Standing at the intersection where their son and his pregnant partner were killed by a drunk driver last year, Russell and Ann Field spoke to the youth justice debate sparked by their deaths.
“Everybody in the community knows that this sentence is inadequate,” Russell Field told reporters on Friday.
“It needs a total overhaul, a total review. We have got to stand up, people like us and other victims of crime … and support a change, a change for the law to be reviewed.”
He was referring to a 10-year sentence for manslaughter – the maximum sentence under the Youth Justice Act – handed down to an 18-year-old this week over the deaths of Matthew Field and Kate Leadbetter.
The teenager, who was 17 at the time of the crash, can apply for parole in five years. The Queensland government says an appeal has been lodged to try to increase the sentence.
More than 50,000 people have signed a petition by the Fields and the Liberal National party mayor of Redland, Karen Williams, calling for breach of bail to be legislated as a criminal offence and for harsher sentencing to be introduced.
But Prof Tamara Walsh, from the University of Queensland’s School of Law, says there is no research that proves tougher penalties lead to a reduction in crime.
“Any one of us who have lost someone that’s close to us can sympathise with these families, but changing the lives of literally thousands of kids in Queensland is not going to make anybody feel better. And it’s certainly not going to reduce crime in the state,” she says.
The director of the Youth Forensic Service at Griffith University, John Rynne, says while the youth offending rate is dropping, the offence rate of chronic youth offenders – who represent 10% of offenders – is not.
“I deal with victims’ parents all the time. The pain that those people are feeling is intense. I don’t want to minimise their feelings or their thoughts but what the evidence says … is that the length of the sentence unfortunately doesn’t fix the issue,” he says.
The deaths of Field and Leadbetter sparked several changes to the Youth Justice Act, including the strengthening of anti-hooning laws, the trialling of GPS tracking for kids as young as 16 and reversing the presumption of bail for serious offences.
Queensland’s youth minister, Leanne Linard, says the removal of the presumption of bail is effective and has led to three times more young people being behind bars across the state than in New South Wales.
She says the “tough measure” means about 300 teens are in detention – 100 more than last year before the laws were changed.
“What it essentially means is that young people have to prove that they should get bail, which is a reverse of what is the normal case in courts,” Linard told ABC Radio on Friday.
The attorney general, Shannon Fentiman, has ruled out reinstating breach of bail as a criminal offence, for which the Liberal National party opposition are pushing.
“It was not a disincentive,” Fentiman said on Thursday. “It did not stop young people reoffending.”
Walsh says 80% of children in detention in Queensland are on remand – warning that legislating breach of bail as an offence could unfairly punish innocent and disadvantaged kids.
“What that’s going to mean is that for kids who miss an appointment, suddenly they’ve committed an offence,” Walsh says.
Walsh says the removal of the presumption of bail was harming children.
She wants more resources devoted to ensuring children have housing, food and a safe home environment. Half of all children who end up in the youth justice system have not had stable homes, one-fifth have been subject to child protection orders, and many more have been in and out of the child protection system, she says.
“Most of these kids have been victims of crime themselves. There’s a real sense of injustice when these children are punished by adults when all the adults in their lives have failed them.”
Griffith University’s Youth Forensic Service is made up of psychologists and experts who work with the courts to write pre-sentence reports for serious sexual violent offenders.
Rynne says these programs are successful as they create a detailed psychological profile of the perpetrator and their environment, creating individualised treatment and risk management plans.
“This program works because it’s resource intensive,” Rynne says. “That might mean sitting on a beach in northern Queensland or sitting in the outback on a log.
“We develop specific interventions based on the kid’s needs … the model is extensively and constantly reviewed.”
Rynne says any new law around breaches of bail would need to target the most serious chronic offenders, coupled by specific programs to deal with them.
“Increasing the punitiveness of the system is not the way to bring about the change. You have to target those serious chronic offenders, which is what the government is doing, but there are interventions available that will target them.”
Walsh says the research shows that when children don’t have hope, they make “silly mistakes” and don’t look towards the future.
“What we need to be doing is making these kids believe that there is a hope for them in the community … because they are supported,” Walsh says.
“If we make the community look attractive to them, then they won’t have that imperative to commit crime in order to end up in detention.”
