Last chance court: Balancing the scales of justice for teen criminals and the victims they traumatise

Is mum here? The magistrate asks.

The courtroom is silent.

“No family present, your honour,” the lawyer says.

The teenage boy slumps down into his seat and rests his chin on his arms. He fidgets in his chair as his image is projected into the courtroom via video link from a tiny room in a juvenile detention centre.

A police prosecutor reads out a rap sheet of crimes committed by the 17-year-old: a spate of armed home invasions and car thefts in the early hours of the morning, rousing children and adults from their sleep.

CCTV footage showing two people, who used their T-shirts as balaclavas, during a home invasion in Malvern. Credit: Nine News

The boy wielding a hatchet, smashing through doors and windows. A terrified woman waking in her bedroom to find the teenager and three others searching for the keys to her Mercedes-Benz.

As they drive off into the darkness, one of the teenagers sticks their head out the window and yells: “Thanks for the nice car.”

When The Age spent three days inside the Children’s Court of Victoria last month, the race against time was clear – young offenders, many with childhoods filled with trauma, were facing their last shot at reform before the system moved them into adult jail.

The weight of the new bail laws hangs heavy in the air.

Under mounting pressure to deal with community fear around crime rates, Premier Jacinta Allan has vowed the reforms will create the “toughest bail test in the country” for repeat offenders.

The laws were fast-tracked through Victorian parliament despite a groundswell of criticism from legal and human rights groups and juvenile justice experts who branded them an overly simplistic solution to a complex problem.

They warned the reforms will lead to increased criminalisation of Aboriginal youth and other marginalised communities, including young people with cognitive disabilities, who remain extraordinarily overrepresented in the youth justice system.

They fear that instead of addressing the state’s worsening crime problem, the laws will instead increase the chances of young people reoffending.

The hatchet-wielding teenager – an Indigenous boy with an acute intellectual disability – is a stark example of the reason they worry.

His lawyer tells the court he will not rehash the teenager’s criminal history “chapter and verse”.

“He has been in and out of court since he was 12,” the lawyer says. “It’s all been said before.”

The victim impact statements lay bare the effect of youth crime in the suburbs.

A young father recounts how his two toddlers, aged three and four, woke when their front door was smashed in during the night.

“It breaks my heart that my boys have had the sense of security broken at such a young age,” he writes.

Another family still struggles to sleep.

“The incident left us feeling extremely vulnerable in our home. The thousands of dollars we have spent fitting our home with security cameras since are now a constant reminder of the violation.”

In putting forward the boy’s case, his lawyer details a childhood filled with extreme violence, abuse and poverty.

The lawyer concedes a longer custodial sentence is inevitable, but he asks the magistrate to consider allowing the boy, who is a few months shy of his 18th birthday, to be able to stay linked to programs and services offered in the youth justice system once he becomes an adult in the eyes of the law.

The magistrate agrees, but tells the boy firmly: “This is your last chance to turn things around”.

Almost every case The Age encountered in the court involved violent home invasions, aggravated burglary or car theft.

What quickly becomes apparent is not merely the gravity and severity of the crimes, and the lasting scars on victims, but the harrowing lives of the offenders before they ever set foot into a courtroom.

CCTV footage showing two people, who used their T-shirts as balaclavas, during a home invasion in Malvern. Credit: Nine News

In almost all the cases observed, the offender has a diagnosis of an intellectual disability. Most have no family in court to support them. Many are in the state’s child protection system, having spent their early years enduring the horrors of family violence and sexual abuse.

Everyone in this courtroom understands what turning 18 means. On full and raw display are the efforts of their lawyers, support workers and even some magistrates to try and hold on to these children and keep them connected to the youth justice system, as they lean precariously into a trajectory of a life of crime.

In courtroom eight, a petite Indigenous girl with her hair in two braids arrives, having just completed a youth supervision order for an aggravated carjacking and a violent assault.

She has been involved in the justice system since she was three; her childhood marred by abuse and neglect.

Her lawyer tells the court she is a “work in progress”, living independently for the first time, and has a support worker trying to get her a job.

The magistrate notes the teenager has just turned 18.

“I know it has been hard … there has been difficulty getting her to engage, but we can’t let that go,” he says. “We have to keep trying.”

Down the hall, another teenager on the cusp of turning 18 has just pleaded guilty to a spate of crimes, including car thefts.

His lawyer tells the court the boy is couch-surfing with nowhere to live. His aunt raised him, until she unexpectedly died, and he moved back in with his mother, but that proved untenable when the house became violent.

Newly appointed magistrate Julie O’Donnell, selected by the state government to handle repeat youth offenders and ensure their cases are heard promptly and consistently, is overseeing the boy’s case.

“These are not minor charges,” O’Donnell tells the boy, who is sitting in the front row of the court, beside a child protection officer.

If such crimes were committed in an adult court, he would be looking at jail, she says.

“These are kids who’ve been in and out of incarceration since about the age of 10 … where is the state government’s plan that will prevent crime by children?”

National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds

O’Donnell sentences the teenager to a youth supervision order with strict conditions, without conviction, but warns that if he appears in court again for similar crimes he will be treated as an adult.

“I accept that a lot was going on for the young person, but I also accept that, given his age being 17, soon to be 18, that more intensive supervision is required as this is his last opportunity to engage with youth justice,” she says.

“We know there are services available to him now that won’t be available to him when he turns 18.”

Two courtrooms away, another teenage boy sits in the dock, flanked by two stony-faced police officers, as he waits for the magistrate to hand down a judgment on his nine-month crime spree, which ended with him slashing a stranger on a St Kilda street with a machete.

The fair-skinned 15-year-old, dressed in a blue singlet, has a young face and scruffy hair.

People rallying against new bail laws at parliament in Melbourne in March.Credit: Justin McManus

He has pleaded guilty to a crime spree that includes stealing cars he drove at speeds of more than 200km/h. He held a nurse in a headlock and tried to steal her car after she finished a night shift. He was on four counts of bail when he boarded a train from regional Victoria to Melbourne in January with a machete hidden down his pants.

He downed a full bottle of vodka before trying to rob a man of his car keys, slashing him across the back of the head when he refused to hand them over.

The teen has an IQ of 62, a severe language disorder, and diagnoses of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism.

His mother relinquished care for him to the state but tunes into the hearing remotely via a video link, a silent observer to her son’s fate.

The court hears his profound intellectual impairment means he is extremely impressionable and struggles with reasoning.

“When you make a decision, there are consequences for that,” the magistrate says, addressing the boy directly as he extends his time in jail by three months and implores him to turn his life around before somebody is killed.

Hours later, a magistrate weighs up the penalty for an 18-year-old who committed a carjacking and was part of a violent assault in a shopping centre.

The court hears how the boy, then 17, threatened a stranger with a machete in the driveway of his home before taking his keys and leading police on a high-speed chase.

Up to 50 police officers pursued the boy and another teenager as they sped down the darkened streets, a helicopter hovering above.

The previous year, he stole a meat cleaver and was part of a “frenzied attack” on a person in a shopping centre.

As his crimes are read out to the court, his older brother, sitting a few rows back from the boy, lowers his head.

The court hears the teenager, from Ethiopia, came to Australia as an orphan on a humanitarian visa with his older siblings.

The magistrate notes the boy, with the support of his older brother, is now holding down a full-time job at a factory and has expressed his remorse.

He is given probation and ordered to return to court in six months’ time.

“Any new offence you commit from now on will now be dealt with in the adult court,” the magistrate tells him, as the boy nods obediently.

Inside the court, the looming reality of life after 18 hangs heavy. Outside, the consequences of their crimes remain just as grim.

Melbourne man Anthony Pinzone paces his home at night, repeatedly checking the doors after thieves broke in one February morning.

Melbourne man Anthony Pinzone still repeatedly checks the doors are locked in the middle of the night following a home invasion in February this year.Credit: Penny Stephens

“I’ll hear a noise in the evening, or at two or three in the morning, and I won’t be able to sleep. I will be checking the cameras to see if there is anyone there,” Pinzone says.

“But it has hit my daughter the hardest. She has really struggled with it all. It has taken away our sense of safety in our own home.”

Thieves broke into his Beaumaris home while he was at the gym, and his wife, daughter and her fiance were inside asleep.

CCTV footage shows four hooded men breaking into the home while two others stood out front keeping watch. They made off with three cars, wallets and a watch.

“We were the lucky ones because we actually didn’t confront the people themselves,” Pinzone says.

“But even just watching the CCTV back and understanding that they just come through with no respect or regard for your property or your place, it has left us all on edge.”

In Victoria, the latest crime statistics revealed a 13.2 per cent increase in the crime rate – the highest it has been since 2016.

Offences committed by children aged between 10 and 17 rose to their highest levels since electronic records began in 1993. Police say these crimes are being driven by a group of about 300 young, highly recidivist offenders.

Pinzone later learned that one of the teenagers who broke into his home, a 15-year-old boy, had been given more than 50 counts of bail before he was arrested and held in custody.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “How does that even happen? The system is completely broken. There’s no ramification for doing something wrong so if you can get away with it, why wouldn’t you? They just commit a crime, and they are out the next day doing the same thing.”

Pinzone welcomes the changes to the bail laws, but remains unconvinced it will solve the crime crisis.

“The problem is you can only help these kids and support them in the system if you catch them and hold on to them,” he says.

National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds.Credit: Ben Symons

National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds says incarcerating children for longer is not the answer.

There is an epidemic of unmet needs, she says, which too often means the most failed and vulnerable children, including those in state care, are the ones funnelled into youth detention centres.

“The state is the guardian, then the state becomes the jailer of these children,” she says. “That is chilling.”

Hollonds says mounting research, including her own landmark report, highlights failures in tackling systemic disadvantage in Australia’s social services as the true drivers of youth offending.

“There is nowhere in the world where you find that locking up more children for longer is going to prevent crime by children, because crime by children is a symptom of underlying issues,” she says.

“What we’re doing is criminalising children with unmet needs like neurodevelopmental disabilities, mental health issues, learning problems and trauma.

“These are kids who’ve been in and out of incarceration since about the age of 10.”

Of the more than 150 young people Hollonds has interviewed in the justice system, most had dropped out of school before year 7.

“I have talked to victims of crime and advocates for victims of crime, and they didn’t want more kids locked up, they want to prevent crime,” she says.

“So the question in my mind is where is the state government’s plan that will prevent crime by children? Because what’s happening now is not based on any evidence.”

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