Liberal and Greens senators call for age of criminal responsibility to be lifted in wake of youth justice report | Australia news | The Guardian
Posted by 5ma5her7
Liberal and Greens senators call for age of criminal responsibility to be lifted in wake of youth justice report | Australia news | The Guardian
Posted by 5ma5her7
5 Comments
Submission statement:
Why it’s related to liberalism?
Juvenile delinquency, justice system reform and prison system of youth is all related to liberalism.
My point on this:
It’s a rare cross bench statement from the Greens and LNP, that both advocate to raise criminal responsibility age from 10 to 14 years old nationwide.
From my point of view, I really object this advocate as raising criminal responsibility age would only give underage criminals more leniency and entitle them being more disrespectful towards the justice system. What we really need is a taskforce crackdown on juvenile delinquency that curbs the current raising crime rate, building better surveillance system in public space to increase the efficiency of the police department, and designing specified prison system for children to avoid them from institutionalization and learning from adult criminals.
I don’t know if youth crime is a big issue, but it’s certainly a very visible issue, with major news stories popping up occasionally involving some pretty horrendous things.
It really is kind of a fucked situation. On the one hand, nobody wants to mess up a kid’s life, but on the other hand it seems like lenient responses just massively encourage repeat offences when there’s no actual redress of the causes – absent parents, no discipline etc.
I don’t know if raising the criminal responsibility age would do anything.
I don’t understand politicians sometimes. Quotes below from article, elipsis mine:
The senators said the evidence they had heard made clear that youth crime rates were in fact falling “in stark conflict with the hyped media reporting” and yet more children than ever were being locked up. […] “These laws are making communities less safe”
Perhaps it’s the Guardian reorganizing their statements, but these two quotes right after the other seem directly contradictory. If crime rate is going down while arrests increase, this would seem, prima facie, to suggest that the law is being enforced with increasing efficacy and resulting in safer communities. Obviously, it’s hardly proof of that (you’d want difference-of-differences at least), but if we’re going to engage the data at the level that the quoted politicians appear to be, then the reasonable conclusion here is not theirs.
When I was a kid I never though to commit crime and I knew it was wrong to do so
No state Premier will want to go and hand ammunition to their opponents on a silver plate in the form of being soft on youth crime and as it is its very hard to actually lock up young offenders.
Victoria pulled the brakes on raising the age of criminal responsibility when they realised how politically toxic it is.