Important deficiencies : A history of juvenile detention in post-war Victoria

The Australian state of Victoria’s juvenile detention system has been the subject of political dispute in every decade since the Second World War. The thesis reveals this essentially continuous dispute as being a function of systemic problems in juvenile detention – many of which resonate with similar systems in other parts of the world – and of bipartisan politics, which has seemingly been unable to resolve these problems. Beginning in 1945, young people in detention gradually became the responsibility of government instead of the philanthropic sector. Since then, rival political parties have alternated between critical advocacy for detained young people and defensive management of the system, depending on which party was in power. This oscillation was maintained until at least the year 2000, irrespective of changes in governmental control, economic policy or the political concerns of the time. The rhetoric of urgent change was never substantially followed through once a party achieved government. The favoured method of defense by governments was to implement a public inquiry from which little reform would ultimately be achieved. This pattern of unending crisis in juvenile detention, and repeated cycles on inquiries, is not unlike the experiences of similar systems in other liberal democracies, including those in the British Isles, North America and New Zealand. The thesis argues that the locus of the problem may be found in the post-war welfare state, with its prevailing views of delinquency, professionalism and class (which obscured the perpetuation of older stereotypes about ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor through the use of new ‘expert’ rhetoric), and an unwillingness to spend money on the implicitly ‘undeserving’. With news media interest in and public concern about the latest crisis in the juvenile detention system, governments have once again opted for public inquiries to ‘get to the bottom’ of what is wrong, staying true to an 80-year-long pattern of avoidance.