has stirred these emotions again. But the Queensland government appears to have run out of politically viable kneejerk responses. They’ve already tried longer sentences, new offences, tougher bail laws, police crackdowns and formally suspending human rights protection for some children.
The only other thing on the table – removing the principle of “detention as a last resort” from the youth justice act – is the cornerstone of the opposition’s political attacks. If the government caves on that point, it might as well appoint the opposition leader, David Crisafulli, as youth justice minister.
In the absence of anywhere else to retreat, Steven Miles this week offered a rare defence of the government’s policies. And in doing so he gave a brief glimpse into a world where the Queensland government seeks to draw the opposition into an actual policy debate.
“Overwhelmingly the expert advice, the evidence suggests, that the best way to keep the community safe is to not have sentencing as a first resort,” Miles said.
“If sentencing is a first resort, you risk hardening early offenders, you risk making them more violent, you risk exposing them to gangs. That’s why that policy from the LNP is dangerous.”
There have been some other positive signs from the government since Miles took charge. Labor’s early intervention policy blueprint, released last month, is the sort of thing youth advocates have been crying out for (even if, for now, the actual substance of the plan amounts to a few word clouds and some nice lofty goals).
If the signal is that Miles wants to engage the LNP into a policy debate then it is a positive one. Under Annastacia Palaszczuk, Labor’s policy on youth justice amounted to constant damage minimisation.
Miles might have found some fight, finally. Or he might just be backed into a corner.
For each of those recent positive signs, there are some not-so-positive ones.
Renewed attacks on the judiciary are particularly galling when judges are implementing Labor’s own laws. The civil liberties campaigner Terry O’Gorman criticised Miles on Wednesday for comments that he would speak to the attorney general “about changing magistrates’ behaviour” to allow media to cover court cases involving children.
“Here is Mr Miles back again putting his weak leadership on full display by attacking magistrates,” O’Gorman said.
“[It] is an unprincipled, weak and pathetic stance by a premier spooked at losing the upcoming October Queensland state election on law and order grounds”.
Last month Guardian Australia published a series of stories about the situation in the Cairns watch house, amid evidence that young people are not being provided adequate food, medical attention or legal support. Some of the stories from the watch house – such as children self-harming by banging their heads against the wall – are horrific.
The head of the Youth Advocacy Centre, Katherine Hayes, in a letter to Miles raising these sorts of concerns in December, said it most succinctly: “children held in these conditions will continue to offend”.
Miles knows kids in watch houses and detention centres are more likely to reoffend. He said so himself – we risk making things worse.
And yet for the past few weeks, the police and the police minister, Mark Ryan, have repeatedly spoken about arrest numbers like some sort of Olympic medal table. Statistics from Police Taskforce Guardian (no relation) show 826 young people were arrested and less than half – 351 – diverted away from the youth justice system.
The lack of diversions, advocates say, is choking the detention system.
Ryan said on Wednesday that “court behaviour” had changed in recent times and “that’s why we’ve got full detention centres”.
“It’s why we’ve got full watch houses, because courts are remanding serious recidivists in custody.”
The state government’s many kneejerks on youth crime policy include 2019 reforms that say a court “must” keep a child in custody if “there is an unacceptable risk that the child will commit an offence that endangers the safety of the community or … a person” and that risk cannot be mitigated via bail conditions.
Last year it suspended the Human Rights Act to arrest children who breach bail conditions. Record numbers have been locked up.
“Detention as a last resort” remains among the formal principles of the youth justice act, but in practice it was watered down a long time ago. Miles’s defence of the idea makes little difference while the youth justice system is so incomprehensible.
