I understand crime in Melbourne. ‘Adult time’ laws will only harm your friends and family

Victoria is at a crossroads. Our streets, courts and communities are under strain from rising youth crime.

Victoria has a youth crime problem. Over the 12 months to June 2025, the number of recorded criminal incidents in Victoria rose by somewhere between 15 and 18 per cent. That is a staggering set of numbers and the biggest I have seen in my 30 years in the legal system.

The Allan government on Tuesday night said they were going to move to an “adult crime, adult time” model. They’re giving up on the idea that the primary aim with kids should be rehabilitating them and instead aiming to lock them up in prisons that do not exist.

This is from a government that not long ago was looking at increasing the age at which kids would face charges at all. It’s amazing how a few months of being attacked in the media has changed their moral convictions.

I’m the director of what is probably the largest criminal law firm in Victoria, and have worked on many of Australia’s most prominent and long-running criminal cases. I share the view of many of my colleagues in criminal law that this huge shift to an “adult crime, adult time” model will only make us less safe. More kids will end up in jail and it will make Victoria a worse place to live.

As a community, we have always recognised that the impulsivity, developmental immaturity and peer-influence typical of youth offending are different from adult offenders. They are kids after all. Kids take time to learn lessons but most of them can learn those lessons.

If simplistic solutions such as locking up more kids worked, we would have done it a long time ago. But it doesn’t work. Look at jurisdictions that sentence lots of young people to prison – like Alice Springs or certain states in the US – and think about whether we want Victoria to go down their path.

As the Law Council of Australia, among others, has pointed out, there is no credible proof that subjecting children to adult-style jail terms makes communities safer. Unlike the people who are running this argument for locking up more kids, I’ve seen what really happens if you do. Eventually, you must let them out. If you send a child to jail for five or 10 years they will come out a hardened criminal. They may have developed significant psychological or psychiatric problems. You’re not preventing crime, you’re creating people who will hurt those who we love in the community.

Cynics might say, well, you’re a defence lawyer, of course you’re going to take the side of criminals. But being a criminal lawyer doesn’t mean you want crime to be rampant. If lawyers wanted more crime, we’d just keep quiet and let the problems spiral. Those of us closely involved in the criminal justice system see firsthand all the different paths that young people can follow after their first visit to a police station. We see the results of the many other more successful options we have for helping turn their lives around. We see how the right support can help a troubled young kid get training, get a job, and change the trajectory of their life.

These jail terms will not be a deterrent. If we put one kid in jail for 10 years, it’s ridiculous to think that some other stupid kid, heading down to a park with a baseball bat without thinking of how things might escalate, is going to say “no we better not do this, it would be comparative behaviour to the non-parole sentence imposed by Judge Mullaly in a similar case last week”.

Tougher sentencing is the easy path. What we need is investment in a better community. That means early interventions with kids who are falling from the right path. The cohort is identifiable, and we should provide them mentoring, education alternatives and pathways to skills and trades. Communities should be helped to build positive programs. Kids should be accountable, but we need to help them before we send them to jail. You cannot police your way out of a crime wave. And none of these interventionist options are as expensive as holding a kid in jail for years.

Victorians deserve to feel safe. Victims deserve justice. These policies will not make our streets safer — they risk producing more harm, more repeat offending and less community trust in the system. Let’s not be tougher on crime and let’s be smarter about crime. That means investing in kids, in families and in communities. That is the path to a safer Victoria.

Bill Doogue is a criminal defence lawyer and founding partner of Doogue + George Defence Lawyers.

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