The slippery slope of youth justice policy in South Australia

We have just had a state election in South Australia, one that has returned a Labor government with an overwhelming majority. As the dust begins to settle, it is a good time to reflect on what this will mean for the state’s Youth Justice system and where we are heading.

A new era of incarceration?

Although new administrations often highlight the shortcomings of their predecessors, this is not an option when the incumbent is re-elected. Labor’s second term policy is framed around a promise to tackle serious, repeat youth offending. It plans to achieve this through tougher sentencing, restrictive bail laws, and by creating “recidivist young offender” declarations that will result in automatic, stricter court consequences that include longer periods of detention (see the South Australia Young Offender Plan 2025).

Not only is it far from obvious why recorded crime rates in South Australia change over time, but the term ‘serious repeat offender’ is not legally defined. This makes it impossible to estimate just how many children will be treated this way.

Should we be worried?

No real explanation is offered about why tougher sentencing should be expected to work. For example, failure to comply with bail is the most common charge that children and young people face, and yet we don’t ask why children find it hard to comply with their conditions (and if there are steps we can take to provide support) or indeed if the threat of remand acts as some form of deterrent.

Numerous submissions to the current Senate inquiry into youth justice provide us with plenty of evidence that the result of custodial sentences is more children becoming trapped in cycles of incarceration.

Shortcomings in the quality of our state’s youth justice facility are also well documented. A series of inspections conducted by the Training Centre Visitor reveals what she describes as “a system under pressure – one where the custodial environment and service fragmentation risk undermining, rather than supporting, recovery and rehabilitation”. And recently, significant issues have been identified with the Adelaide Youth Training Centre’s capacity to provide appropriate therapeutic care. It seems hard to feel confident that these latest government promises to incarcerate more children and young people will result in better outcomes for South Australia when we consider this.

Our history does not inspire confidence. Back in 2009, for example, a United Nations youth representative described the South Australian youth justice detention centre, the Magill Training Centre, as “a living child rights abuse” that contravened a child’s right to a safe and non-hazardous environment to grow up in. The response of the Labor Acting Premier of the time, Kevin Foley, was dismissive. To quote the Acting Premier, “that is a ridiculous comment from a do-gooder from the United Nations who chooses to come in here and lecture this Government on what we should be doing”, going on to add that “it [Magill] is not a holiday home for wayward children, it is a penal institution for children who have committed some very, very serious crimes”.

And, of course, Mr Foley’s comments about holiday homes are all the more disturbing in light of recent events, which tell us about the level of abuse that occurred in this facility. Over 70 former inmates have now alleged that they were subjected to systemic sexual and physical abuse in Magill, with a police task force now investigating claims spanning three decades. And it has been reported that over $1.5 million in compensation has already been paid to more than 20 victims.

But don’t we already know what we need to do?

The last 20 years have seen multiple inquiries, reviews, and reports into Australian youth justice systems; all of which arrive at similar conclusions and offer a clear blueprint for improvement. None of these has suggested that a tougher approach is needed. In fact, they highlight the vulnerabilities of justice-involved children and recommend responses that seek to address the dysfunction that they have grown up with and provide them with the skills they need to live independently in the community.

Their recommendations have not, however, been consistently implemented by Youth Justice agencies. Rather, bursts of political attention (often triggered by a crisis, such as a death in custody) typically create a sense of urgency that quickly fades, and proposed reforms remain ‘in draft’, ‘under development’, or are simply not accepted or ignored. And so, nothing much changes – and the cycles simply repeat.

Human rights and human wrongs?

Many of the proposed reforms are based on the need to better understand the importance of children’s rights. These are fundamental entitlements – such as the right to life, to liberty, and to freedom from torture – that belong to all individuals. But when it comes to human rights in custodial settings, the focus is often on adhering to minimum standards, such as the United Nations’ minimum standards for the humane treatment of people in prison (the Nelson Mandela Rules), which prohibit torture, and restrict solitary confinement to a last resort (although this for under 22 hours/day without human contact for maximum of 15 days!!).

The focus is very much on preventing ‘human wrongs’ – circumstances in which human rights have been violated, such as when violence and abuse, discrimination, and neglect have occurred – responding to egregious acts of poor professional practice. And simply pointing this out seems to do little to prevent these recurring.

Trauma-informed youth justice

A trauma-informed approach to youth justice, by contrast, is more concerned with developing good practice and building the system’s capacity to do better. It highlights the importance of ethical practice that is underpinned by six core principles – safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, empowerment, and respect for diversity.

Each of these principles was developed to recognise the impact of trauma and to prevent re-traumatisation – and they can be readily operationalised in a custodial setting. For example, they require staff to actively care about justice-involved children and young people, to deliver on their promises and follow through, and to make sure that children know they matter.

Whilst these are all practices that align with a human rights focus on protecting the dignity and autonomy of the individual, the trauma-informed approach is concerned with strengthening an organisational culture that ensures that people are safe and empowered to take control over their lives in ways that achieve the overarching aim of keeping the community safe.

Whilst a trauma-informed approach is now accepted elsewhere and increasingly used in criminal justice and custodial settings, progress in South Australia has been slow. And there are no signs of this changing if the new South Australia Young Offender Plan 2025 is anything to go by. And this is despite a more trauma-informed approach being strongly endorsed by those who currently work in SA youth justice.

Somewhat surprisingly, Queensland has led the way here by establishing a whole-of-government, whole-of-community approach for integrating trauma-informed practice. This is a strategy that could readily be applied to youth justice in South Australia and, for the first time, spark a serious policy debate about how child protection histories and experiences of out-of-home care create a pipeline into the prison system that is too often only facilitated by youth justice.

And so, as I reflect on the current direction of youth justice in our state under a new Labor government, it feels like we are moving further away from the trend-setting ways of working in youth justice that we used to be well-known for in South Australia. It is surely time for a Labor government that publicly claims social justice and equality as its core values to do better. And this, for me, means developing a much stronger policy platform – one that supports our government agencies to work in ways that are fair, compassionate and, ultimately, much more likely to succeed.