BBC/Simon Atkinson
A protest was held outside the Northern Territory parliament in Darwin as MPs debated lowering the age of criminal responsibility to 10.
“Thomas” – not his real name – was 13 when he began his first stay in prison.
Following the sudden death of his father, he robbed a store in Australia's Northern Territory (NT). He was detained for a week, but a month later he was in custody again for another burglary.
Five years later, the Aboriginal teenager has spent far more time in prison than outside.
“It’s hard to change,” Thomas told me. “(Breaking the law) is something you do your whole life – it’s hard (to stop) the habit.”
His story – a revolving door of crime, arrest and release – is not isolated to the Northern Territory.
For many, as the years go by, the crimes become more serious, the sentences longer, and the time spent between prison stays shorter and shorter.
The Northern Territory has the highest incarceration rate in Australia: more than 1,100 people out of every 100,000 are behind bars, more than five times the national average.
It's also more than twice that of the United States, which has the highest number of people behind bars.
But the issue of child incarceration in particular has been thrust into the spotlight here, after the territory's new government controversially lowered the age of criminal responsibility from 12 to 10.
The move, which defies a UN recommendation, potentially means locking up even more young people.
BBC/Simon Atkinson
Business owner Sunil Kumar says his restaurant has suffered five or six burglaries in the past year and is in favor of stricter laws.
It's not just about incarceration. It is also a question of inequality.
While around 30 per cent of the Northern Territory's population is Indigenous, almost all of the young people locked up here are Indigenous.
Thus, indigenous communities are by far the most affected by the new laws.
The Country Liberal Party (CLP) government says its mandate, after its campaign, is to ensure the security of the Territories. This helped the party achieve a landslide victory in the August elections.
Among those who voted for the CLP was Sunil Kumar.
The owner of two Indian restaurants in Darwin, he was the victim of five or six burglaries last year and wants politicians to take more action.
“It's young kids who do it most of the time – (they) think it's fun,” Mr Kumar says.
He says he upgraded his locks, installed cameras and even offered soft drinks to children loitering outside in an attempt to convince them.
“How come they got out and the parents don’t know?” he said. “There should be punishment for the parents.”
But while the political discourse around crime is powerful, critics say it actually has little to do with the actual numbers.
Rates of young offenders have increased since Covid. Last year there was a 4% increase nationally.
But rates are about half what they were 15 years ago in the Northern Territory, according to figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
But politicians are playing on residents' fears.
As well as lowering the age of criminal responsibility, they also introduced stricter bail legislation, known as Declan's Law, in honor of Declan Laverty, a 20-year-old who was fatally stabbed last year by someone out on bail for an earlier alleged assault.
“I never want another family to go through what we’re going through,” said his mother Samara Laverty.
“The passage of this legislation marks a turning point for the territory, which will become a safer, happier and more peaceful place.”
“Children aged 10 still have baby teeth”
On the day the laws began to be debated in Darwin last month, a small crowd of protesters stood outside Parliament in a last-ditch effort to turn the political tide.
A woman held up a sign that read: “10-year-old children still have baby teeth.” Another asked: “What if it was your child?”
“Our young people in Don Dale need a chance to hope,” said Indigenous elder Aunt Barb Nasir, addressing protesters.
She was referring to a notorious youth detention center just outside Darwin, where evidence of abuse – including a video of a child wearing a hood and chained to a chair – has outraged many people in Australia and led to a royal commission inquiry.
“We always have to defend them because they are lost in this,” Aunt Barb said.
Kat McNamara, an independent politician opposed to the bill, told the crowd: “The idea that to support a 10-year-old child you have to criminalize him is irrational, ineffective and morally bankrupt. »
After a wave of applause, she added: “We are not going to tolerate this.”
But with a large majority in Parliament, the CLP easily succeeded in passing the laws.
BBC/Simon Atkinson
Protesters opposed to new law say imprisoning children for 10 years is not a sustainable long-term solution
Lowering the age of criminal responsibility reversed legislation passed last year that briefly raised the threshold to 12.
And while other Australian states and territories have been under pressure to raise the age from 10 to 14, it is now back to 10 across the country, except the Australian Capital Territory.
Australia is not alone: in England and Wales, for example, this figure is also set at 10.
But in comparison, the majority of members of the European Union set the figure at 14, in accordance with UN recommendations.
Northern Territory Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro says that by lowering the age of criminal responsibility, authorities can “intervene early and tackle the root causes of crime”.
“We have this obligation to the child who has been abandoned in many ways and over a long period of time,” she said last month.
“And we have (an obligation) to people who just want to be safe, people who don’t want to live in fear anymore.”
But for people like Thomas, now 18, prison hasn't helped anything. His crimes only got worse and the time spent inside increased.
He says he finds prison strangely comforting. It's not that he likes it, but guarding comes with familiarity.
“Most of my family has been in and out of prison. It felt like home because all the boys took care of me.”
His two younger brothers are also stuck in a similar cycle. At one point, their mother took a bus to visit all three in prison every week.
Thomas still wears an ankle bracelet issued by authorities, but he has been out of prison for almost three months now – his longest period of freedom since he was a teenager.
He was helped by Brother 2 Another, an Indigenous-led project that mentors and supports First Nations children caught up in the justice system.
BBC/Simon Atkinson
Brother 2 Another's Darren Damaso says there should be more investment in services to support Indigenous youth
“Locking these kids up is just a reactive way of doing things,” says Darren Damaso, a youth worker with Brother 2 Another.
“There needs to be more rehabilitation support services, more funding for Indigenous-led programs, because they actually understand what's going on for these families. And then we'll slowly start to see changes. But s “It's just a matter of locking them out as the default action, it won't work.”
Mr Damaso is from the Larrakia Aboriginal people, the ancestral owners of the Darwin region, and he also has links to the Yanuwa and Malak Malak people.
His organization brings young people to a renovated unit in an industrial area on the outskirts of Darwin, offering a relaxation area, sensory room and gym.
Brother 2 Another also works in schools and tries to help young people find work – opportunities that many who have worked in police and prisons struggle to achieve.
“It’s a self-perpetuating cycle,” says John Lawrence, a Scottish criminal lawyer who has been based in Darwin for more than three decades.
He has represented many young people and argues that more money should be spent on schools rather than the prison system, to avoid incarceration in the first place.
Indigenous people “have no voice and therefore suffer great injustice and great harm,” Mr. Lawrence says.
“The fact that this could happen reveals in a very clear and obvious way how racist this country is.”
A national debate
Tough crime talk is not unique to Northern Territory politics.
In the recent Queensland election, the Liberal National Party's winning campaign played heavily on its slogan: “Adult crime, adult time.”
In a recent report by the Australian Human Rights Commission, Anne Hollonds, the national children's commissioner, claimed that by criminalizing vulnerable children – many of whom are First Nations children – the country is creating ” “one of Australia's most pressing human rights challenges.”
“The systems that are supposed to help them, including health, education and social services, are not fit for purpose and these children are falling through the cracks,” she said.
“We cannot police our way out of this problem, and the facts show that locking up children does not make the community safer. »
This is why there is an increasing focus on funding early intervention through education, not incarceration, and trying to reduce marginalization and disadvantage in the first place.
“What are people's cultural strengths? What are people's community strengths? We build on that,” says Erin Reilly, regional director of Children's Ground.
Her organization works with communities and schools on their ancestral lands, learning about bush foods and medicines and the indigenous “kinship” system – how people fit into their community and family.
“We center Indigenous worldviews and values and work in a way that works for Indigenous people,” says Reilly.
“We know that the education system and health systems are not working for our people. »
For Thomas, life inside was tough, involving weeks spent in solitary confinement. But from the outside, he says, we have little understanding of the circumstances he experienced.
“I felt like no one cared. No one wanted to listen,” he says.
He points to the bite marks on his forearms and adds, “So, I get hurt all the time, see the scars here?”
Additional reporting by Simon Atkinson
