> The point of this punishment is not to apply a sort of cosmic morality according to the true culpability
Except that is very much part of the justice system, and when people talk about "trying kids as adults" it is exactly about holding them culpable as if they were adults.
> We must stop them hurting people; let's figure out how.
I very much agree. "Lock 'em up and throw away the key", "they knew what they were doing!" and, an actual slogan from the queensland elections, "adult crime, adult time" don't really show a search for a solution. They're just appeals to base vengefulness.
Yes, kids commiting serious crimes need to be stopped. Victims and the wider society need to be safe. Yes the systems in Australia have been failing at this, over and over.
But young brains don't take consequences into account in the same way older brains do. They don't understand the impact that their actions will have on others or themselves in the longer term and aren't especially likely to consider harsher consequences as a deterrent because they aren't thinking about consequences. They literally aren't wired that way.
If your goal is actually reducing crime experienced by the community, you need to look at why kids are getting to that point, what's gone wrong in their upbringing, maybe holding parents more culpable, and intervening earlier. Otherwise you're not going to achieve anything more than a few appealing soundbites. And the problem with all of that in an Australian context is that there is a hidden subtext here - it's often (far from always, but often) First Nations kids who are causing the problem, and there is a long history of state intervention in First Nations families being - there's no other way to put this - actively evil.
It's a tough situation involving under-developed brains, ongoing generational trauma and all sorts of other crap.
For reference, here's what the Australian Human Rights Commission has to say -
https://humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/2025.04.15%20...
"The evidence shows that the younger children are locked up, the more likely it is that they will go on to commit more serious and violent crimes. As shown in the HWE report making the justice system more punitive through longer sentences, harsher bail laws, and building more children’s prisons is the wrong approach.
That is because offending by children is a symptom of underlying causes and unmet needs that we are failing to address. The proposed measures in the Bill are likely to result in more crime, not less."
So I agree, action needs to be taken, people need to be safe. Trying kids as adults is a simplistic sop to anger, not a good solution and flies in the face of evidence.
tl;dr - It's dumb.