I am a criminal defence lawyer. I know that means some people will read this article and decide what I think before they read a word of it. I represent people who have been accused of, and sometimes convicted of, doing awful and sometimes heinous things to other human beings.
So perhaps it is worth saying plainly: I am not “pro-criminal”. I am not opposed to consequences. I am not opposed to prison, and I am certainly not opposed to protecting victims and protecting the community.
I became a criminal lawyer by accident; I stayed a criminal lawyer because I truly believe the work matters. I also suspect very few of my colleagues go into criminal law because they think it is the path to riches. The hours can be brutal. The work is emotionally exhausting. I do it because I quickly learnt that what happens in those places matters.
We sit in watch-houses in the early hours of the morning. We visit people in prison. We sit through courtrooms hearing the worst things people have done to one another. We sit with victims and hear what an offence has done to them. We tell families that someone they love is going to prison. We sit across the table from people who have caused extraordinary harm. We see addiction, violence, mental illness, trauma, grief and sometimes just plain human cruelty.
While we are doing all of this, we are not trying to be the enemies of the criminal justice system. We are trying to be one of its most important safeguards. When the State comes for a person’s liberty, the defence lawyer stands in the way – not to obstruct justice, but to ensure that justice is done lawfully.
Something that is often forgotten is that we also see that the line between victim and offender is not always as clear as people imagine. Many people who commit offences have themselves been victims of crime. Some have grown up surrounded by violence, abuse, neglect or exploitation. Others have been harmed by people they trusted, sometimes repeatedly and from a very young age. That does not excuse the harm they later cause, and it does not diminish the experience of their victims. But it is often an important part of understanding how someone came to be before the court.
A person can be both a victim and an offender. Recognising that is not an attempt to avoid responsibility. It is an acknowledgement that people’s lives are complicated, that harm can be passed from one person to another, and that any serious attempt to prevent future offending must address the harm and trauma that may sit behind it.
But the longer you stay in this job, you also see something that is harder to explain to someone who has never worked inside the system.
You see people change.
You see people who genuinely regret what they have done. You see parents desperate to get their children back. You see someone who has spent years in prison finally decide that they do not want to come back. You see someone get a job, find somewhere to live, repair a relationship and start doing the ordinary things that most of us take for granted.
And you see the criminal justice system at its best and at its worst.
You see it protect people. You see it hold people accountable. You see it give victims a voice. You see it prevent injustice.
But you also see a system that sometimes mistakes punishment for progress. You see people spend years in custody without receiving the intervention they need, only to walk out the prison gates at the end of their sentence and return to exactly the circumstances that contributed to their offending in the first place.
That is not being soft on crime. It is not being soft on offenders.
It is recognising something that I think is sometimes lost in the political debate: criminal justice is ultimately about people.
It’s about the victim and the offender, who often, may also have been a victim.
It’s about their families.
It about the police officers, the corrective services officers, the lawyers, the magistrates and judges who are required to make incredibly difficult decisions every day, knowing that those decisions often not going to please everyone.
Most importantly, it’s also about the community to which almost every prisoner will return.
I want victims to get justice. I want dangerous people kept away from the community when it is necessary. I want people who commit serious offences to face serious consequences.
But I also want fewer people to become victims in the first place.
And after spending years watching the system up close, I think we should be prepared to ask a very simple question of every new law we introduce in the name of community safety: is this going to work.
A law does not become more effective simply because it is tougher or because it makes for a good press conference, and the success of a criminal justice system is not and should not, be measured by how many people we imprison.
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