Our CEO, Jonathon Hunyor, wrote a compelling opinion piece, explaining what why current approaches to youth justice are failing, and what we should be doing instead:
The answer to failure isn’t to do more of the same.
So it was deeply frustrating to see the NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb recently launch an operation focusing on child offenders in regional towns – trumpeted as a ‘crackdown’ on ‘juvenile ringleaders’ – which offered nothing new and ignored decades of evidence showing that locking kids up is part of the problem.
If we are serious about community safety – and we should be – we need to confront the reality that current approaches towards offending by children and young people are not working. We also need to get real about the fact that they never have.
