We Didn’t Think It Through

I wake and for the briefest moment, the whole of last night feels like a dream. But I’m still in the holding cell. An officer walks into the room. Her footsteps on the cement wake Uncle Ray as well and he sits up and snorts. 

‘Their parents are here’, the copper tells Uncle Ray. I rub my eyes, and my hands are so sore. 

The cops come in and take Lenny out of his cell in handcuffs. They handcuff me and whisk me away to a white room with a table in it. I wake up fully when I see Aunty Dawn sitting there at the table. She’s got bags under her eyes and her hair is all frizzy. Her face seems more wrinkled somehow as our eyes meet. The officers sit me down. I expect them to take the cuffs off, but they don’t. They leave the room and I’m just sitting here, tired and dirty, with my handcuffs tight around my sore wrists.

‘You all right, Jamie?’ she asks. I guess she can see the bruises on my face.
‘Yeah. I’m all good.’
‘Your caseworker, Lauren, is going to meet us at court.’
‘So, I have to go to court?’ I ask.

Like his white ears must’ve been burning, a detective comes in and sits with us. Aunty Dawn moves over to me. As the detective begins to talk, I look to my hands in my lap. My wrists have red rings around them. The cop tells me I’m charged with car theft and all this other shit that I don’t really pay attention to. All I know is I have to go to court. 

III

Lauren almost trips over as she rushes into the courtroom. She halts to do her little bow to the magistrate at the bench in front of us, then sits beside Aunty Dawn on the bench behind me. I stand on a platform with a wooden fence the height of my waist.

My legal aid, a younger man, probably late twenties or early thirties, sits beside me. He wears a grey suit and black tie. His hair is neatly combed to the side and his face is hairless, apart from his eyebrows. Seriously, the skin on his face is as hairless as a baby’s arse. The magistrate starts to talk and my legal aid presents his arguments for trauma and out-of-home care system and peer pressure bullshit. The magistrate has a build-up of saliva in the corners of her lips and claps her wet mouth when she talks.

‘Danger to the community … High severity … Troubling … Reckless … Bad influence …’

She probably thinks her words hurt me, but they hardly leave a bruise. She tells me bail is refused. The court officers take me away in my handcuffs. They walk me through a door and through another door and another and then I’m in another holding cell. 

Lauren comes waddling behind the legal aid. Her heels click loudly on the hard floor. They both pull some seats from against the wall and sit them at my cell. Lauren looks like she’s just gone for a run. Her forehead is glistening from the overhead fluoro lights. 

‘James, how are you?’ she asks.
‘All good.’

I’m not all good, though. I’m tired. My cheek is itchy and hot. My back is sore. I want to see my mates again. I want to know that they’re okay.

Lauren clears her throat, opens her folder and starts flicking through plastic slips filled with papers. She pulls out a piece of paper and starts scribbling, turns to the legal aid. 

‘Can you tell us what exactly is happening? I can never understand any of that legal talk.’

The legal aid sits up in his seat and starts to talk, but he’s hard to follow. He’s got a dull, boring voice. The only takeaway is that Dally and Lenny are getting locked up. 

‘Jamie’s been refused bail. He’ll be held on remand at Kinston Juvenile Justice Centre in Kinston City up the coast.’
‘How long will he be there on remand?’ Lauren asks.
‘The judge has set a date for September twentieth.’
‘That’s a month away.’ I chuckle. ‘Fuck.’
‘So, he just sits there until he’s found guilty or not?’ Lauren asks as she leans forward and rubs her temple.
‘Do you understand what I’ve just said, James?’ the legal aid asks.
‘Yep.’
‘You might have to wait it out for a while. Things move slowly in the legal world,’ he says.

He talks to Lauren some more and she asks more questions and I’m starting to think she isn’t smart. Or maybe she’s just asking so many questions because she wants to get as much information as she can. I don’t see why she cares so much. She’s not the one who will be doing the time. And I know she can’t actually like me. She’s at work and she’s getting paid to do her job, just like the caseworker before her and the caseworker before that one. 

The handcuffs are looser on my wrists as the court officers take me away. They throw me in the bus and pull me back out when we get to the police station.

I’m taken to a small room and Aunty Dawn arrives. She stands by the closed door for a moment, studies the white walls of the room. I think she’s probably trying to muster the courage to look at me. She must be so disappointed, fed up. She’s about to rip me up like a roast chicken from Coles, tell me she’s had enough. 

‘Oh, Jamie’, she says. She dawdles to the table and sits in the chair across from me. She places her hands on the surface and sighs. ‘How are you feeling?’ she asks. 

She finally finds my eyes, but I can’t look. I turn to the white walls like she did as I shrug my shoulders.

‘It’s okay to be upset or angry. This is a tough spot you’re in.’

I shrug my shoulders again. She thinks she’s failed me, but she didn’t. It’s just … I… I’m no good. I don’t bring no happiness to anyone. I wish I could say it to her. I wish I could open my mouth and say it.

It’s not your fault. I’m no good.

‘You just keep your head up,’ Aunty Dawn says. ‘You keep your back straight and remember who you are. I might not be your mother, but you’re my boy. You’re my son. You’ll always be. When you get to that place, you keep your head up. Remember how much me and Uncle love you. Don’t let that place break you. You’re stronger than the system. Stay out of trouble. Do your time. You’ll be out before you know it. You’ll be okay, Jamie.’

A tear is escaping my eye, so I quickly wipe it away. I don’t want her to see it. I don’t want her to know how scared I am. I don’t want her to worry. 

‘Aunt, I’m all good. I’ll be right, I swear.’ I place my hand over hers on the table and look into her brown eyes. She looks so tired. The lines on her face crinkle as she forces a smile, then she places a kiss on the back of my hand.

***

While Jamie Langton might be a fictional character, his experiences unfortunately ring all too true for young First Nations kids who find themselves disproportionately criminalised and dragged into criminal legal systems designed to fail them. First Nations kids like Jamie are 29 times more likely to be in detention than other children in Australia. 

In many jurisdictions across so-called Australia, First Nations kids as young as ten are being arrested, criminally charged and thrown into prison, as well as kept in detention without being found guilty of any crime. 

In both the Northern Territory and Victoria, the minimum age of criminal responsibility (the MACR, as it is known, is the youngest age a child can be found criminally responsible for their actions) is going backwards (NT to 10 and Vic to 12) after the reversal of previous policy commitments. Other state governments, such as Queensland, have doubled down on harsh ‘law and order’ approaches that promise to arrest, sentence and treat kids the same way criminal legal systems treat adults. ‘Adult crime, Adult time’ legislation is expected to be introduced into Queensland Parliament in early December, which if passed will remove the principle of detention as a last resort from Queensland’s Youth Justice Act 1992 (Qld) as well as make a host of other legislative changes that punish instead of rehabilitate kids, pushing them further into cycles of incarceration and disadvantage.   

Not only do criminal charges and detention not work to deter or reduce crime, these regressive policies disproportionately affect, criminalise and torture First Nations kids, and cause further harm to their families and communities, compounding the inter-generational trauma they already face. 

On 20 November 2024, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) – the most widely ratified international human rights treaty in the world – had its 35th anniversary. The UNCRC regards children as legal subjects who are inherently entitled to human rights and fundamental freedoms. 

Australia ratified the UNCRC on 17 December 1990, meaning it has a duty under international law to ensure that all children in Australia enjoy the human rights set out in the treaty – a duty it is failing to honour. All across so-called Australia, children – including First Nations children – continue to be ignored, silenced, tortured, and treated with a lack of dignity and freedom. 

Article 37 (b), for example, sets out that “The arrest, detention or imprisonment of a child shall be in conformity with the law and shall be used only as a measure of last resort and for the shortest appropriate period of time”. In reality, children as young as ten are often imprisoned for great lengths of time, sometimes in facilities designed for adults, and increasingly put in solitary confinement, a direct contravention of their rights under the UNCRC. One 13 year old First Nations boy with an intellectual disability was recently forced to spend 500 days in an isolation cell, where he was kept for more than 20 hours each day. 

Every day, kids like Jamie are beaten down by a system that repeatedly communicates one thing: you are no good.

It is our responsibility – all of us – to change that. 

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