“Thomas” – not his real name – was 13 when he began his first stint in prison.

After the sudden death of his father, he had robbed a shop in Australia’s Northern Territory (NT). He was detained for a week, but within a month he was back in custody for another burglary.

After five years, the Aboriginal teenager has spent far more time in prison than out.

“It’s hard to change,” Thomas tells me. “(Breaking the law) is something you do all your life – it’s hard to (kick) the habit.”

His story – a revolving door of crime, arrest and release – is not an isolated one in the Northern Territory.

For many, over the years, the crimes become more serious, the sentences longer and the time between prison terms shorter.

The Northern Territory is the part of Australia with the highest incarceration rate: more than 1,100 per 100,000 people are behind bars, which is higher than five times higher than the national average.

It is also more than twice that of the US, which is the country with the highest number of people behind bars.

But the issue of child incarceration in particular has been thrust into the spotlight here after the territory’s new government controversially lowered the age of criminal responsibility from 12 to 10.

The move, which defies a UN recommendation, potentially means locking up even more young people.

It’s not just an incarceration issue. It is also one of inequalities.

While about 30 per cent of the Northern Territory’s population is Aboriginal, almost all of the young people incarcerated here are Indigenous.

So Aboriginal communities are by far the most affected by the new laws.

The Liberal Country Party (CLP) government says it has a mandate after campaigning to keep territories safe. It helped the party claim a landslide victory in the August election.

Among those who voted for the CLP was Sunil Kumar.

The owner of two Indian restaurants in Darwin has had five or six burglaries in the past year and wants politicians to do more.

“Little kids do (it) most of the time – (they) think it’s fun,” explains Mr Kumar.

He says he’s improved his locks, installed cameras and even offered refreshments to kids hanging around outside in an attempt to win them over.

“How are they out there and the parents don’t know?” he says “There should be a punishment for parents”.

But while the political rhetoric around the crime is strong, critics say it actually has nothing to do with the actual numbers.

Rates of young offenders have increased since Covid. Last year, there was a 4% increase nationally.

But rates are about half what they were 15 years ago in the Northern Territory, Australian Bureau of Statistics figures show.

Politicians, however, play with the residents’ fears.

As well as lowering the age of criminal responsibility, they also introduced tougher bail legislation known as Declan’s Law after Declan Laverty, a 20-year-old who was fatally stabbed last year by someone on bail for a alleged previous attack.

“I never want another family to experience what we have,” said his mother Samara Laverty.

“The passage of this legislation is a turning point for the Territory, which will become a safer, happier and more peaceful place.”

On the day the laws began to be debated in Darwin last month, a small crowd of demonstrators sat outside parliament in a last-ditch effort to change the political tide.

A woman held up a sign that read: “10-year-olds still have baby teeth.” Another asked: “What if it was your child?”

“Our young people in Don Dale must have opportunities for hope,” Aboriginal elder Aunty Barb Nasir said to the demonstrators.

She was referring to a notorious youth detention center just outside Darwin, where evidence of abuse – including video of a child wearing a hood and handcuffed to a chair – has outraged many in Australia and led to an investigation by royal commission.

“We always have to support them because they are lost out there,” said Aunt Barb.

Kat McNamara, an independent politician who opposed the bill, told the crowd: “The idea that in order to support a 10-year-old child you have to criminalize them is irrational, ineffective and morally bankrupt.”

After a round of applause, she added: “We will not stand for this.”

But with a large majority in parliament, the CLP easily passed the laws.

The lowering of the age of criminal responsibility overturned legislation passed just last year, which had briefly raised the threshold to 12 years.

And while other Australian states and territories have come under pressure to raise the age from 10 to 14, for now it’s back to 10 across the country except the Australian Capital Territory.

Australia is not alone – in England and Wales, for example, it is also set at 10.

But in comparison, most European Union members do it on 14, in line with UN recommendations.

Northern Territory Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro claims that by lowering the age of criminal responsibility, authorities can “intervene early and address the root causes of crime”.

“We have this obligation to the child who has been let down in many ways over a long period of time,” she said last month.

“And we have (an obligation to) people who just want to be safe, people who don’t want to live in fear anymore.”

But for people like Thomas, 18 years ago, prison didn’t fix anything. His crimes just got worse and his time inside increased.

He says he finds prison strangely comforting. It’s not that he likes it, but with custody comes familiarity.

“Most of my family has been in and out of prison. I felt at home because all the guys took care of me.”

His two younger brothers are also stuck in a similar cycle. At one point, their mother would take a bus to visit the three of them in prison every week.

Thomas still wears an ankle bracelet issued by the authorities, but has been out of prison for almost three months – the longest period of freedom since he became a teenager.

He was helped by Brother 2 Another – an Aboriginal-led project that mentors and supports First Nations children caught up in the justice system.

“Locking these kids up is just a reactive way of doing it,” says Darren Damaso, a youth leader for Brother 2 Another.

“There needs to be more rehabilitation support services, more funding for Aboriginal-led programs because they actually understand what’s going on with these families. And then we will slowly start to see changes. But if it’s just a “shut them down”. ‘ default action, will not work.”

Mr Damaso is from the Larrakia Aboriginal people, the ancestral owners of the Darwin region, and also has links to the Yanuwa and Malak Malak people.

His organization brings young people into a converted facility on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Darwin, offering a relaxation space, a sensory room and a gym.

Brother 2 Another also works in schools and tries to help young people find work – opportunities that many who have been involved in the police and prisons struggle to engage with.

“It’s a self-perpetuating cycle,” says John Lawrence, a Scottish criminal lawyer who has been based in Darwin for more than three decades.

He has represented many young people and argues that more money is needed to get them into school than the prison system, to prevent incarceration in the first place.

Aboriginal people “don’t have a voice, so they suffer great injustice and harm”, says Mr Lawrence.

“The fact that this can happen shows very graphically and glaringly how racist this country is.”

Tough talk about crime is not unique to Northern Territory politics.

In the last Queensland election, the Liberal National Party’s winning campaign played heavily on its slogan: “Grown-up crimes, grown-up time”.

In a recent report by the Australian Human Rights Commission, Anne Hollonds, the National Children’s Commissioner, argued that by criminalizing vulnerable children – many of them First Nations children – the country was creating “one of Australia’s most urgent human rights challenges man”.

“The systems that are meant to help them, including health, education and social services, are not fit for purpose and these children are falling through the cracks,” she said.

“We cannot control the way out of this problem, and the evidence shows that locking up children does not make the community safer.”

This is why there is a growing push to fund early intervention through education, not incarceration, and trying to reduce marginalization and disadvantage in the first place.

“What are people’s cultural strengths? What are the strengths of the community of people? We rely on that,” says Erin Reilly, regional director for Children’s Ground.

Her organization works with communities and schools on their ancestral lands, teaching about bush food and medicine and the Aboriginal ‘kinship’ system – how people fit into their community and family.

“We center Indigenous worldviews and Indigenous values ​​and work in a way that works for Aboriginal people,” Ms Reilly explains.

“We know that the education system and the health systems are not working for our people.”

For Thomas, life inside was hard, involving weeks at a time spent in isolation. But on the outside, he says, there is little understanding of the circumstances he lived through.

“I felt like nobody cared. Nobody wanted to listen,” he says.

He points to the bite marks on his forearms and adds: “So I hurt myself all the time – see the scars here?”

Additional reporting by Simon Atkinson