Tyson Kliendienst was 11 when he was first locked up. It started with lower-level crimes: assault and supermarket theft. Then it escalated. From stealing cars to burning them out. From burning out cars to high-speed police chases. From car theft to home invasions. From break-ins when no one’s home, to break-ins while the family’s asleep.
“Once you come back out [of juvenile detention], your confidence goes up a little bit more. So you see how the charges slowly progress. It got worse and worse to the point where, at 16, 17, it was holding up pubs: robberies at 4 in the morning, while the cleaners are there,” Kliendienst said.
By the time Tyson spent his 18th birthday in a detention cell, he had been incarcerated up to nine times. “Have you got yourself a dream? You don’t get asked that in there. They ask you when your next court date is.”Credit: Mick Tsikas / AAP
By the time Kliendiest, now 25, spent his 18th birthday in a juvenile detention cell, he had been incarcerated up to nine times. “You get lost in this f---ed up system where they lock you up and put you in the same environment that causes the problem.”
That was the mentality, he said: becoming a bigger and better criminal. “It’s like high school: when you come in year seven, you want to be the year 12 student. That’s what the boys’ home does to us: you come in as a young kid, at 12 years old, and old mate who’s been in there for five years for a stabbing, you want to be at his level, because he gets the respect. The attitude is: this is for the hard boys. There is no place for the weak there.”
Every time Kliendienst – who grew up in foster care – returned to youth prison, he’d be welcomed by staff with a laugh, like family. “It’s like they’re so happy to see me back: ‘Oh, here you are again. We’ve got a bed for you’, like you’re home ... It’s a sort of merry-go-round. Once you’re on it, it’s so hard to get off. There was no push, no drive, to make me succeed and be better.”
Robert Tickner has been watching this dynamic for decades. He was federal minister for Aboriginal affairs in the Hawke and Keating governments, when the Royal Commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody was handed down, and went on to chair the Justice Reform Initiative.
He said 66 per cent of children in detention between 10 and 16 receive another sentence within six months of leaving. About 85 per cent are back within a year. The cost of detaining children costs more than $855 million each year – which is $2827 a day, or $1 million a year, per child. First Nations children are overrepresented.
“If you had told me 33 years ago, that I would be standing here in this building with these record rates of incarceration, particularly youth incarceration … that the system would not have improved over those 33 years, and we hadn’t followed the world’s best practice, I would never have believed it,” he said. “This country has indeed failed.”
Tickner – joined by the Australian Medical Association, Law Council of Australia and National Children’s Commissioner Anne Hollonds – said it’s time for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to take personal responsibility for a situation that has failed while being driven by states and territories.
There has been a political push for years to lift the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 14, but there is still no uniformity across the country.
As state premiers and Albanese make major plans to block children under 14 or 16 from using social media to protect them from harm, they say youth justice must also be on the national cabinet’s agenda. A new Senate inquiry, established by a unanimous motion last month, will deliver a set of recommendations to the Albanese government by the end of the year.
“As the prime minister has noted, we need state and territory collaboration to develop a national model of best practice based on the evidence of what works to turn young lives around,” Tickner said.
Hollonds, who also published a report on the issue last month, said Australia was going in the wrong direction. Western Australia is building a $100 million maximum-security youth detention centre; the Northern Territory plans to lower the age of criminal responsibility from 12 to 10; the Queensland opposition is going to the state election with an “adult crime, adult time” policy.
Only Tasmania is taking the right approach, Tickner said, in closing its youth detention centre and moving to a therapeutic model that focuses on intensive case management and partnering with community services.
Hollonds said most state and territory approaches were not based on evidence. “In Australia, [evidence] shows that the younger you lock up children, the more likely they are to go on to commit more and more violent crimes. That’s what we’re seeing today,” she said.
“We thought that toughening up the justice system – more policing, more children’s prisons, tougher bail laws, longer sentences – would fix it … We were wrong. We thought that states and territories could do this on their own and fix youth crime. We were wrong.
“Developed countries, rich countries like Australia, are closing youth detention centres and focusing on upstream systems to prevent crime before it starts, and then therapeutic facilities that address the complex needs of these children if they have already become involved in the system.”
Most of Australia’s 800 or more children in detention are on remand, waiting to be sentenced, and some are detained because they don’t have a safe space to live while on bail. Many have disabilities or mental health issues and are harmed by conditions in detention, which can include extended periods of isolation.
Kliendienst described his time on remand as isolated and lonely. “You’d go out, you’d have your breakfast, you’d come back to your cell,” he said. “You would then wait for ‘work party’, where you come out and clean and sweep and mop the floors. You do that for maybe two hours, and then it’s back to yourself. You get one phone call to your family, and it’s a playground for violence.”
Around the time he was 17, things turned around, through a connection with BackTrack Youth Works in Armidale, NSW. He’s now a plumber, raising two children in Brisbane. “You need the right support, a place of belonging, where you can feel love, and that’s where we’re struggling with a lot of these kids. They’re coming from dysfunctional backgrounds, foster homes, and then what are we doing with them? We’re locking them up,” he said.
“I didn’t see the worth in myself. I didn’t love myself. And to have somebody who consistently supports you throughout your whole journey, regardless if you’re doing right or wrong, it’s amazing. That’s what you don’t get in there.
“Every time I came out, these guys [at BackTrack] kept reminding me of my worth. Who do you want to be? Have you got yourself a dream? You don’t get asked that in there. They ask you when your next court date is.”
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