I have read your accounts with interest - as you have experienced young crime is a demoralising and ugly facet of life and my observation, after a long time, is that there is no respite or improvement to be had. There are too many experts involved, who are not, and competing agendas.
This is another topical matter which resurfaced this week.
A liddle baby boy has been committed to stand trial for a double murder in suburban Brisbane on Australia Day. He was tearing through an intersection in a stolen Landcruiser, cleaned up a tow truck, rolled and wiped out a couple walking their dog. In their 30s, she was 6 months pregnant.
He “also faced a string of other charges” … dangerous driving while juiced up on some unnamed drug, burglary and wilful damage. I briefly saw some news footage of him appearing in court by video and he didn’t look much interested. The solicitor for the cheeky little funster “was instructed that he is profoundly sorry (that he got caught) but he would be disputing that he knew that, by his manner of driving, he would probably cause those deaths. That is an element required in Section 302 (1) aa blah blah blah”.
Those two things are reminders to the magistrate that she has an obligation to not unduly pressure the prisons budget and that the defendant’s solicitor planned to help her in achieving that.
He attempted to do a runner, in which he had prior experience because the early media reports stated he was “on bail” for vehicle theft (?) and evading police recently. There were other past charges reported in January but all of these disappeared from view when, within days, the police commissionerette¹ leaped to his cause demanding that the media not be horrid and judgemental because they must pretend that he has always been a good boy, a lovely boy.
The Law Society and others who are there to protect lovely grubby boys above all others jumped on her bandwagon citing the Youth Justice Act.
Mrs Chief Constable managed to waste everyone’s time on January 29 with her clichéd “we do need to have a conversation about this … make sure we can stop it from happening again … look at the whole history of the life of this child and what interventions took place … look at what we need to learn from“ – all that stuff they learn about at crime technical college, to spruik when they need to insult the intelligence of the general population who pay for it all!
Since January he has become an adult but he’ll still be cradled in the caring arms of “the system” as a liddle baby. That system requires the families of the victims to go and gets tuft, evidently.
¹ Why am I so dismissive? She is of a Croation family, from the tropical Tablelands - we therefore expected a tough minded, unequivocal leader. She is not. Carroll is only marginally better than her predecessor who was woeful, insipid. I knew the previous bloke, Bob Atkinson, he was a leader and not a show pony, he kept the troops' minds on the job, not distracted by stupid ministers and effete judges.