Children need care, not cages and adult prison sentences
By Monique Hurley
In the same week as announcing new safety measures for women and children, Victoria’s premier has decided the state’s most marginalised children should be ripped away from their communities and condemned to a bleak future, writes the Human Rights Law Centre’s Monique Hurley.
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Across the country we must ask ourselves, why are we demonising children? We all want our children to grow up in playgrounds and schoolyards, but after years of fearmongering and scapegoat reporting by the media, governments across the country apparently think it is okay to lock children up for life in prison.
In Victoria, the Allan Government’s hypocrisy was laid bare last week. In the same week as announcing new safety measures for women and children, Premier Allan decided that the state’s most marginalised children should be ripped away from their communities and condemned to a bleak future behind bars.
Reckless and rushed, the Premier’s proposed Adult Time for Violent Crime laws will see children aged 14 and above face adult sentences in adult courts in certain cases, and remove the rule that prison for children should be the ‘last resort’.
The children who will be pipelined into prisons as a result of these laws need to be supported to learn from their mistakes, not caged and subjected to adult prison sentences. There is no circumstance where we should condemn a child to a lifetime in prison.
Copied from the racist handbook of the Crisafulli Government in Queensland, the laws are part of a national race to the bottom. Regressive reform like this is not designed to make communities safer – it is calculated to scapegoat children in order to obfuscate the government’s defunding of services that provide invaluable supports to children in the community.
Instead of doing the work to grapple with what causes children to be criminalised in the first place, governments across the country are doubling down and capitulating to the calls of commercial media and shock jocks to punish children for their own policy failures.
Applying adult penalties to children is not only cruel, but flies in the face of our international human rights obligations. It also calls into question compliance with Victoria’s own Charter of Human Rights which provides that children should be treated in an age-appropriate way.
Equivalent laws in Queensland were so extreme that they required the state’s own human rights protections to be overridden and contravene the Convention on the Rights of the Child. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture called the laws “incompatible with basic child rights”.
The record shows that reforms like those proposed will have discriminatory impacts and will exacerbate the mass incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, who are already being funnelling into prisons at alarming and unacceptable rates by a criminal legal system already bent towards injustice.
Overseas, many countries are actively working to reduce the number of children being locked away in prisons in recognition of the fact that prisons are not places where children should grow up. The evidence is clear that prevention is more effective than punishment and that prisons do not provide the supports children need to get their life back on track.
Last year, a child caged away in a youth prison pleaded with the National Children’s Commissioner: We need help way earlier. Informed by the voices of 150 children and consistent with the findings from decades of research, the report confirmed that the tendency of governments to rely on punitive approaches, including locking children up, does not work to keep the community safe.
When a child does something seriously wrong, it means something has gone seriously wrong for that child. The timing of the Victorian Government’s announcement in the same week that they are purporting to protect women and children through reform of the family violence system completely fails to recognise that the children at risk of being caught in the net of the criminal legal system are victim/survivors of family violence, abuse, trauma or neglect and have often been failed by the state’s so-called ‘child protection’ system. All imprisonment does is entrench inequality and perpetuate cycles of harm.
The proposed laws also come after the Allan Government revised the state’s bail laws earlier in the year so that more children could be warehoused in prisons on remand, and announced they would reopen the decommissioned Malmsbury youth prison – a hotspot for human rights violations. Abuse thrives behind bars and Victoria’s prison watchdog, in taking an extraordinary step in opposing the proposed laws, is already concerned about escalating complaints regarding conditions in the state’s youth prisons.
Opposed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, human rights, legal, child rights and civil liberties experts alongside the Victorian Ombudsman and Children’s Commissioners across the country, these regressive laws should be scrapped. Instead of pouring money into prisons, the Allan Government should be acting bravely in ensuring that every child has a secure home, is engaged at school and is connected with family and community to give every child the best chance at the brightest future.
About the author
Monique Hurley is an associate legal director at the Human Rights Law Centre where she works in solidarity with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations to call out racial injustice and alongside people with lived experience of incarceration to hold governments to account for the mistreatment of people behind bars. She is also a lecturer at Melbourne Law School and on the board of Vacro. Monique has a Bachelor of Arts/Law from Monash University and a Master of Laws from Columbia University where she studied as a Fulbright scholar.
Thanks for this article. There's a guy here on substack named Vic Myers of The Resistance. He's gives advice on voting and platforms candidates that are not of the normal political ilk. He was a prison guard for 17 years and he also said there were many young men in there that shouldn't have been. They did something stupid and now they have a record that will follow them for the rest of their lives. It will interfere with getting a job and renting an apartment. This is what I believe sends them back to committing crimes. Some of the young men just needed someone to care enough to help them before things got worse. He actually says he quit because the system wasn't trying to "rehabilitate" them they were basically just warehoused. None of the guards tried to protect them from other prisoners so they would lose time off for good behaviour when they retaliated. A lose lose situation.
This piece captures what decades of clinical work have shown: when a child causes harm, it is almost always a reflection of the harm they’ve already endured. Early adversity, developmental trauma, disrupted attachment, and chronic instability don’t disappear when a child turns 14. They intensify. And punitive responses only reinforce the very patterns that led them to crisis.
Adult sentencing policies ignore what brain science has made unequivocally clear — adolescents are still developing the capacity for impulse control, emotional regulation, and long-term decision-making. A system that responds to trauma with incarceration doesn’t just fail children; it manufactures future suffering for entire communities.
The stories shared here including those from former prison staff remind us that when rehabilitation is absent and hope is removed, we create conditions that perpetuate cycles of harm instead of breaking them!
Children need consistency, treatment, safety, and adults who see their potential, not cages. Thank you for shedding light on what too many policymakers seem determined to ignore.