A Magistrate has lamented the failures of the Child Safety system when sentencing an indigenous teen who had spent more than two-thirds of his life behind bars.
On 16 August, Beenleigh Magistrate Mac Giolla Ri sentenced 15-year-old Jack Campbell (a pseudonym) after the child pleaded guilty to public nuisance, enter dwelling and commit, and unlawful possession of a handgun offences.
“Over his short life, Jack been held responsible and punished for many, many offences and has been imprisoned many times,” Magistrate Mac Giolla Ri said.
He said it was likely imprisonment and offending would not be occurring if Jack was receiving appropriate care from the State as his guardian.
“A key aspect of Jack’s sentence should be imposing an order that protects the community from the risk that Jack will offend again,” he said.
“Ultimately … it seems to me that the justice system can have only a limited impact of Jack’s offending unless those with responsibility for caring for Jack dramatically improve his care.”
In his reasons published on Monday, Magistrate Mac Giolla Ri said there was evidence that Jack struggled greatly unless he was surrounded by predictability, structure and routine, and that detention, of whatever length, was no deterrent to him.
He outlined how Jack was removed from his mother and placed in State care at two days old, because of concerns of neglect, family violence and substance abuse in his mother’s home. He also outlined the lack of stability for the youngster in that care since.
He stated Jack had been assessed as having Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, autism, intellectual disability, anxiety and depression.
The magistrate’s analysis of Jack’s offending and detention over the past 12 months showed the teenager was capable of being in the community without offending, and the offending depended largely on the care he received in the community and not on the sentences imposed.
“It is quite clear that with appropriate support Jack is quite capable of creating a tolerable future for himself but without that support, he will continue on a sad merry-go-round of offending, incarceration and hopelessness,” Magistrate Mac Giolla Ri said
He said it was not clear that “the residential placement system as it currently exists in Queensland is a viable way to care appropriately for vulnerable children”.
He said the information provided by Child Safety for the case suggested the residential system rarely, if ever, created a placement that provided a sense of security to a child because of factors including rotation of staff and short placements, which led to a limited opportunity to form trusting relationships.
“On one view, my real task is to decide what sentence, in all the circumstances, is appropriate to impose on this intellectually disabled child in order to protect the community from the offences he may commit in the future,” Magistrate Mac Giolla Ri said.
“Unfortunately, the things that can protect the community from the offences Jack may commit in the future are, with one exception, not things that I can impose by way of sentence.”
He said meaningful community protection measures included a long-term placement, appropriate people in Jack’s life to enable him to develop prosocial skills, and access to intensive and continuing therapy.
He said detention in Jack’s case could serve only one legitimate sentencing purpose: incapacitation.
“The question then is how long a fair sentence of detention for the purposes of incapacitation should be for Jack’s offending, in all the circumstances of this case,” he said.
“The appropriate length of incapacitation for an intellectually disabled child is a difficult sentence to calculate and one that might fluctuate (within reason) depending on how robust the arrangements are for his care on release, that is a child who is cared for in a way that will prevent offending does not need to be incapacitated by detention.”
Magistrate Mac Giolla Ri said Jack had served 25 days in custody, but no placement had been arranged for him.
He said given the extreme risk of reoffending, he indicated the teenager would be released in 10 days and appropriate arrangements needed to be made for this.
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