“Without language, one cannot talk to people and understand them; one cannot share their hopes and aspirations, grasp their history, appreciate their poetry, or savor their songs.”
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So go the words of Nelson Mandela, the late South African president, who spent 27 years of his life behind bars.
It is a sentiment shared by La Trobe University Rural Health School professor Pamela Snow.
The speech pathologist and psychologist has spent the last two decades assessing the language skills of incarcerated children.
Her most recent study found speech pathology could have a profound impact on young men in the youth justice system, 50 per cent of whom have a language disorder that made it difficult for them to express themselves and understand other people.
“They're the tools we use every day to interact with each other, get along with each other, have job interviews and navigate the business of everyday life,” Professor Snow said.
But language, she said, was a fragile thing.
“Even though its innately human, it's vulnerable to the kind of environmental influences children experience.”
The young men she had met in youth justice centres were almost always from disadvantaged backgrounds; many of those who took part in the study had been exposed to trauma and neglect from a young age, and were on the radar of child services before being locked up.
Their disadvantage was only compounded by language disorders.
Especially difficult for those struggling to use language was the act of storytelling, Professor Snow said, a problematic deficiency for young people speaking with police, lawyers and judges.
“When being interviewing about something they may or may not have done, they don’t give very connected, elaborate responses,” she said.
Language difficulties could even be behind the offence that landed them in the justice system; the more serious the young person’s language disorder, the more serious the offence they committed, Professor Snow observed.
“When things gets a bit tricky in the interpersonal space, they get physical.”
But as little as two months’ speech pathology sessions, developing the young people’s vocabulary and ability to piece together sentences, saw them make gains on the measures used to assess language skills.
While the researcher said she did not know whether the lessons taught would be retained, nor whether they could impact the detained person’s life after their release from the justice system, there was already interest in her work from the sector.
Many working inside correctional facilities were unaware until now of the benefits the speech pathology offered young people, she said.
“It's something that's been hiding in plain sight, and that people have taken for granted,” Professor Snow said, with actions like showing disinterest or failing to listen previously passed off as just bad behaviour.
For the La Trobe professor, changing societal expectations about what these young people could achieve was one way their lot in life could improve.
“We all take it for granted children who come through protection and through the youth justice system don't have much employment potential,” she said.
“But that does not have to be the case.”
Prison no longer preferred
Money spent keeping young offenders behind bars should instead be used to address the root causes of their behaviour, legal advocates in Bendigo have said.
Australia’s Productivity Commission last year calculated the national average cost of detaining a young person at $1400 per day.
In the decade before 2014, the Victorian government’s youth justice bill hit $1 billion.
It was figures like these that made Loddon Campaspe Community Legal Centre practice manager Clare Sauro advocate for a funding model called justice re-investment.
The model directs prison funding to prevention programs hoping to stop people from entering the criminal justice system.
“It’s the idea that prevention is better than a cure,” Ms Sauro said.
Loddon Campaspe Victorian Legal Aid managing lawyer Marcus Williams was of the same mind, saying experiences of the justice system were often entrenched in the lives of young offenders who sought his service’s assistance.
It was these young people who stood to benefit most from intervention programs, he said.
The lawyer said there were already initiatives in place to divert children from detention – he named ROPES, in which a Victoria Police member is paired with a young offender to complete a ropes course, as one of the most successful – but they were under-resourced.
Mr Williams believed funding those efforts, rather than sentencing people them to prison, would have better long term outcomes.
“The reality is, that, those sorts of environments (prisons) don’t do anything to enhance people's ability to cope in the community,” he said.
“They will be released at some stage, and they need to be released into a supportive community.”
However, he did concede that it was difficult to balance an offender’s welfare with the concerns of the community, saying there were times when imprisonment was the only way to address a threat to public safety.
The rates of young people returning to prison within months of their release was also reason to ask whether detention was a worthwhile investment of taxpayer funds, Ms Sauro said.
In 2013-14, 50 per cent of young people returned to prison within 6 months, a figure which ballooned to more than three-quarters within a year of release.
Interventions were especially important for young people battling mental or intellectual disadvantage, she said.
“A person’s mental health or cognitive impairment has a huge effect on their understanding of laws and appropriate behaviour as well as their interaction with police and their experience in the justice system.”
