A myopic “tough on crime” policy stand and a lot of noisy pontificating about “throwing away the key” may placate the tearoom outrage but rarely identifies or solves the bigger problem we have in the youth justice system. We have escalated our prison population, including amongst youth offenders, with little concurrent investment in rehabilitation or early intervention. The facilities are at capacity and we suddenly wonder why we have rioting in places like Malmsbury.

The deplorable behavior in the jails should not in any way be a case requiring justification but rather another clarion call for the community and political leaders to look deeper into the cause than some glib dismissal of “thugs”. The contributing factors to creating these juvenile delinquents are many and long. Drug abuse, particularly ice, may be the camel’s straw that tips them over into wild animalistic behavior but the causes and choices that set them on this path are likely to have started long before. Like ice use and addiction the causes of first use and rehabilitation become key to any solution but where resources are least directed.

Any individual fronting the court can demonstrate this textbook decline, back to the first appalling example they took from their peers or even their parents, the first contemptuous disregard for law, for aspiration or even the value of school.

But some consideration must be given to those who at an early age may at least be partially rehabilitated. Giving them all up as lost causes, “fit for the cage”, is swelling social disaster. The single-minded punitive approach risks fostering a recidivist prison population for future generations to handle, dwarfing the nightmare faced by the United States or Russia. Treat them like beasts and it is fair chance they will act like them. The discipline of deterrents may well be lost anyway, as the failure of the death penalty to reduce crime has shown in America. 

It is for precisely this reason many magistrates strive so hard to keep young offenders out of jail, knowing full well each term inside is a few steps more in a dire academy where there is no graduation. Only the really strong complete the toughest course of all; breaking the cycle. There is no doubt the community deserves protection form dangerous criminals and the police are doing their part in ensuring these youths are not beyond the law but how we narrow that gap which so many fall through to fill our jails will dictate the kind of future we will live in.