By Clancy Dane

Dear Minister Boothby,

Congratulations on your election win and appointment as the new attorney-general. I expect that you understand the importance of quick and decisive action from here.

Every day on the campaign your party promised to keep Territorians safe from crime. As the principal lawyer of the largest specialist criminal law firm in the Territory, I wanted to share a few insights.

You need to close Don Dale and open the new youth detention centre as an absolute priority. I’ll let you in on something most people outside the youth justice system don’t understand about why our youth courts look ‘soft’; according to the law, courts are required to consider whether they are sending the child somewhere safe where their welfare will be adequately provided for.

Every person working in the youth justice space understands that Don Dale is an appalling excuse for a youth detention centre. Unscheduled lockdowns, akin to the solitary confinement of children, are routine. Self-harm is rife. The facilities are deficient.

Children are coming out of there more damaged, more traumatised, and more likely to offend. Defence lawyers can point to this and ask that their clients be released on bail because of it.

If you want to put a stop to the ‘revolving door’ of youth justice, and ask the courts to impose ‘just’ consequences for youth crime, you need to give courts a youth prison which isn’t criminogenic and inhumane. You need to urgently give courts the ability to send children to a purpose built facility designed to make them come out less likely to commit crimes.

We know that the facility is almost finished, nothing is more important to reducing crime in the NT than getting it up, running, and functioning effectively. If we can find pathways out of crime for these kids the Territory will become safer immediately. The returns will be compounded year-on-year.

With the new facility already built you could close Don Dale in the next few weeks. More than that your legacy can be not just the person who closed it, but also as the person who transformed youth justice into something which actually functions to make us safe.

We need to focus on consequences for children, not retribution against them. The consequences of youth offending must necessarily involve giving them every opportunity to walk the path which leads away from future victims of crime. The new facility represents a long-awaited opportunity to make that happen.

Your proposal to send youth justice responsibilities from Territory Families to Community Corrections is a misguided one.

Please consider the financial and logistical costs that are going to be involved in such a massive transfer of responsibilities between government departments. Which particular department employs youth justice officers surely matters far less than what they actually do, and Territory Families already have departmental responsibility for many of the same children in the child protection space.

I question whether those resources might be better spent on improving Territory Families led youth justice?

What we (desperately) need is kids coming out of the youth justice system less likely to commit further offences. The best way to do that is to focus on improving what exists, not throwing good money away by playing musical chairs between government departments.

Lowering the age of criminal responsibility to 10 also won’t make us safer.

We are talking about a very small number of 10 and 11-year-olds who you are making the scapegoats for the failures of adults to address crime. They typically come from unimaginable poverty, and unless them, and their families are properly supported, whether or not their actions are deemed ‘criminal’ will have little bearing on their choices.

Diverting these children into intensive supports remains the correct approach.

Enormous resources were spent less than a decade ago on a royal commission into the protection and detention of children in the Northern Territory. Valuable and hard lessons were learned. Let’s not forget them.

Finally I would implore you to urgently review the increasing delays we are seeing entwine themselves into the Local Court.

Those who work day-to-day in the Local Court know it is in a silent crisis. Matters listed on a particular day are routinely not even being reached, including people who have not yet appeared before the court and are waiting to make a bail application.

Cases which could be adjourned for a few days can’t get a date for weeks. Prosecutions are dragging on. Case management orders are being ignored with little consequence. I have to constantly remind my clients that the wheels of justice move very slowly here.

It wasn’t always like this. When cases take so long to finish its little wonder we have such a high remand population and so much offending on bail.

There is an old adage in the courts that justice delayed is justice denied. Right now justice is being denied to defendants, victims, their families, and the broader community alike through pervasive delay.

Eventually an innocent person on remand will take their own life after spending too long in prison awaiting hearing. It would be much better if this situation was to be reviewed by you, rather than the coroner.

Clancy Dane is the principal lawyer of Territory Criminal Lawyers and the former vice president of the Criminal Lawyers Association of the Northern Territory.