Almost half of all children charged by Queensland Police last year found themselves outside of education, training, or work.
It’s children like these that Townsville’s Flexible Learning Centre hopes to engage with.
“Our young people have been marginalized from mainstream education,” says Neil Whitley, acting Head of Campus at the centre.
“Having a valuable, relevant education is a ticket to a successful future for all.
“Our young people deserve that same opportunity,” he said.
The percentage of Queensland children charged with offences in 2022 who weren’t engaged in education, training, or employment has been slowly decreasing since 2018.
But many still find themselves disengaged from a system that experts and advocates say may help in diverting young people away from a life of offending.
“We try to remove barriers to our young people accessing education,” Mr Whitley said.
“We collect and drop off our young people, we provide breakfast and lunch every day, we have youth workers in each learning group, we access a number of external agencies and specialist practitioners to work with our young people
“Engaging in education enables the young people to become future focused, and find, identify and explore options for their future,” he said.
Although the number and rate of youth offending in Queensland has been decreasing for at least the past decade, the Government says there is a small group of repeat youth offenders who are committing half of the offences.
Earlier this year, the State Government introduced a breach of bail offence for minors, in an effort to discourage repeat youth offending.
The government asserts that the new law is different to the one they scrapped upon taking office in 2015.
“It is much stronger will stand up to the scrutiny of the courts, unlike that of the previous administration,” former state Minister for Youth Justice Leanne Linard said in a statement.
“I stand by my previous comments that the Breach of Bail offence introduced by the Newman Government – and the LNP in opposition advocated to have re-introduced - was ineffective.
“In the interests of bipartisanship, the Palaszczuk Government has introduced a Breach of Bail offence which mirrors the adult offence,” she said.
For many children, minor offences are the beginning of a life in and out of the system.
“Usually if children breach their bail it’s because they’ve reoffended, or just because the conditions are too hard for them to comply with, and that’s often not their fault,” said Professor of Law at the University of Queensland, Tamara Walsh.
“They also tend lead pretty chaotic lives, so they, like all of us, can forget appointments, and those sorts of things can amount to breach of bail as well, so it’s very disappointing, is the bottom line.
“It’s very disappointing that we’re moving towards more punishment rather than recognising that it’s often the adults in the child’s life that are responsible for their breaches,” she said.
From 2018 to 2019, Queensland had, nationally, the second-highest proportion of young people returning to sentenced supervision within one year of their initial release, according to the Productivity Commission.
It’s facts like this that highlight the need for a circuit breaker.
“The international research shows that the more formal processing we expose children to … the more likely they are to be charged again, so in a sense, we’re creating our own problem,” Professor Walsh said.
“What we could do is legislate for environments that are satisfactory for these young people, that are suitably supportive and nurturing.
“We need to decide whether we are comfortable to keep putting kids in detention … or whether we want to put the resources that we would’ve put into detention to create a better situation for them,” she said.
The latest publicly-available data indicates that it costs the Queensland Government $1,800 per day to keep each child in detention.
Advocates like Siyavash Doostkhah say the amount of money spent on early intervention services pales in comparison to the funds the Government spends on detention.
“For instance, for years we advocated for funding for the youth sector for youth workers to work with young people and their families, they [the Government] keep saying ‘we don’t have money for that,’” Mr Doostkhah said.
“There’s that disparity between prevention and support … and what the Government and the Opposition have been advocating, which is about punishment.
“Unfortunately the funding that goes to the sector in recent years has become very business-like,” he said.
Mr Doostkhah says decades-old funding cuts have meant the work of those in the youth sector has been impacted.
“We have a huge turnaround in the sector … a majority of youth workers have been there for less than 2 years and a majority of them are not going to be there in 2 years’ time,” he said.
“This is quite disastrous, because working with vulnerable, young people, and children in particular, requires trust building, which sometimes takes a long time.
“Labor made promises when they were in Opposition that they were going to re-instate those fundings, but they have failed to do so,” Mr Doostkhah said.
Townsville’s Flexible Learning Centre remains an accessible avenue for young people requiring assistance in engaging with education, despite funding issues.
“We are funded as an independent Special Assistance School by both state and federal governments,” Neil Whitley said.
“We do not charge any fees to our families.
“There are always financial constraints to our work,” He said.
The Government insists it is putting funding towards early intervention services, with the caveat that tougher laws are required in the short-term to curb reoffending.
“We are investing more than $100 million in additional funds into programs proven to make a difference in breaking the cycle of youth offending,” Minister Linard said.
“The evidence clearly shows that these programs are getting results in diverting young people from crime.
“At the same time and to target serious repeat offenders, the government has introduced new laws and tougher penalties,” she said.
It’s an approach that creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, some say.
The short-term solutions of tougher laws put forward by the Government may have the long-term effect of increasing the number of children caught up in the youth justice system, further increasing the financial demands of detention services across the state.
“Prisons are punishment, and also a training ground that ensures that there’s a long term chance that young people maintain their involvement in the criminal justice system,” Siyavash Doostkhah said.
“The earlier young people get in through the youth justice system, the more likely that they will graduate into the adult justice system, and so, we are really manufacturing criminals.
“And in that way we say that’s how they’re neglectful, because they’re actually spending a ridiculous amount of community funds to make the community less safe,” he said.
Education is one factor, but many of the children charged by Queensland Police last year came from disadvantaged backgrounds.
Experts say the current approach to youth justice issues is a reactive one, leaving out the importance of addressing these underlying factors.
“We’re charging these really vulnerable kids, who are often homeless, often on child safety orders … what we do with this small subset of kids is charge them, and then keep on charging them, and so we just create an impossible situation for them where they’re just practically unable to exit that system,” Professor Walsh said.
“They start off with very minor offending like every child and then they become entrenched in the system, their offending becomes more serious, and therefore their penalties become more serious.
“The bottom line is you have to create a life for them, you have to create a life that looks better than the life that they’re living,” She said.
Neil Whitley agrees.
“Programs aimed at young people need to be respectful to young people, and intentionally focus on their needs and aspirations, not just their offences,” said Neil Whitley.
“We work with four principles in guiding any interaction between people; honesty, safe and legal, respect, and participation.
“Programs will be successful if young people see value to themselves in attending the program, rather than forcing young people to attend programs that they are not invested in,” Mr Whitley said.