We need to urgently respond to the youth justice review survey if we are to stop the LNP criminalising more young people. Please share this post with 10 of your friends and get everyone you know to complete the survey!

The Attorney General has been using mainstream media to create an atmosphere of fear, softening the public for the introduction of draconian laws targeting young people in Queensland.

Please take the one minute it takes to complete the survey and share with your friends. The survey is only online for the rest of this week, so we need to urgently play and win the numbers game.

YANQ has created a 'how to' guide to help you complete the survey (download below).

Survey link - https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/qldyouthjusticesurvey

Over the next few weeks, YANQ will be shifting around the office space and getting rid of a lot of excess furniture in the process. Please get in touch if your organisation or office could do with any furniture and you are able to pick up from West End. Any donations or creative in-kind ideas (why not offer to write 5 letters to the LNP!?) welcome. Contact us on [email protected] or 3844 7713.

This article was first published in the Journey magazine of the Queensland Synod of the Uniting Church in Australia.

It's been a long time coming. In June 2009, then Queensland Opposition Deputy Leader Lawrence Springborg flagged huge changes to the Juvenile Justice Act under a LNP Government in Queensland. Three years later, a newly elected LNP Government with a massive majority quietly passed the most far-reaching amendments to the Act in over two decades, removing detention as a last resort, scrapping Youth Justice Conferencing and Special Circumstances Courts, and introducing army-style 'Boot Camps' as an option for magistrates.

Back in 2009, Springborg said the amendments were to be implemented to “uphold community expectations on how young offenders should be sentenced”. A scan through the Courier Mail archives of commentary around offences committed by young people quickly shows community expectations over many years can be summed up by the 'do the crime, do the time' cliché. Articles on youth crime are largely underpinned by an irrational community fear of 'youth' which does not match the reality of rates of crime committed (which is actually decreasing according to a recent Youth Advocacy Centre review).

The newly scrapped Youth Justice Conferencing was one of the most successful programs in the Juvenile Justice system, with numerous evaluations attesting to the satisfaction of all involved – victims, perpetrators, co-ordinators and Departmental Staff. Unfortunately, the program was quickly dismissed by the LNP as being part of “Labor's soft-on-crime” platform. The problems with the politicisation of what works best to reduce recidivism and with the LNP's one-size-fits-all, tough-on-crime approach are manifest. In the words of Associate Professor of Criminology Robyn Lincoln, sending young people to detention, or in the best case Boot Camps, is based on “a fundamental lack of appreciation of the causes of crime, [rather] it signals a vengeful justice system”.

And this should be the real concern around youth crime. Pandering to community expectations that do not understand what actually works for young people, and rather seek revenge based on incorrect and hysterical assumptions of youth crime, does nothing to change the actual rates of offending amongst young people, nor make the community safer.