The National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls unequivocally condemns the Queensland Government’s refusal to rule out sending 17-year-old children back into adult prisons.
We know what happens inside adult prisons. We have lived it. We have survived the violence, isolation, degradation and lifelong damage imprisonment causes. We will not stand silently by while the Crisafulli Government threatens to inflict that harm on another generation.
These are Queensland’s children. They are our children, our grandchildren, our nieces, our nephews and our community. They are not political props. They are not headlines. They are not disposable bodies to be offered up to satisfy a government desperate to appear tough.
‘A 17-year-old does not become an adult because the government wants a harsher headline. A child is still a child, even when they are accused of breaking the law,’ said Tabitha Lean.
Sending children into adult prisons is not justice. It is the deliberate placement of children into institutions built around adult punishment, surveillance and control. Children held in adult prisons face profound risks to their physical safety, mental health, development and connection to family and community.
No government can claim ignorance of those consequences.
‘We have been inside these prisons. We know what they do to people. If the Queensland Government sends children back into adult prisons, it cannot pretend it did not know the damage that would follow,’ said Tabitha Lean.
The government’s proposed “breach bail, go to jail” laws would also expose children accused of committing certain offences while on bail to a reverse onus and mandatory imprisonment. This is punishment built upon accusation. It strips away the presumption of innocence, weakens judicial discretion and makes imprisonment the automatic political answer to every social crisis.
Children will be required to prove they deserve freedom before they have been convicted. Those without stable housing, family support, money, documents or access to strong legal representation will be the least able to satisfy the court. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, children living in poverty, children in out-of-home care and children with disability will once again bear the heaviest burden.
‘The government calls these children ‘serious offenders’ before a court has determined whether they committed the alleged offence. That is not justice. It is a government publicly declaring children guilty before trial,’ said Tabitha Lean.
Many criminalised children have already endured state intervention, removal from family, residential care, homelessness, school exclusion, racism, disability discrimination and violence. Queensland repeatedly abandons these children, then punishes them for the ways they survive that abandonment.
‘The state removes children from their families, moves them through residential care, excludes them from schools, leaves them without safe housing and then acts shocked when they come into contact with police,’ said Tabitha Lean.
‘Queensland cannot abandon its children and then build cages for them. Government neglect is not cured by child imprisonment,’ said Tabitha Lean.
For incarcerated and formerly incarcerated women, the threat to imprison 17-year-olds in adult prisons is deeply personal. We know the terror of having children taken from us. We know what it is to try to mother through prison walls. We know how criminalisation tears through families and how its effects continue across generations.
Our children should not be forced to inherit the cages that held us.
‘We refuse to watch the prison system swallow another generation of our children. Their lives are worth more than the political careers being built on their punishment,’ said Tabitha Lean.
The Premier has also indicated that his government will not place significant weight on expert evidence during the parliamentary committee process. That statement makes clear that this is not evidence-based reform. It is punishment decided in advance, with consultation reduced to a performance.
People with lived experience of incarceration are experts in what prisons do. Children, families, First Nations communities, youth advocates, lawyers and human rights organisations must not be dismissed because their evidence contradicts the government’s political agenda.
‘The Premier says he wants to hear from ‘everyday Queenslanders’. We are everyday Queenslanders. We are mothers, grandmothers, aunties and community members, and we are telling him that adult prisons are no place for children,’ said Tabitha Lean.
The National Network calls on the Queensland Government to:
- immediately rule out placing 17-year-old children in adult prisons;
- abandon mandatory imprisonment and the expansion of reverse-onus bail provisions for children;
- guarantee that no child is held in an adult police watch house or prison;
- listen to children, families, First Nations communities and people with lived experience of incarceration; and
- invest in housing, education, disability support, healing, family connection and Aboriginal community-controlled responses.
Every child is capable of growth and transformation. A government that chooses cages over care is not protecting the community, it is manufacturing further harm.
‘These children belong to all of us. We will not allow the Queensland Government to disappear them behind adult prison walls and tell the public it has created safety,’ said Tabitha Lean.
‘Keep your hands off our children. They need homes, care, culture, education and futures, not adult prison cells,’ said Tabitha Lean.
For further comment, please contact Tabitha Lean on 0499 780 226.
