Power and the passion: Why youth crime drives Queensland wild

Earlier this month, the Australian Bureau of Statistics lobbed a curious set of numbers into the youth crime maelstrom presently consuming Queensland politics and media.

There were fewer individual juvenile offenders in 2021-22 than the previous year, according to the ABS, just like there were the year before that, and the year before that.

The decline was more pronounced when offenders aged 10-17 were calculated as a rate per 100,000 of their cohort – a more accurate measure of the situation because it accounted for population changes.

These trends were backed up in the most recent annual crime report compiled by the Queensland Government Statistician’s Office, which found the total child offender count had fallen 27 per cent in the decade to 2020-21.

The 10-17 age cohort accounted for more than half of crimes such as robbery in 2020-21, but only 16 per cent of total crime.

Of course, these figures do not account for recent months. And collated Queensland Police Service data for 2022, the worst year for total crime since 2019, does not separate juveniles.

This masthead, working off a small slice of raw data, found the number of juvenile offences in January rose by more than 1000 on January last year, and almost 800 when comparing December 2021 to 2022.

But, importantly, adult offences increased by about 4400 and 3100 in the same periods, respectively.

The percentage increases for both adults and juveniles were almost identical.

Whatever the numbers, they would mean little to the many Queenslanders who have suffered and who grieve. They do not present the full nature of Queensland youth offending or acknowledge the centres experiencing a disproportionate share.

But they offer a modicum of base-level context to an issue that youth justice experts lament is being politicised at the expense of evidence.

“When fevers are running so high, you cannot win an election just relying on science, because people aren’t interested in the science of criminology,” said Associate Professor Paul Williams, a politics analyst at Griffith University.

“Not to put too fine a point on it, a lot of people want action and vengeance, so locking [children] up is a symbol of strong leadership. This is particularly germane to Queensland political culture, [which] says we like strong leaders who make decisions.”

Williams referred to the long years of Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Peter Beattie; Anna Bligh during the 2011 floods; and Annastacia Palaszczuk’s performance during the pandemic, which helped her sail to election victory in October 2020.

Back then, Palaszczuk anchored her case for lockdowns and border closures to the advice of professionals. But according to youth justice experts, her government’s lurch towards more punitive juvenile crime measures is precisely the opposite.

The government of Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk would be in trouble if an election were held today, says one expert, as the opposition under David Crisafulli continues to hammer the youth crime narrative.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen, Matt Dennien

“I think that what we really need is to take that step back,” said Dr Renee Zahnow, a crime researcher at the University of Queensland.

“I know the community is very angry, but putting young people in detention is not a solution.”

Academics canvassed by Brisbane Times warned of a spiral of offending: once children came into contact with punitive systems of youth justice, they were more likely to become the very repeat offenders the community so loathed.

While the experts did not dismiss a youth crime issue or seek to diminish victims’ experiences, a core frustration remained that government policies and rhetoric shifted with the fast-moving pendulum of the news du jour.

Queensland Labor went from denouncing prisons for children in 2018 (“we can’t continue to keep doing the same things over and over and expect a different result”) to pronouncements of “tough laws made even tougher” in December last year.

The “tough new initiatives” – including new detention centres, harsher maximum sentences for car thieves, and reduced avenues to bail – were “evidence based”, according to Police Minister Mark Ryan.

We asked for the evidence he was referring to, but did not receive a response.

Few political minefields draw such public emotions and political contortions as youth crime.

Zahnow believed this was in part because many people with children felt a sense of expertise when it came to discipline; others an innate concern about their own children being swayed off the tracks.

Williams said youth crime also played to the “folk devil” mindset, whereby wayward young people were among outsiders to be feared, alongside “southerners, socialists, drug users, whatever”.

In Queensland, several high-profile deaths – including those of Emma Lovell, Robert Brown and Scott Cabrie – have galvanised community anger, particularly towards the 17 per cent classified as serious repeat youth offenders.

Research compiled in Queensland’s crime reports noted youth offending, despite making up a small portion of total crime, was generally more visible than the closed-door or dark-cornered escapades of adults.

Often this visibility was fed by the young people themselves boasting of their crimes on social media. Community Facebook pages, too, reposted videos or members’ own footage, creating easy content for television news and packaged montages.

“We call this cultivation theory,” Williams said.

“[People] ... watch news bulletins and the first three stories every night is a stabbing, a robbery and a murder. After a couple of years, they’re going to think the world is a dangerous place.”

Meanwhile, political law-and-order campaigns were a “big stationary target”.

“Where voters fail to understand economic intricacies, they can understand when someone’s been assaulted or murdered,” he said.

“It lends itself to colourful media headlines and opposition point scoring. It’s really the perfect fit for conflict politics. And it’s working – the government is losing control of the narrative.”

Williams believed the Palaszczuk government would be in trouble if an election were held today. Expect the opposition to continue hammering the youth crime narrative, he said, particularly outside south-east Queensland in seats “where crime tends to push people’s buttons more”.

“It’s about politics, clearly, at the end of the day,” said the head of QUT’s School of Justice, Professor John Scott.

“Unfortunately, in liberal democracies, one of their weaknesses is that there’s a lot of short-term focus rather than implementing things that actually work down the track.”

News Corp and other media outlets have sought to highlight Queensland’s crime rate and the policies of the state Labor government.

Scott said “justice reinvestment” – a focus on the structural conditions that caused crime – was a meaningful long-term approach.

Experts and studies suggest many young detainees have undiagnosed neurological impairments. They may come from troubled households without structure, attention or regular meals.

One practical measure in some Indigenous communities was night buses to collect wayward youths and bring them to community centres with activities and meals, Scott said.

Among a range of new laws and spending, the Palaszczuk government announced this week it would expand the presumption against bail to more crimes and make breaching bail an offence.

It would also invest an extra $100 million in diversion and rehabilitation.

“The only things that will work with juvenile justice, and what has been shown to work through evidence, is to really think about restorative justice,” Zahnow said.

“It’s to think about a multi-agency care-based approach, where we teach young people through mentorship, education, family development, long-term care ... the skills they need for individual resilience, for jobs and to become part of the community.”

She agreed some children were too violent to be in the community and youth detention had its place as a last resort. But she believed Queensland needed a better model: small facilities with more access to psychologists, mentors and other professionals.

“You can see [the new laws] are there to placate the community rather than to have an impact,” she said. “And the problem with that is it costs money – money that could be spent on helping these young people.”