CENTRAL COAST EXPRESS ADVOCATE, Wednesday, July 28, 2010
The ‘Juvenile Justice’ system is anything but ‘just’...
If young achievers are our pride, who takes credit for our 'young' criminals? Children are our legacy as much as our future. Does a child stop being a child because it has committed a crime, horrible as it might be? If the sins of the fathers are the sins of the sons, who should pay? The factors which may influence a child's slide into delinquency often start at a very young age. If we wanted to turn a child into a criminal, what would we do? For example, which other species emanates the danger to its offspring almost exclusively from its parents. If Juvenile Delinquency is the symptom, what is the disease? Is there possibly more to crime than punishment?
This book challenges the Juvenile Justice system, created to lead young offenders back into society, as much as it challenges the reader to examine the way we all embrace young people – as long as they are cute or do us proud. But we pull back in disgust or indifference when they need us most.
- George Dieter
Mr. Dieter's book, 'Creating Criminals Without Even Trying', is a direct criticism of the failure of our current juvenile justice systems failure to cope, an opinion which is not to often voiced to the public. Public opinion of young offenders is often misshaped by the overwhelming flood of news stories depicting youth in over-elaborate and stereotyped ways. It is this false public opinion Dieter aims to abolish, and it turn with it the current process young alleged offenders endure.
According to BOCSAR (2005) figures show that juveniles have the highest rate of re-offending among convicted offenders, with a 55.6% recidivism rate in comparison to adults at 27.6%. This clearly speaks something about the juvenile justice sytems lack of success.
"The police union says agencies and politicians critical of police charging
young children need to help find a solution rather than criticising" (ABC News, Nov 23 2010).
At least the agencies are willing to admit their failure. The current system within Australia has a major problem of process as punishment, a term coined by Malcom Feeley (1979). The basic concept is that the range of informal sanction built into the determination of culpability before sentencing "shifts the locus of punishment and central concern away from adjudication and sentencing to the preliminary stages of the process." For example in 2006 58% of the detention population of juvenile offender was made up of remand prisoners, meaning they're weren't proven guilty yet (de Londras, 2008). Th enock effect of this large number of un-convicted youth being placed in detention for their pending trial contributes undoubtably to recidivism. It costs in excess of $150,000 to keep a juvenile in custody for 12 months in NSW according to Mission Ausutralia (Andrews, 2009), which in some cases is how long trials for serious offences last. Surely this money could be put to better use in establishing programs that don't involve imprisonment or involve process as punishment?
Upon research I've found such programs do exist.
- The Northern Territory government is providing $50,000 per year to get troubled youth out of the jsutice system and into boxing by producing a program for youths to vent their anger in a healthier way that violent crime. (Full story here)
- A pilot program at Newcastle's Children's Court which went under way this year has a found significant reduction in re-offending rates of some of the most serious repeat offenders after taking part in their 'Intense Supervision Program. (Full story here)
- Numerous communities have taken on the Midnight Basketball program, to get youths off the streets at night and into legal, fun activities. To participate in the competition youth must take part in a workshop on numerous life skills. (Full story here)
It's programs like these that we need to be pushing for, programs to re-educate, and re-introduce young offenders to the community, setting them on a path away from crime. The Department of Juvenile Justice recognised in 1996 that putting youth in custody and detention can "further criminalise juvenile first offenders, say, by contamination through their new association with known offenders inside" (Cain, 1996). However since then what has really been done to change this? Nothing. Placing blame doesn't help here though, only action will. On that note, what do think would be an appropriate means of handling juvenile offenders?
References
Cain, M. (1996). Recidivism of Juvenile Offenders in NSW. Department of Juvenile Justice: Haymarket, NSW
Love the layout of the blog, look forward to reading your thoughts :)
ReplyDeleteAlyce
I think to a large extent, the reason so much reporting about crimes committed by young people is skewed is because its not commercially viable for the news to provide a balanced and analytical background to young offenders. Newspapers and TV news are limited in how much they can say in their allotted square/30 seconds. This means the media has to cut stories down to absurdly simplistic narratives.
ReplyDeleteBut also there is an extent to which selling really punitive stories makes good business sense. People want to read stories about youth gone wild and they want to be able to blame the parents, as a form of affirming their own moral values. News stories which don't just spew out the usual "these kids need to be taught a lesson" are met with resistance, as people are typically very unsympathetic to offenders. This is due in large part to the fact that most people don't have much contact with marginalised people or how they experience life.