DEAR News Of The Area,

THE NSW National (Mining) Party has been making a lot of noise lately about “youth crime”.

In their quest for relevance they have chosen a campaign against a group that we all have a legitimate right to fear: young people!

I blame rock and roll myself but that might be just showing my age.

All of the proposals they put forward to address the issue are counter productive and will not make people safer.

They want to put more people into jail, at an earlier age, when all the evidence shows that this makes for more criminals and a more unsafe society.

More jails come at an enormous cost.

A new jail means a hospital is not built.

More prison officers mean less teachers.

It all has to be paid for at the expense of something else.

The new Northern Territory government can now boast that fully one percent, one in every hundred, of territorians are now incarcerated.

This is yet another example of simple solutions to complex problems.

We cannot arrest our way out of a supposed crime wave.

To deal with the problem we must deal with many intersecting issues such as generational trauma, insecure housing, poverty, drugs, alcohol, gambling, education, social supports, etc. A lot of things to fit onto a corflute at a rally.

Why do jails have such a poor record with regards to recidivism?

Why did the NSW government cut all the education facilities out of the prisons?

Prisons have a poor record of keeping the community safer if around 50 percent of inmates just end up going back in within two years.

We need policies that keep children out of prison and the social supports that work to this end.

We need more family violence shelters and support for families. We need to actively address men’s violence.

We need to have more “halfway” houses to help people integrate back into society at the end of their sentences.

We need to work on socialising people in prison before they are released.

These things are hard. They are complex.

They require us to examine the causes of social problems and act on them.

Yet we can’t even get agreement to stop the exposure of children to gambling advertising. Really!?

So why do the Nats resort to a fear campaign?

Is it that they have no positive policies to put forward?

A simple answer (to a complex question) is that they know that a fear campaign will always trump reason.

Fear campaigns work.

I believe we need to embrace children and their well being knowing that our primary purpose in life is to nurture them into well adjusted adults who will, in turn, nurture their children.

Regards,
Peter SOBEY.