The premier's $204 million youth justice strategy will detain young offenders in secure facilities like the former Malmsbury centre to deliver schooling, life skills, and addiction treatments. Human rights advocates, Indigenous legal groups, and union leaders have strongly condemned the initiative as punitive rather than therapeutic. The broader law-and-order push also allocates $70 million to hire police reservists to reopen closed stations alongside $300 million for facility construction and renovations. However, internal critics fear the hardline pivot will fail to rescue historically low primary voting numbers.
Key points
Legal, human rights, and union groups argue detaining young offenders exacerbates disadva…: Legal, human rights, and union groups argue detaining young offenders exacerbates disadvantage rather than delivering genuine therapeutic rehabilitation.
Progressive Labor members fear adopting hardline justice measures alienates the party's b…: Progressive Labor members fear adopting hardline justice measures alienates the party's base and benefits the conservative opposition.
Right-aligned Labor MPs believe the government's tough-on-crime shift represents an inade…: Right-aligned Labor MPs believe the government's tough-on-crime shift represents an inadequate response that arrived too late for outer-suburban communities.
Sources checked by our analysis pipeline: 1
Until December last year, Meena Singh was the Victorian commissioner for Aboriginal children and young people, a role that saw her advocating for some of the state’s most vulnerable children.
She had held the role since 2022. In all that time, she says, nobody from the Victorian government had approached her with a proposal like the one the Victorian premier, Ben Carroll, announced last week: a $204m “tough love” plan to send children who commit low and mid-level offences to secure facilities, including the former Malmsbury youth justice centre, for schooling, drug and alcohol treatment and life skills.
“If you are on the trajectory of committing crime like carrying a knife or looking to steal cars, you can expect to be detained and be put in this new mandatory detention in Malmsbury,” Carroll told reporters last Sunday.
“We have seen how, where you break the cycle, it can turn young lives around.”
Singh says she was “quite horrified” by the announcement.
“It is very misleading to try and paint the imprisonment of children as therapeutic,” Singh, now a professor at…
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