Music can provide incarcerated youth with opportunities to build confidence, engage with learning, develop social skills, and and redefine themselves from young offenders to young artists.
In one year, an average 566 children between 10 and 13 were in detention. Almost 70% were Indigenous children.
The youth justice system should consider alternative community-based models that better recognise the ability for young people to abandon crime.
Dean Lewins/AAP
Australia should look to the New Zealand model, which has a strong focus on community, and recognises that the majority of young people grow-out of participating in crime.
Vulnerable children caught up in the criminal justice system can suffer long-lasting consequences, even from a short period behind bars.
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Children are still being held in police cells and juvenile detention for low-range offences, under alarming conditions. Here’s how their mental health and future prospects suffer.
Images like this one aired by the ABC’s Four Corners programme helped trigger a Royal Commission - but its recommendations have still not been acted on.
ABC Four Corners
One year after the Royal Commission into Northern Territory child detention recommended big changes, little of substance has been done to tackle the problem by the NT Labor government.
Sirley Silveira Paixao, an immigrant from Brazil seeking asylum, kisses her 10-year-old son Diego Magalhaes, after he is released from immigration detention in Chicago on July 5, 2018.
(AP Photo/Charles Rex Arbogast, File)
Psychotropic medication is ‘pharmaceutical violence’ against migrant children and other incarcerated youth throughout the United States. Drug addiction is one consequence.
Women with children in their arms protested the separation of families seeking protection at U.S. borders, as DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen addressed a Senate subcommittee.
AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais
Research reveals that the factors that put youth at risk of sexual assault while in custody are significantly different from those that put adults at risk in prison.
The detail of the government’s reforms remains elusive four months after commissioners Margaret White and Mick Gooda handed down their final report.
AAP
Implementing the Don Dale royal commission’s recommendations will test the capacity to redress the ‘systemic and shocking failures’ it identified.
If youths with brain impairment had been identified and supported early, their entry into the justice system could have been avoided entirely.
from shutterstock.com
New research assessing young people in WA detention found 89% were severely impaired in at least one area of brain function. One in three had fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD).
A royal commission has recommended that the Don Dale detention centre be closed.
Neda Vanovac/AAP
The Don Dale royal commission’s capacity to make lasting change lies with the government implementing its recommendations.
To improve on a building like the Don Dale centre, design that properly considers human behaviour needs to take priority for its replacement.
Neda Vanovac/AAP
Architecture can affect behaviour and the choices we make. The brief is out for a centre to replace the Don Dale facility, but word is, it’s ‘a disgrace’. We can do much better.
Protests after death of a 36-year-old woman in custody at immigration detention facility in Arizona.
AP Photo/Ricardo Arduengo, File
What’s shocking about the treatment of detainees in youth detention is not so much the treatment of those vulnerable people, but that it is happening in a wealthy country like Australia.