Logan has been branded by premier David Crisafulli a “warzone” under seige from criminal children.
But criminologists disagree, and refute proposed legislation that would see youth offenders serving adult prison sentences.
Newly-released data shows Logan has the third-highest number of children repeatedly committing serious crimes in Queensland.
These 46 children are considered “serious repeat offenders”.
But out of the 15 police districts in Queensland, Logan’s youth are committing only the tenth-highest number of offences – around 2000 so far this year.
That is just over 4% of all offences commited in the city.
In comparison, juveniles on the Gold Coast committed more than 5100 offences in the same time, with only 28 serious repeat offenders.
South Brisbane had the highest number of youth offences – 7600 – but seven less serious repeat offenders than Logan.
The state government released these figures, but refused to share the same data from previous years.
Dr Ross Homel, an emeritus professor at Griffith University and a highly-accomplished criminologist whose research focused on the prevention of crime, said the number of young people offending was decreasing year on year.
In fact, he argued there was no youth crime “crisis”.
“If their is a crime crisis, it is an adult crime crisis,” Dr Homel said.
“Even on the worst of days, only 15% of crime is committed by juveniles.”
He said adults were responsible for the remaining 85%.
A seven-day crime-crackdown in Logan last week saw 194 people arrested – almost 30 arrests a day.
Only 10% of those arrested were under the age of 18.
Dr Homel said Logan was likely producing a higher number of serious-repeat offenders because of the socio-economic disadvantages, including access to education, faced in many suburbs.
He said the new government’s “adult crime, adult time” legislation was not a solution to this.
“Deterrence doesn’t work on young people… because they don’t think rationally,” Dr Homel said.
He said early prevention was the best method.
Dr Homel and his colleagues recently completed a 20-year study which investigated the effectiveness of early prevention.
It involved providing a sample of 543 children from a disadvantaged region in Brisbane with specialised communication and family support throughout their schooling.
This resulted in “dramatic reductions in youth offending”, according to Griffith.
The conclusion: family support should be combined with both high-quality, early-in-life preventive initiatives and with evidence-based child and parent programs in late primary school.
Other successful ways of reducing youth crime has been through Queensland police’s Youth Co-Responder teams, which involved police officers and youth justice workers teaming up to prevent at-risk youth from offending.
The initiative, first launched in 2020 in Logan, saw these young people and their families referred to services to address the underlying issues contributing to offending behaviour.
An independed evaluation of the model found young people engaged by the co-responder teams were less likely to commit serious crimes.
According to the evaluation, the greatest reduction in reoffending was with serious repeat offenders, recording a 73% reduction in the number of offences committed six months post engagement.
Youth responsible for an average of 25 offences in the six months before engaging with co-responder teams dropped to an average of seven offences in the six months post engagement.
