Comment on Discussion Thread: Friday, 21 March 2025
RustyRaven@aussie.zone 1 week agoI doubt the changes they are making will make anything better, if anything it will make the problem worse.
The problem seems to be kids, and its pretty rare to get kids from decent homes & upbringings doing that type of stuff. Almost always they will have their own history of trauma and it is likely that feeling safe in their own home is something they have never experienced for themselves. They get dumped into underfunded child protection system that often exacerbates the problems instead of really helping, and puts them in contact with other troubled kids where they band together into gangs that may be the closest thing to family and safety they can get. Putting them in juvenile detention just makes that issue worse and solidifies criminal activity as a life course instead of a life phase they may be able to get over.
In a lot of ways this sort of offending is the canary in the coal mine for problems in society as a whole. There will always be some dodgy individuals that choose to do the wrong thing, but when it is a rising tide like this you really need to look at how your whole society is working and make changes there if you want to fix things. Unfortunately part of the social problems that cause this (in my opinion) is a general callousness towards individuals and unwillingness to pay for “soft” solutions like improving education, access to food and housing, counselling services etc. Instead we want “hard on crime” options of locking people up (generally at much greater expense) and then we wonder why we end up with hardened criminals.
dumblederp@aussie.zone 1 week ago
Plenty of rich kids with heaps of opportunities wind up being absolute criminal shits with no respect for society. It may skew towards the ignored kids of meth heads but it’s far from exclusive.
RustyRaven@aussie.zone 1 week ago
There are always going to be some people who choose to do the wrong thing no matter what, but there are a far larger number that could go either way.
It’s also not just a matter of rich or poor - rich parents can be shit, poor parents can be great. And no matter what your own parents are like the wider society has a massive impact - that ignored kid of meth heads could have extended family that care for them and support from the wider community to make better choices themselves and that will make a huge difference. Or you might have a decent family, who have some sort of bad luck - maybe a disabilty or death in the family - and without social support that situation can snowball. Maybe the parent can’t work, so they lose housing, which leads to the kids being taken off them and put in foster care, with all the problems associated with that, broken schooling etc.
I used to work for Legal Aid in the Children’s Court section and there were almost no kids that had criminal issues without having child protection issues first.
dumblederp@aussie.zone 1 week ago
I’d argue that the rich kids don’t wind up at legal aid. My grandfather got my dad out of so many court cases when in fact my father should’ve faced some sort of punishment for multiple cases of theft, domestic abuse and dealing. As he always got away with it he never had to face any consequences which may have encouraged him to consider the type of person he was.
RustyRaven@aussie.zone 1 week ago
True, they probably don’t. But the reality is that over half the kids in custody have had child protection orders.
There have always been some people who do the wrong thing regardless of their circumstances and there always will be, but how we structure our society has a big impact on how many of the people that could choose differntly choose to break the law. And that’s not just poor people vs. rich. Allowing the rich to get away with doing the wrong thing without consequence is as much a part of the problem as how many poor people there are and the way they are treated. A dysfunctional society creates dysfunctional people, and any solution that only looks at the individuals and not the whole society won’t be very effective in creating change.