The youth crime panic: Real fear, wrong fix

While serious youth crime fuels genuine fear, evidence suggests harsher punishment is failing to address the small group of repeat offenders driving much of the harm, writes Wayne Hawkins.

LAST WEEK, at the supermarket in our shopping centre in Claremont, Tasmania, retired police officer Phil Pyke saw three young people filling their bags and pockets. He told them to put it back.

What followed was a stream of abuse and threats. Pyke walked them to the front of the store and they left, but not far. A security guard warned him they were waiting outside. Rather than risk being attacked unseen in a darkening car park, he went out the front, where there were cameras and witnesses.

When Pyke approached one of them, he was struck in the head with what he has been told was a knife. Then a second one hit him and he held that one until police arrived. Three youths have been charged with common assault and the matter is before the courts.

None of our staff was there that evening. But everyone who works in that centre now locks up a little faster and looks over their shoulder a little longer.

Mr Pyke wants hard and fast decisions, but listen to how he frames it. “I believe in young people. We do need to make other people safe,” he told ABC Radio Hobart. He also says the way things stand cannot continue.

So when people say youth crime is out of control, I understand exactly where that feeling comes from. The question is whether the feeling matches the facts and whether the fixes on offer will stop the next attack.

Australia’s youth detention system punishes kids but fails to rehabilitate them

The punitive approach of our youth detention system only serves narrow, short-term political thinking.

What the numbers say

Nationally, fewer young people are offending, not more. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) counted 44,583 offenders aged 10 to 17 in 2024–25, down 5% on the year before. Adjusted for population, the youth offender rate has fallen 28% in a decade.

That is not the whole story. The ABS counts each young person once, no matter how many offences they commit. So a small number of kids can drive a lot of harm. In Victoria in the year to June 2025, 1,128 children were arrested a combined 7,118 times. In Tasmania, just 57 children account for half of all youth crime.

This is the real picture: not a generation gone bad, but a small, known group doing serious damage, and a system failing to turn them around.

The cases behind the headlines

Recent months have brought cases that would frighten anyone. In Brisbane, seven teenagers aged 14 to 17 have been charged with murder after a 27-year-old man died following an alleged carjacking in Kelvin Grove. In Sydney, two teenagers aged 14 and 16 have been charged over the shooting death of student Marco Tapia at Glen Alpine. Police allege they prepared vehicles and supplied a weapon, and say the shooters targeted the wrong house.

These matters are before the courts and every accused is presumed innocent. But the Glen Alpine charges include participating in a criminal group, which points to something politicians rarely mention. Victoria Police has said adult criminals frequently task children with burglaries, car thefts and arsons. Kids are being used and the adults using them are the harder target.

The bidding war

Instead, we get a race to sound toughest. Queensland’s ‘Adult Crime, Adult Time’ now covers 45 offences. The Northern Territory lowered the age of criminal responsibility from 12 back to ten and removed detention as a last resort. NSW is extending its strict youth bail laws and the NSW Liberals are pitching their own ‘Adult Crime, Adult Time’. In Tasmania, the Government says it is reviewing the Youth Justice Act, and a local MLC wants a bail law review and more police patrols.

Police matter. Visible patrols and fast responses deter opportunists. But policing is the front door of a system and the problems sit behind it. Queensland incarcerates more children than any other state and still has one of the highest reoffending rates in the country. In NSW, almost 80% of young people in detention are on remand, not sentenced. And more than half are Indigenous Australians.

Juvenile justice: Why Australia must choose Norway over the U.S.

Around the world, sharply opposing views on juvenile justice are emerging and understanding them is crucial if Australia is to head in the right direction.

A billion dollars for a revolving door

Australia now spends $1.1 billion a year on youth detention. That is more than $3,600 a day, or about $1.3 million a year, for every child locked up. By the Productivity Commission’s own measure, 56.7% of young people aged ten to 16 are back under sentenced supervision within 12 months.

As a small business owner, I would not keep paying a supplier who failed more than half the time. Yet that is exactly what governments of every colour keep doing, because it looks decisive on the evening news.

Tasmania shows the absurdity. The state has committed $155.3 million to replace the Ashley Youth Detention Centre, which holds about 15 young people on an average day.

The cost is not only counted in dollars. In 2023, 17-year-old Indigenous boy Cleveland Dodd died after harming himself in Unit 18, a youth wing inside Western Australia’s maximum-security adult Casuarina Prison. It was the state’s first juvenile death in custody. Less than a year later, another boy died at Banksia Hill. Advocates count 20 suicide attempts and more than 350 instances of self-harm in Unit 18 between its opening and September 2023.

A decade after the Don Dale footage shocked the nation into a Royal Commission, the Northern Territory has brought back spit hoods. Children are dying in state care and too many governments are answering by locking up more of them, younger.

What would actually work

If a few dozen kids in each state drive most of the harm, that is where the effort belongs. Intensive case management, bail support that actually supervises, getting kids back into school and going after the adults who recruit them. Screening matters, too. One WA study found a third of detainees at Banksia Hill had foetal alcohol spectrum disorder and 90% had significant neurodevelopmental impairment.

Paying for it does not require new money so much as moving existing money. Justice reinvestment shifts part of the detention budget into prevention and measures the savings. Canberra can help through disability, schooling and Closing the Gap funding these kids should already be reaching. Even at $100,000 a child, intensive work with Tasmania’s 57 repeat offenders would cost less than locking up five.

The man outside our shops deserves better than a politician’s press release the morning after. He deserves a system that stops the next attack. Right now, we are paying a fortune for one that doesn’t.