This post is the first in a series of academic posts examining Queensland’s Liberal National Party’s ‘adult crime, adult time’ policy. The posts are designed to ignite thoughtful discussion and debate. Associate Professor Andrew Hemming begins the conversation with a provocative analysis, with Mrs Kirstie Smith set to offer her response in the following post.
By Associate Professor Andrew Hemming, University of Southern Queensland
Introduction: A Policy That Doesn’t Go Far Enough
David Crisafulli’s announcement of the Queensland Liberal National Party’s ‘adult crime, adult time’ policy to combat youth crime has one major limitation: it does not go far enough. The stumbling block is the misleadingly entitled Youth Justice Act 1992 (Qld) which is essentially a ‘get out of jail free card’ to Queensland’s youth. The legislation is based on the outdated neuroscience that juvenile offenders should face lesser sentences than adults because they are liable to make irrational decisions on account of peer pressure and emotional immaturity causing them to engage in high-risk behaviour.
Outdated Neuroscience: A Flawed Foundation for Youth Sentencing
The most recent neuroscience (2022) emanating from the United States is focused on the teenage brain. The old assumption that adolescents were risk machines lacking the decision-making powers of a fully developed prefrontal cortex is being challenged:
There is growing recognition that what was previously seen as immaturity is actually a cognitive, behavioral, and neurological flexibility that allows teens to explore and adapt to their shifting inner and outer worlds.
Zara Abrams, ‘What neuroscience tells us about the teenage brain’ (2022) 53(5) American Psychological Association 66.
This means that neuroscientists are now not viewing the developing brain as broken, immature or contributing to problematic behaviour, but rather as ‘malleable, flexible and promoting many positive aspects of development in adolescence’ (ibid, Abrams).
The Inadequacies of the Youth Justice Act: Protecting Offenders, Not Victims
The inadequacies of the Youth Justice Act are fundamental, commencing with the definition of a child as a person under 18 years of age. As a society, we are prepared to allow a young person to be in unsupervised control of a motor vehicle, a potentially lethal weapon, at 17 years of age, but are content to leave the age of adult criminal responsibility at 18 years of age. Why?
Perversely, under the Youth Justice Act young offenders cannot be identified, yet many seek celebrity status by boasting and posting videos on social media about their successes in stealing cars, destroying other people’s property and the like. Why should the identity of such blatant amoral publicity seekers be protected?
Case Studies: The Price of Leniency
David Crisafulli declared that the soft policing of teenagers and a dearth of serious consequences after committing serious crimes had created ‘a generation of untouchables’. Crisafulli is correct in his assertion. For example, under s 183(1) of the Youth Justice Act the default position is that ‘a conviction is not to be recorded against a child who is found guilty of an offence’. Under limited circumstances, a conviction may be recorded at the discretion of the court.
Similarly, under s 155 of the Youth Justice Act, mandatory sentence provisions in any other Queensland legislation are inapplicable and the court must disregard them. If an adult is found guilty of murder, under s 305 of the Criminal Code 1899 (Qld), the mandatory sentence is imprisonment for life with a non-parole period of 20 years. However, if a 17-year-old is convicted of murder, s 155 of the Youth Justice Act requires the court to disregard s 305 of the Criminal Code 1899 (Qld). In its place, s 176(3)(a) of the Youth Justice Act sets out the default position for a life offence of a period of imprisonment of not more than 10 years. Only if the court considers the offence ‘to be a particularly heinous offence having regard to all the circumstances’ may the court sentence a ‘child’ murderer to more than 10 years imprisonment. The teenager aged 17 years and 8 months when he murdered Emma Lovell was found by the court to have committed a particularly heinous offence and was given a head sentence of 14 years imprisonment but is only required to serve 70 per cent of that in custody and will be released in 2032.
A further high-profile example of the leniency of the court when sentencing two juvenile offenders under the Youth Justice Act can be seen in the violent knife attack on former rugby union great Toutai Kefu and his family in their Brisbane home in 2021. Before breaking into the Kefu home, one of the boys remarked: ‘If someone wakes up, just stab them’. Despite the judge finding the stabbing attack was particularly heinous, the two offenders were sentenced in June by Justice Peter Davis to seven and eight years respectively, but due to ‘special circumstances’ are only required to serve 50% of their sentences. To boot neither had a conviction recorded. Unsurprisingly, the Queensland Attorney-General Yvette D’Ath has lodged an appeal over the sentences on the ground they are manifestly inadequate, especially given the finding the offences were particularly heinous and in light of the maximum possible life penalty.
Critics of the ‘Adult Crime, Adult Time’ Policy: Missing the Mark?
After Crisafulli announced his ‘adult crime, adult time’ policy, the media gave prominence to the predictable chorus of disapproval from the usual sources. Queensland Council for Civil Liberties vice president Terry O’Gorman attacked the policy because the necessary supporting policy work had not been completed:
Law and Order slogans are one thing. Doing the hard work to fix Queensland’s juvenile justice system is quite another.
In the same vein, Queensland Law Society president Rebecca Fogerty said the policy would do little to address the systemic issues at the root of youth crime offending:
Calling for longer sentences in a struggling detention system will not fix the problem of youth crime. It will need to more overcrowding, more violence, more lockdowns, less education and less rehabilitation. This will compound the issues we know give rise to serious repeat offending.
Of course, in the eyes of such critics the blame is never to be attached to the individual violent youths involved in these serious offences, but on their disadvantaged backgrounds and their experience of domestic violence. Therefore, the proposed solution is always allegedly to be found in vast public expenditure on social housing, better schools, more welfare support systems and a myriad of programs all to be paid for by the long-suffering taxpayer.
It is unrealistic and disingenuous to pretend such massive public expenditure will ever eventuate and the community has lost patience with the endless revolving door policy of serial youth offenders. As the then Queensland Attorney-General, Shannon Fentiman observed in 2021:
We know that 46 per cent of youth crime is committed by a small group of recidivist offenders.
Ironically, existing Queensland government policies, such as school exclusions, are contributing to the problem. There is a documented progression whereby short informal exclusions develop into longer, formal suspensions because exclusionary school discipline does not address the wider factors underlying the anti-social behaviour of children and can reinforce such behaviour (Inquiry into Suspension, Exclusion and Expulsion Processes in South Australian Government Schools, Final Report, The Centre for Inclusive Education, 26 October 2020). Exclusionary school discipline contributes to the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’.
Conclusion: Repealing the Youth Justice Act—A Necessary Step
Any proper risk analysis points to one sensible conclusion: the need to take such violent offenders out of circulation in the community for which they clearly have no respect. The alleged outcomes outlined by Fogerty will not eventuate if suitable additional youth detention centres are built, which does represent expenditure the community will support. Belatedly, the Queensland government has recognised this reality by finally committing to build two new youth detention centres in Woodford and Cairns, while also constructing the Wacol Youth Remand Centre which is scheduled to open at the end of 2024.
In sum, the Youth Justice Act 1992 (Qld) needs to be repealed and more appropriate legislation introduced. Youth justice does not equal victim justice under the current Youth Justice Act.
Author
Andrew Hemming is an Associate Professor in Law at the University of Southern Queensland, based at the Toowoomba campus. A seasoned teacher and prolific author, he specialises in evidence and criminal law.
Andrew is known for his rigorous scholarship and passion for engaging in robust debate.
You should be ashamed Andrew. Where are all your citations? I’m quite certain the QLS and Bar Association would love to debate you on this. Not to mention the Human Rights commission and the United Nations. Is Toowoomba so uncivilized?
As editor of Lawfully, I want to clarify that the citation format was my editorial decision, not Associate Professor Hemming’s. The sources are provided via links in the text, which was my stylistic choice for this debate series. Both parts of this academic debate examining Queensland’s ‘adult crime, adult time’ policy are now available, presenting different perspectives on this issue. We welcome robust discussion of the arguments presented, provided it focuses on the substance of the debate rather than personal criticism.
Locking Up Kids Is Not Justice: It’s Just Colonialism with WiFi
Let’s have a real conversation about youth crime, shall we? The kind that doesn’t start and end with “throw them in jail” or “adult crime, adult time” sloganeering that would make even a colonial magistrate nod in approval.
Because here’s the thing: Australia’s youth justice system isn’t broken—it’s working exactly as it was designed. And that’s the problem.
From its colonial foundations to its shiny new youth detention centres in Woodford and Wacol, the system still clings to a 19th-century belief: that you can punish people into being better. Or failing that, at least make them disappear for a while.
But as any teenager with access to TikTok could tell you—this doesn’t work. Not in 2025, not in 1825, and certainly not in a country trying to pretend it’s post-colonial.
The Penal Colony Never Left
Let’s not forget: modern Australia was founded not on constitutional ideals or human rights, but on convict labour, blackbirding, and genocide. Prisons weren’t built to rehabilitate—they were built to contain, control and coerce.
Still today, our justice system looks suspiciously like a control mechanism for people we’d rather not deal with: the poor, the brown, the traumatised, and yes, the kids caught in systems of neglect and dysfunction.
When Andrew Hemming rails against the “inadequacies” of the Youth Justice Act 1992 (Qld), he’s really lamenting that we no longer throw 17-year-olds into penal servitude. He argues that shielding youth offenders from conviction records and mandatory sentencing is “perverse”. Personally, I’d call it basic human decency.
But let’s humour the premise: that if we just made the system tougher, harsher, louder—youth crime would magically dissolve into nothingness, like sweat off a magistrate’s brow in an un-air-conditioned courtroom.
But Why Are Kids Committing Crime?
Here’s a wild idea: instead of asking how hard we can hit kids with the law, why not ask why they’re breaking it in the first place?
Most youth crimes aren’t the result of moral collapse or TikTok-induced nihilism. They’re the predictable result of:
Families doing it tough under rising cost-of-living pressure,
School systems that suspend rather than support,
Parents criminalised for trying to discipline their kids,
Intergenerational trauma wrapped in poverty, neglect and systems that punish rather than protect.
We’ve created a society where a kid might break into a house not for kicks, but because there’s no food at home. Or because mum’s been evicted. Or because some adult promised him $300 to do it—and he figures that’s a better deal than another day at school where he’s told he’s “too hard to teach.”
This isn’t rocket science. Or even neuroscience.
Speaking of Brains: They’re Still Developing
Neuroscience was all the rage in youth justice circles a few years ago. You know, the whole “the prefrontal cortex isn’t fully formed until 25” explanation for why young people are impulsive, reckless and unable to fully grasp consequences.
Then Zara Abrams (2022) dropped a truth bomb in the American Psychological Association: adolescents aren’t just broken adults in training—they’re actually neurologically flexible, adaptive, and learning how to manage their shifting internal and external worlds.
Translation: teens are weird, chaotic, and emotionally intense—but that’s development, not deviance.
So let’s stop pretending a 17-year-old with a developing brain and a hard life should be sentenced like a 40-year-old mafia don.
Prisons: Now with 100% More Recidivism!
Let’s talk data.
Over 60% of youth released from detention in Australia will reoffend within a year (AIHW, 2022). That’s not just failure—that’s institutionalised failure with a million-dollar price tag.
Compare that to diversion programs like Youth Justice Conferencing, which cut reoffending by up to 30% (BOCSAR, 2010). Or community-based supports that cost a fraction of what it takes to lock someone up and leave them worse off.
Prison, it turns out, is a great place to make friends, lift weights, and return to court with a few new tattoos and a better criminal network. But it’s a terrible place to become a better human being.
Fix the Family, Not Just the Kid
So what’s the alternative?
Invest in family support instead of surveillance. Build wraparound services that work with schools, communities, and health systems to keep kids connected. Provide culturally safe spaces, like the Youth Koori Court, where young people can actually see justice done with them, not to them.
And for the love of all that is rational and research-based—stop criminalising poverty. Taking kids out of struggling homes and putting them in cages is not justice. It’s social failure dressed up in legal robes.
The Path Forward: Smart Justice, Not Slogans
In 2021, then Attorney-General Shannon Fentiman admitted that 46% of youth crime in Queensland is committed by a small group of recidivists. Instead of asking what trauma and neglect those kids have experienced, Hemming wants to lock them up for longer. That’s like responding to a house fire by installing more smoke alarms—after it burns down.
“Adult crime, adult time” sounds tough, but it’s lazy policy. If being tough on crime worked, America would be the safest country on Earth and Queensland wouldn’t need to build more detention centres.
The truth is, punishment is the cheapest form of justice—but it’s also the least effective.
Final Thought
Prisons were designed by the British Empire to crush the poor and the rebellious. They’ve evolved since then—now they have vending machines and video conferencing—but the logic is the same.
If we want to reduce youth crime, we need to tackle poverty, disconnection, structural racism, and family stress. We need to treat kids like potential, not problems. And we need to remember that justice isn’t just about consequences—it’s about connection.
Because if the system keeps failing to ask why—then no amount of “adult time” will make up for the lost childhoods we keep sentencing into silence.