Ballarat has a problem with youth offending  and The Courier has said before a small number of recidivist offenders inflict a wildly disproportionate amount of damage and in turn drain a similarly high level of resources. The community rightly wants a solution to the problem. “Get them off the streets,’’ the mob cries without any of the understanding of those who have to get them off the streets or what they will do with them. The Courier does not expect age alone should entitle our more problematic young offenders to special treatment let alone the right to walk free, but there must be a recognition of multifarious causes for this aberrant behaviour or it will simply keep coming back at us.  

The police themselves, who in their frustration are opposed to anything like soft justice, recognise prevention is a better if far more complex expedient. They also recognise custodial sentences often amount to sending young offenders off to a training camp for criminals. Having imbibed the institutional environment and the worst of the company in such correctional facilities some young people are simply on a returning cycle where they graduate from elementary crimes to adult prisons and a lifetime of damage to the community and expense to the taxpayer through the legal and correctional systems. While protection from serious criminals is an imperative of the justice system and prisons exist for this very reason, the disjoint here is they largely fail in their correctional or rehabilitative capacity.  International examples show that punitive justice, whether it is with the truant adolescent on the downhill slide or the career criminal, acts too rarely as a strong enough deterrent to show there are alternatives.

The question fundamentally comes down to; do we want to solely solve the problem we have now or do we want to ensure we solve it so that the issue is not so much worse and widespread for the next generation? It may seem for many it is too late. When a mother is buying ice for her twelve year old son, it must strike even the best intentioned with despair but this is all the more reason to stop it. For the sake of Ballarat’s future, efforts in early prevention and breaking the cycles of recidivism in the high risk youth groups must be a priority.