Tougher penalties dominate the politics of youth crime, but without addressing how young people – particularly First Nations children – learn, relate and develop, punishment risks deepening the very problems it seeks to solve.

Each time youth crime surges into the headlines, governments promise tougher penalties to “teach them a lesson.” Yet for many of the children caught in this system, particularly First Nations young people, the lesson is not learning, but dislocation. Journalist Kat Wong’s recent report on the surging detention of First Nations children should be read as more than another news item. It is a warning about the direction of Australian politics.

Across Australia, First Nations children remain grotesquely over-represented in detention. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare reports that First Nations young people are detained at vastly higher rates than their peers, and make up the majority of those in custody on any given night.

This is not evidence of a system working. It is evidence of a society repeatedly failing to understand.

The political appeal of harsher sentencing is obvious. It is simple, dramatic, and communicates force and moral certainty.

But force is not the same as effectiveness. Moral certainty is often little more than emotional relief dressed up as policy.

The problem begins with how these children are imagined. The punitive argument assumes a child has entered a shared moral world, understood its rules, weighed consequences, and then chosen to reject them. In many cases, that assumption is absurd.

Many of these young people have learned to function in environments very different from those assumed by the dominant culture, environments shaped by instability, trauma, poverty, racism, fractured attachment and exclusion. Others live between two worlds: one governed by mainstream institutional expectations, the other by community, kinship and survival.

To insist that such a child must simply be taught “our rules” is to miss the point. The issue is not whether rules exist. It is whether the child has lived in a world where those rules are coherent, credible and reachable.

This is why expectations are the first issue and why they are never neutral. Expectations are always embedded in culture.

For Aboriginal children, this creates a deep complexity. The norms of the dominant society are presented as universal, while Indigenous traditions and systems of belonging are often treated as peripheral. Yet the evidence suggests the opposite: that culture, community and Elders are not barriers to justice, but essential to it.

The NSW Advocate for Children and Young People argues for culturally grounded diversion, on-Country programs, Elders-led healing and community-controlled services. These are not soft alternatives. They are attempts to create systems in which expectations are experienced as legitimate.

In this sense, many Aboriginal children must learn to operate in two worlds – understanding both the expectations of their own communities and those of wider Australian society. But that kind of learning does not occur through fear. It requires explanation, modelling, trust and repetition. Without that, punishment becomes not instruction but collision, where children are punished for failing to inhabit a world that was never adequately made intelligible to them.

The second issue is consequences. There is an assumption that harsher consequences produce stronger learning, yet the evidence consistently points elsewhere. What matters far more is predictability, consistency and credibility.

Severe consequences that are delayed or inconsistent are poor teachers, and the current system illustrates this failure starkly. Most young people in detention are on remand, not serving a sentence, and the vast majority leave custody without ever receiving one. In practice, this means children are exposed to the disruption and damage of incarceration without even the coherence of a concluded judicial process. This is not disciplined justice; it is institutional confusion.

The issue is not whether society should respond to harmful behaviour – it must – but whether the response actually produces learning, stability and reduced reoffending.

At the centre of this failure is a deeper misunderstanding: punishment is being asked to do work that only relationship can do. Crude punitive models assume that information and pain will produce change, yet this is rarely how human beings, especially young people actually develop. Change does not occur because someone is told they are wrong. It occurs when they feel sufficiently safe, respected and understood to risk seeing the world differently.

Without that foundation, expectations feel imposed, consequences feel rejecting, and correction is experienced as attack. This is why the NSW Advocate places such consistent emphasis on continuity of relationships, family-centred support, cultural connection and community-based mentoring. Relationship is not the alternative to accountability; it is the medium through which accountability becomes believable.

A more intelligent response would not abandon consequences, but it would redefine them. It would recognise that consequences must be clear, immediate, proportionate and persistent, but not necessarily harsh.

It would acknowledge that expectations must be made real within the child’s cultural and developmental world, rather than imposed as abstract demands from outside it. It would invest in diversion not as an act of leniency, but as a more disciplined method of linking behaviour to responsibility and repair. And it would accept that Aboriginal communities must play a central role in defining how accountability and restoration operate for their own young people, not as a concession, but as a condition of legitimacy.

Ultimately, youth offending is not simply a legal problem to be managed, but a signal of disequilibrium, within the child and within the broader environment in which they are developing. Harsh penalties do not restore that balance. More often, they deepen dislocation, reinforce distrust and confirm a young person’s sense that the wider society is arbitrary and hostile. The task is therefore more demanding than punishment. It requires the creation of environments in which expectations are understandable, consequences are predictable, and relationships are strong enough to carry difficult truths. It requires, in effect, a shift from vengeance to coherence.

That is the lesson Australia still has not learned.