Youth justice system needs reform not repression

That children are our future is a cliché. It recognises the respect that children deserve. But the frequency with which the phrase is repeated suggests doubt about whether due respect is given practical effect. Some recent reports and documents confirm that doubt.

They include the submissions made to the Victorian Commission for Children and Young People on the use of isolation in the Victorian youth justice system and its final report, reports and court evidence about the treatment of children in Barwon prison, the preliminary report by the Northern Territory Royal Commission into  Child Protection and Youth Detention Systems, and an article surveying research into the extent of physical, verbal and sexual abuse of children in Australia.

We need only to imagine ourselves as a child subject to the practices described in these accounts, to find them scarifying. The recurring images of children lying in the foetal position, a sign of acute traumatic stress, in solitary confinement, hooded or surrounded by guards say it all.

When we set them against the results of research into the biological and psychological development of children sketched in the Commission for Children report, detention, prolonged lockdowns, isolation and a culture of punishment are destructive and counterproductive.

The NT Royal Commission report echoes others in saying that decades of inquiries into the patterns and conditions of incarceration have produced few lasting results. Public concern is drawn to evidence of catastrophic brutality but ignores the underlying and persistent chronic dysfunction.

The custodial treatment of people, however tightly regulated to ensure respect for those detained, inevitably drifts back to a punitive regime. We should then ask why public outrage at cruelty to children is only episodic, and why the compass bearings of detention regimes, however set to the true north of remediation, always swing back to punishment.

Part of the answer may be found in the research estimates of the prevalence of abuse suffered by children. They differ widely, depending on the definition of what constitutes abuse, the composition of the group surveyed and the questions asked. Although the statistics are unreliable, on a conservative estimate they indicate that about one in 20 children have suffered emotional, physical and sexual abuse.

This would mean that only a small minority of the friends and schoolmates of most children would be affected, and that their plight would escape adult attention. Where a higher proportion of young people suffers, as the research indicates in the case of young females, public concern is manifestly higher.

"The resultant frustration of young people and the effects of a rapid turnover of largely untrained and underpaid staff will inevitably lead to protests and destructive behaviour. That can provoke either reform or repression."

This may suggest that the treatment of children in the justice system does not arouse consistent public concern because, like Indigenous Australians, people who seek protection and Muslim Australians, they are a small minority. Most Australians will not have had much contact with them and so will not imagine them as like their own children. They will accept as justifiable for these different children treatment they would be outraged at if meted to their own.

Only images that represent both these children's vulnerability and the brutality of their treatment will evoke in them empathy and outrage. They will see these other children as like their own. But when confronted with images of violent, uncontrolled behaviour by young people, they will again see them as alien and so properly subject to harsh and punitive treatment. This blinkered vision underlies the cycles of reform and regression to a punitive approach.

It is also inherently likely that detention regimes will become more punitive. In any institution where one group of people is responsible for depriving other people of their liberty the interests of security will predominate over respect for the persons detained. The institutional relationship between the lockers-up and the locked-up colours the interaction between officers in centres of detention and those for whose incarceration they are responsible. The relationship between troubled young people and powerful figures of authority will be inherently conflictual. Detention will then be ultimately, fundamentally unproductive.

The bias to the interests of the institution is also reflected in the priorities reflected in regulations designed to ensure respect for young people. In Victoria many regulations specify how young people in detention may and may not be treated. But another clause allows these requirements to be overridden when the interests of the centre are as stake.

This statement of priorities inevitably mean that the respect due to the children is eroded, and that the regulations which limit the use of solitary confinement, exclusion and lockdown will become token. They will be seen as an exercise in ticking boxes and their intent ignored. The resultant frustration of young people and the effects of a rapid turnover of largely untrained and underpaid staff will inevitably lead to protests and destructive behaviour. That can provoke either reform or repression.

In today's fearful society, unfortunately, repression is all the go, with new jails the kindergartens for forming future criminals. That will lead to another scandal, another inquiry and, we might hope, to another opportunity for reform.

Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.

Main image from the website of the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory.