- by C Bartholomew
- The Guardian
- Issue #2122
Photo: stockvault (CC0)
Youth crime ‘crisis’ stories have dominated headlines and debates ahead of the Queensland state election. Liberal National Party (LNP) leader Crisafulli has pushed the slogan “adult time for adult crime,” while Miles’ Labor have celebrated their own youth crime policies as the “toughest in the nation.” Both ignore an inconvenient fact: the youth crime crisis does not exist.
Data from the Queensland Police Service shows youth crime rates in Queensland are at near-record lows. Youth crime has dropped consistently over the last 20 years. Rates reached their lowest in 2021-2022 during the COVID pandemic, according to Queensland government figures. A minor increase of 2.7 per cent in 2022-2023 caused a lot of media fearmongering. Since then rates have dropped by 2 per cent, with much less fanfare. Youth crime has dropped 18 per cent since 2012-2013.
Even if crime was a worsening issue, the current youth crime frenzy would be misplaced. The vast majority of crimes in all categories are committed by adults, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Despite this, Crisafulli has promised to establish “reset camps” for young offenders and ditch existing “detention as a last resort” protections.
Labor has already suspended the Human Rights Act several times, weakened last resort protections, imposed stricter youth bail laws, and promised to fund more youth detention centres. Despite common claims that the law has become too lenient, the country’s imprisonment rate is at record highs, especially for those yet to receive a sentence. The number of unsentenced prisoners denied bail has also doubled in ten years to an all-time high of 15,973 in 2023.
The idea of a state-wide or nation-wide youth crime surge is simply not true. Despite this, the media is awash with sensationalised stories of high-profile home invasions, alleged murders, and car thefts.
A key component of Crisafulli’s election campaign has been ads and photo ops of him standing next to various victims of youth crime. This shameless political opportunism from the media and politicians is grossly immoral and has real consequences for Queensland children and communities.
US civil rights lawyer and activist Alec Karakatanis defines ‘copaganda’ as a kind of propaganda which promotes “a grossly distorted version of crime, punishment, and safety.” Copaganda creates and feeds upon fear of crime, especially crime committed by the marginalised, then “falsely suggests that the best way to respond to our fear is to increase government repression through police, prosecution, and prisons.”
What we are seeing now, a phenomenon criminologist Ross Homel calls “the big lie” of tough-on-crime politics, is copaganda in action.
Youth crime is not just a slogan for the LNP to use against Labor, it is also an attempt to normalise tougher policing as the go-to response for community safety.
Even though, as Homel has stressed, “Criminal justice processing of juveniles is itself a cause of future offending,” detaining children is still a political goldmine. The Northern Territory’s Country Liberal Party have ridden the wave of youth crime hysteria to successfully revive the Territory’s practice of throwing 10-year-olds, almost all Aboriginal, in prison. In Queensland, the practice never stopped.
Politicians and media ghouls claim the real Queensland youth crime crisis is a growing number of serious repeat offenders, yet all available research concludes that early contact with the justice system only increases rates of recidivism.
In other words, Crisafulli’s “adult time for adult crime” policy will subject more children to brutality and only have more serious repeat offenders to show for it.
The failure of tough-on-crime policing in the USA since the early 1970s Nixon administration, or the countless examples of systemic abuse and torture of children in Australia’s own youth detention systems are lessons we still haven’t learned. Voters are being asked to choose between children’s rights and community safety. Tough-on-crime policies will deprive them of both.
Policing should not be the only tool the government is willing to use to keep communities safe. Rather than using children as an excuse to propel the policing arms race (in both legal power and firepower), governments ought to be held to account for issues such as poverty, housing inequality, and education disparity which create youth crime in the first place.
Tough-on-crime narratives just perpetuate these systems of inequality.
Stories of youth crime crises have been popular in Queensland since the 1800s, yet no amount of tough-on-crime policy has been enough to fix the alleged problem. It is time Queenslanders, and other Australians demand better from their governments.
