The truth about youth crime? A body reacts the same whether stabbed by a 16 or 40-year-old

Crime is not a new problem. It’s not in the realm of driverless cars or drones. Societies have been dealing with crime for thousands of years. Billions of dollars have been poured into researching crime. Nothing short of breathtakingly warped government policy has resulted in Victoria this year notching up its highest youth crime rate since records began. Twice.

This didn’t happen by accident. It’s not normal.

Youth detention centres should be repurposed into intense learning institutions – with high walls.Credit: iStock

There are two inescapable requirements to reducing crime: a high likelihood of detection and proportionate penalties. If either of these is missing, you get lawlessness. Victoria is seriously lacking in both these elements and the new Allan government proposal – to sentence some children in the County Court – that was announced on Tuesday night, will not improve that situation.

But children who commit serious crimes will now receive adult penalties under the proposal, won’t they? That may be what the Labor government announced, but the County Court and Children’s Court apply the same substantive law and hence moving the forum in which some youths are sentenced from the latter to the former will do nothing to abate the crime crisis in Victoria. The proposal is a political stunt to make crime-traumatised Victorians believe that Labor is finally trying to reduce serious crime – now that we are less than a year out from the next election.

County Court judges can impose harsher penalties than Children’s Court magistrates, but that doesn’t mean they will. Judges, like magistrates, have the discretion to impose any sanction from the maximum penalty to no punishment at all for every crime. Magistrates and judges read the identical law books when sentencing offenders. Thus, County Court judges will continue to invoke youth as an overwhelming mitigating factor and impose the identical sanctions (i.e., often no custodial sentence) to those in the Children’s Court.

Premier Jacinta Allan’s stated displeasure at there being “not enough consequences” in the Children’s Court is a fraud on the rule of law. Parliament has supreme law-making power. The outlandishly soft sentences imposed on serious young offenders are reasonably attributable to the government. Judges are simply applying the law prescribed by the government. The government needs to take full responsibility for Victoria’s crime crisis, which it has caused with its embrace of empirically flawed restorative justice policies for nearly a quarter of a century.

The crime crisis will only end when justice policy is dictated by empirically validated rules, and ethical principles that distinguish between the innocent and the guilty.

The starting point is the biological reality that the human body reacts the same to being stabbed by a 16-year-old as a 40-year-old. Victims of serious crime are often permanently mentally damaged by the trauma. The most common sentencing outcome in the Children’s Court is a diversion – which is no sentence at all. It is incomprehensible for an orderly society that youths who commit serious crime can receive less punishment, ie a diversion, than other children who incorrectly wear a school uniform.

When there are no consequences for wrongdoing it leads to more wrongdoing. That’s why the link between crime and punishment is a cornerstone of every civilised society. The argument that incarcerating juveniles will turn them into hardened criminals is a fallacy. A youth who habitually breaks into houses with a weapon while the owners are at home has already reached peak badness.

There is no statistical difference in recidivism levels between similarly situated juveniles who are incarcerated and those who are not. But there is a gaping statistical difference in community safety between these cohorts. There is a 100 per cent certainty that incarcerated offenders will not further harm people in the community during their period of detention and a high likelihood that an offender who is a multiple home invader will cause further carnage to innocent Victorians.

The fact that some young offenders have had traumatised lives is no justification for not incarcerating them. Concern about reducing trauma cannot be applied selectively. The trauma of the inevitable future victims of serious young offenders in fact weighs more heavily on the justice scales than the experiences of young offenders. No coherent moral code treats the interests of the innocent as less important than those of the guilty.

Additionally, when there is such great risk to young offenders of being killed or injured in gang violence or accidents in stolen cars, incarcerating them is often in their best interests.

The principle of proportionality mandates incarceration for all serious violent offences. That said, most children are salvageable and we should facilitate their integration back into society. Decades of research establishes that there are no wide-ranging measures that are effective to rehabilitate most criminals. That’s why the recidivism rate of young offenders remains unchanged for the past decade – even as governments continue pouring in tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into mindless programs developed by the burgeoning criminal justice industry.

There is only one proven approach to reducing the internal impulse to crime: education. Educated people act more prudently, have better problem-solving skills, and a greater incentive not to commit crime. Approximately 78 per cent of prison entrants aged 25 to 34 have not completed high school compared to 20.5 per cent of this age group in the general population. Further, inmates who successfully complete vocational education and training programs in prison are 2.5 times more likely to remain out of prison two years after release. Youth detention centres should be repurposed into intense learning institutions – with high walls. Juveniles would be incentivised to complete prescribed educational courses by getting credits for early release.

The other key ingredient to reducing crime is effective deterrence. The certainty of detection and apprehension is the best first line of defence against crime. This is why police stations and courts are crime-free zones. This is best achieved by dealing with most minor offences (right across the board) with infringement notices (as is already the case with drink driving). Unburdening police of futile paperwork (more than 95 per cent of minor offenders plead guilty) would free up police to flood the streets.

The urgent priority should be for practical solutions — consistent enforcement, certainty of detection, and proportionate penalties. Until policymakers embrace evidence-based measures that protect communities and hold offenders accountable, the crime crisis will remain an avoidable tragedy for thousands of Victorians.

Mirko Bagaric is a law professor at Swinburne University and author of Australian Sentencing.

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