Australian True Crime

00:03 This is Australian True Crime with Michelle Laurie. Australia is in the middle of a difficult conversation about violence. From youth crime to knife attacks and domestic violence, politicians, police and communities are all searching for answers. So what if one country has already been through this and found a way to dramatically reduce violent crime? Karen McCluskey helped lead that transformation. As one of the founders of Scotland's Violence Reduction Unit, she helped change Glasgow from one of Europe's most violent cities into an international case study in violence prevention by treating violence as a public health issue and not just a criminal justice problem. 00:44 Today, she speaks with Australian True Crime's producer, Matthew Tankard, to explain what worked, what didn't, and what Australia can learn from Scotland's experience. 00:54 This is Australian True Crime. We acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which this podcast is created, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people of the Kulin Nation. And a warning, this episode of the podcast contains graphic descriptions of violence. 01:12 If you love digging deeper into the stories behind the headlines, there's a new podcast I think you'll love. It's called Law the Podcast, from the team behind Australian True Crime. Hosted by former Supreme Court Judge Lex Lasry AM. 01:25 Peter Dutton described me as a left-wing ideologue. 01:28 And leading barrister Greg Barnes SC. 01:30 Leave aside, you know, the issues of human rights, etc. It doesn't decrease your crime rates. 01:36 Going beyond the headlines to explain what the law means, why it matters and how it affects us all. Get Law the podcast on the free iHeart app or wherever you're listening now. 01:48 We actually started in 2003. And I mean, I was head of intelligence analysis. We were made national in 2004. And the next year we had a big drop in the murder rate. 01:59 But you can't look at figures like year to year. That's a massive mistake. You have to look at trend lines, you know, because what you want to bring it down is consistently because crime changes all the time. You form a squad, you put loads of cops out, you do lots of stop search. crying comes down for a little bit and then it goes back up again because you've not addressed the problem you know all you've done is try and address one of the symptoms I joined Strathclyde Police Force down in England. And I think we'd had about three murders in three years. 02:34 And I'd come back to Scotland after a long time of working away in London and other police services. 02:40 And I was just overwhelmed. It wasn't just, you know, we'd have a, you know, somebody would say there's been a murder. Sometimes we'd have three and four on a weekend. And it was just, everybody else was overwhelmed. They just thought that was what happened, you know, that was just Glasgow, that was Scotland, we had a level of violence. 03:00 And people just thought that was, and I hate to use the word normal, but you know what I mean, that when things happen so frequently, it does become normalised. I used to be, I trained as a nurse originally, I don't think I was a very great nurse, but I trained as a nurse. and went to hang around as an emergency department. And actually you have a great surgeon, actually based in Australia now, who was actually one of our main emergency medicine consultants who was based in Glasgow. A man called Michael Sheridan, and he did a really unusual thing. 03:30 He counted the amount of people who were coming in as a result of violence. And what you found was that only 30% were reported to the police. 03:39 So regardless of how bad we thought it was, it was actually much worse. 03:45 And then United Nations came out and said that Scotland was the most violent country and Europe and Glasgow was the most violent city. And so I went away and I took three weeks and I just wrote a report for the chief constable at the time. And what it really said was, you know, despite the best 30 years of policing, we'd been fantastic at Detectown. 04:08 But actually, we've made no difference to trying to prevent this happening in the first place. 04:13 Yeah. What do you think was unique about Glasgow that made the rate so high compared to the rest of the world? 04:18 So really interesting. I mean, lots of people have asked me that question. So, and lots of people will recognise this. De-industrialisation, you know, we used to have massive shipyards, we had lots of employment, you know, and that's gone down as, you know, we've moved into tech industries and, you know, and manufacturing's moved elsewhere. So there was unemployment and we've had drugs and, you know, and all the issues you would probably recognise in lots of places in Australia and I've been out there, it would feel pretty similar. Hopelessness. 04:50 And, you know, we actually had to come up with a term called recreational violence. We had lots of gangs. We had about three and a half thousand young people, ish, youngish, you know, under the age of sort of 25, 26, who were sort of engaged in these gangs. And gangs have been around for a long time in Glasgow particularly, really since the 1920s. 05:12 And, you know, and they were just, it wasn't because they were robbing people to get, you know, to get a watch or for money. It was just recreational. It was, that's just what we do. 05:21 Yeah. Do you think it's pretty common worldwide, you know, when you said that only 30% of people report? Or is that Glasgow specific? 05:28 No, it's very common. They don't report for a whole range of reasons. They didn't trust the police. 05:33 You know, I didn't trust the justice system, didn't trust the police. And sometimes I would go in and I would, you know, I'd be in the emergency rooms and I would see people who were quite badly injured, but they'd be in their mobile phones texting someone, plotting a revenge. You know that tit for tat? you know, violence that you get. And you get it in Australia. I know you do. So it was continuous. And sometimes you'd have, you know, one person being assaulted, sometimes seriously. And then you'd get a whole series of assaults off the back of that and sometimes catastrophic. 06:05 So what happened as a result of you writing that report? 06:08 I think the chief, you know, I was incredibly lucky and I often talk about this in leadership. The chief could have locked me in a cupboard and said, look, I don't particularly want you telling anybody that we only report 30% of the crime because he's standing up and he's saying crime's up 5%, it's down 5%, you're doing this. 06:26 And he didn't. He took a really bold decision. He said, I want you to flush it out. 06:32 I want you to try and think about how you would do this differently. And he set us up as, you know, it was a few of us, myself and a detective chief superintendent called John Carnican. 06:44 And, you know, he set us up in a room and he said, on you go and make change. 06:49 And I mean, that's a really bold thing to do as a leader. You know, he didn't put any strictures around us. 06:55 He just said, have your values in place and then make a difference. 06:59 So that's how it started. 07:02 And I think all of us, and I always say this, I never want to meet another murder victim's family. But I know I will, and I have. And we've broken too much bad news to parents. And sometimes the parents face that you're breaking this terrible news to. And the face of the person, you might have just arrested a young person. 07:21 Sometimes the parents face the shock and the horror. I mean, it stays with you forever. And I think he knew in his heart of hearts that we could be different. 07:34 And I think that boldness of let's try something different. And what he took away, and every police officer and anybody who's working for the police or any big organisation will recognise us, He took away all the bureaucracy. He asked us, you know, and we had this motto called proceed until apprehended or even proceed until tasered by the chief constable, where we just thought, you know, if we're going to fail at this, let's not fail trying to build the garden shed. Let's try and fail building the cathedral. 08:05 Let's try something really different, really big, so that we can show real appreciable change. In many ways, I think because we started to show reductions. I mean, the first year we started, we had quite a big reduction and people were saying, oh, you must be delighted. And I was like, you can't even be delighted about some murders still happening. I'm pleased it's come down. 08:25 But come back to me in five or 10 years time. And when it's kept on coming down, that's when I'd like you to come to me and say, you know, obviously this is working. 08:35 But it takes everybody. I mean, there's a cast of thousands of people who stand right beside me in doing the work because, you know, I'm spinning lots of plates. So the one thing that we knew was that what we were doing wasn't working. So if you think about it, you know, a crime is committed. It's then reported. We then investigate it. Sometimes you'll have an outcome. You know, you'll get a detection or not. And then you put someone in jail. And that's, you know, I mean, that's the criminal justice model. And what we wanted to, we wanted to think about prevention. And, you know, because I had a health background, etc. 09:07 We looked at a sort of public health model, which was about prevention. How could we, so firstly, did we understand what the level of the problem was? So surveillance. Then we tried to work out all the risk and protective factors, you know, people excluded from school, drugs, alcohol, you know, poverty, you know, people excluded from work, a whole range. So we worked out what the risk and protective factors were. And then in truth, you know, we went into prisons, we interviewed people, we looked at their background and And there's actually lots and lots of research out there about what drives people into this, what happens in those families. 09:44 And we had whole families where we jailed grandfathers, fathers and sons for violence. 09:50 You know, it was intergenerational. Gang violence was just, we were actually, this is going to sound terrible, there was sort of a pride about it. You know, we had films about it. If you look, you know, and I flippantly said once and then got hugely pilloried. I said that if you look at, you know, a Glaswegian in the media, they're often aggressive as violence. They're often the villain. 10:15 You know, so we were always portrayed. That was what the, you know, if you thought about a Glaswegian, that's what it was. You were hard drinking. You know, there was a bit of aggression and, you know, you were sort of, you know, if there was a fight happening, you were always, you know, at the front. 10:29 And that's an interesting cultural thing around, you know, that sort of west of Scotland, male and violence. And we had to try and get rid of that. So there was a big cultural piece to it. And, you know, at the time when I started, and this is going to sound incredibly old, and you could probably carbon date me. I mean, I didn't have Instagram. There wasn't TikTok now. When I go in and I speak to loads of young people still, I mean, I spoke to about 350 in a big assembly hall. And I asked them, where do you get all your news? And of course, I was like 98% of them said TikTok. 11:01 So, you know, the norms that they see and how they're made to behave as men, as young men particularly, because this is predominantly an issue of young men. 11:11 You know, it is shaped by media and society. I'm not saying that, you know, it's not that argument that, you know, online gaming makes you violent. But it does shape our behaviour. It shapes sexual behaviour in young people. You know, what they think is acceptable, you know, and set by a whole range of other things and how they think that men should behave. 11:32 Something that I would imagine has to be a new aspect to all of this, this is something we're definitely finding in Australia, is that, you know, people are uploading their crimes to TikTok and Instagram and just for clout, really. Like the fame aspect of it is like this new motivation that maybe wasn't there earlier. Yeah. 11:49 They're not really getting fame, what they're getting is a jail sentence. I've never found that when I'm speaking to them in a jail cell, they feel that famous. And when their mum's coming to visit them and travelling 50, 70, 90 miles, to visit them in a jail cell, And I think it's a conversation that we missed out for many decades was for it was to be a man in 21st century Scotland. You know, it actually takes more of a man to walk away from a fight than it does to face up to it. 12:21 But that's a challenging cultural piece. You know, so that was part of it. But obviously we, you know, we worked on Obviously dealing with those who were committing violence, both who had been victimised and were perpetrators. 12:35 Worked with lots of schools about trying to keep kids in schools. Exclusion is a thing that goes through. 12:42 Every person who I've met in jail through violence, their story always starts with, see when I was five, see when I was six, see when I was 12. It then starts about school exclusion. And I don't know where we think kids are going to go when, you know, they're excluded from school. They're on the streets. And wouldn't they say that trouble always finds trouble? And then people got into the justice system and the justice system is like an infection. Once you get it once, it can come lifelong and life-limiting. You know, you're constantly in it. So trying to keep people out of the justice system where we could was incredibly important. 13:18 So one of the big things that we started, and it was very public, was we had to tackle the gangs. We got all the gangs in a room. I mean, we brought them into a room. We even shipped them in from the prisons. 13:30 And we did this, you know, we had the chief constable stand up. We flashed their pictures around the room. And we said, look, we know where you live. We know what you're doing. And we're telling you now, that's it, it's finished. The next one of you that commits an offence, we're going to take out your whole gang. 13:46 And I've got, you know, 60,000 police officers. I can have them all outside your front door if I so wish. That was a bit of a fib. 13:52 Most of us were on the holiday because it was in the summer. 13:55 You could see them pointing up and saying, oh, look, where's me? And we said that. And then we had a surgeon who stood up and he said, look, here's the injuries we're getting and people looked away because we have something in Glasgow. And I don't know whether people know about it. It's called the Glasgow Smile. And what they do is they put a knife up people's face. You know, I suppose people would think of this sort of joker. 14:18 It is a horrific facial injury. Horrific. If you get one and you're a victim of crime, it will change your life for the next 60 years. You know, because people will look at you and they'll think you're a violent man. So we have lots of those and we had some of the most skilled maxillofacial surgeons in the world. 14:35 And so you would have all of these gang members in the one space and you would just be showing these photos to them? 14:41 Yeah. I mean, you know, this is what's happening. And then we had our mum stand up, you know, a pretty spectacular woman called Drayshul who talked about her son who was murdered. 14:53 And he'd been challenging in his youth and you could hear them. I mean, some of them were crying at the back of the room because no matter how challenging their background's been or even how difficult the relationship with their parents has been, it was incredibly emotive. And the Glaswegians, we are not known for our emotion. We try and keep that tightly bottled up. 15:18 And we said to them, here is an opportunity. You can get out of this. You can phone us 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. We will have some directory within 24 hours. We will have a plan. 15:29 And to be honest, I didn't think we'd get anybody. And we were overwhelmed. 15:35 We had people who just said, I just don't want to do this anymore. I need help. I need out. I need rehoused. Sometimes we had to rehouse people in different areas. 15:45 People needed back into education. Often they'd been excluded from school, got involved in gangs, hadn't got any education. Some people just needed to get into work. Every person that came to us wasn't a success story. I've got one young man who I think came to us seven different times. Behaviour change is hard. 16:02 It is really difficult, and particularly if you're in environments where everybody else is doing the same thing as you are. 16:09 I often, I used to see lots, because I used to go into the emergency rooms quite a lot, and used to get these really hardened men, and young men, and sometimes older, And it's really interesting when they might be in extremis, you know, they may have a wound that is, you know, it's difficult to stop them, you know, and then you can see them, you know, and you're saying, do you want me to contact someone, you know, a family member? And it changes because we used to call it the reachable, the teachable moment. And it's actually a really good psychology. 16:40 It's about Prosecco and De Clemente. It's called motivation to change. Where are people motivated to change? And we intervened at every single point. So in hospitals, dental surgeries, because if I punched you in the face, the first thing you lose is your teeth. Dental pain is really painful. And so we trained all the dentists to intervene, you know, in dental surgeries. You know, we had vets doing it. We had everybody trying to intervene at points in time where we could try and divert people into, you know, other services to try and get people out. 17:11 So was that 17:12 Like a part of your funneling method. You would be there at these moments when these people would be maybe at like a rock bottom or at least really vulnerable or susceptible to change. That's when you come to them and give them a way out, basically. 17:25 For some of them and for others it was, you know, I mean, sometimes they had a friend who died. So there might have been a gang and a friend died. And we tried to... 17:35 to try and capitalise on that moment as well when people were thinking, that could have been me, you know, and they start to think about themselves. 17:43 But it's really hard. Almost everybody I know, and there's a big sort of adverse childhood experience, is almost everybody I have ever dealt with. 17:51 have grown up in houses where drugs and alcohol have been used, have had parental imprisonment, there's been lots of abuse and neglect. You know, the last thing that people always tell me, even after I've known them for years, is about the sexual abuse that often happened to them when they were young. That's a tough thing and I'm not making excuses, but it is a reason for why we often find these young people in these situations and particularly who get drawn into, you know, and get drawn into violence. 18:21 But there are those who absolutely need to be in prison for all our safety because they don't want to change. They have committed great harm, you know, and that will always be the case. But it's a much smaller number than is in there now. We had no budget because, see, when we had loads of budget, we didn't solve this either. We didn't solve it. Throwing money at it is not, you need to first have a plan and then what you're going to do, because people just think, if I just throw money at this, that will fix it. 18:53 Of course it didn't. And we tried, I mean, we'd formed squads, you know, I mean, it's a great thing in policing, you know, we form a squad and it didn't work. You needed a really coherent plan and you needed to bring all our partners, so health and education and early years and And everybody else in together and I needed to convince them. I felt honestly at the beginning, I was like a timeshare salesman. 19:15 I was getting people in the room and I was telling them the problem. And then I said, you know, are you with me? And then sort of rang the bell and sort of locked the door and kept them in until they, I said, and this is what we're going to do. And we're going to do this together. And it was really tough. And I have to say, for the people who came to me and said, have you got any budget? I didn't engage with them because it wasn't about budget because we all had a responsibility to reduce this. 19:39 And actually, lots of the services were in place. We just had to adapt them. But I think what we eventually got, we got a momentum going. You know, we showed that we could change things. And then people got behind us. We are now at sort of record lows for violence and record lows for homicide. And we have no under-18s in our prisons. Way back in 2003, we had something like 1,400 under-18s in prison. And then for the 18 to 19-year-olds, we had... 20:07 And I'm going to make up a number, but it was around two and a half to three thousand. 20:11 So now we have zero under 18s. 20:14 The number of 18 and 19 year olds is, you know, I want to say 300. 20:20 And that's because of the preventative work that we've done. So, you know, we did huge amount of work in early years because great parenting is as close as it gets to being magic without being magic. 20:32 And really focusing on that early years and parenting and empathy and compassion and all the skills that make you a great human being. 20:41 critical and then working with the teachers I mean I didn't get invited to many teachers conferences after a while because I would say one more kid you have in school is one less kid I have in jail I need you to try and keep children in school. And I know that's a hard ask. My dad was a teacher, you know, and he said, Karen, that's a really difficult thing. But actually, the teachers really came alongside the work. They have done so much work and about understanding the children that they've got, the trauma that they're experiencing, how to manage them. 21:14 how to sort of do trauma-informed practice, keeping children in school as much as they can. Glasgow tried to practice a zero-exclusion policy. 21:24 I mean, that is pretty extraordinary. 21:27 And I think that keeping kids in school and doing all that early work, I think that's what's prevented young people coming into the justice system. And then we also have the children's hearing system in Scotland, which is about need and not deed. So it's about what do these young people need to enter the world fully fledged and with all those skills and not just about the deeds, because it's really easy. You talked about that, you know, adult crimes, adult sentence. 21:56 I wish there was an evidence base around that, but there's really not. 21:59 Yeah, well, I mean, it seems like any expert, at least that we've spoken to, you know, criminologists or people that work with youths are just like, this is a really, really bad idea. There's no upside to this. But it's a catchy phrase. It would win votes. 22:13 And it is. And listen, and I feel really sorry for politicians. I mean, I would never want to be a politician because I think it's a really tough job. And we're in a really weaponised environment right now, aren't we? People are not going to vote for lots of things I'm talking about. Even though I'm talking about prevention, I can say, look, it works. If you engage in this and you put the evidence and you really work hard at it, this is not a five-year thing. I mean, I have been doing this now for... decades, decades. And you have to be utterly relentless. 22:47 That's a tough thing because, of course, politicians are in for four or five years. And I'm saying, I need you to work about, I need you to think about 10 years. And when people say to me, what do you want from a politician? I'll say, I don't want a politician. I want a statesman and a statesman. I want somebody who thinks ahead and thinks, what is it we want this country to look like and be like for the citizens who are here? How do you want people to thrive and survive and contribute to the, you know, the wealth economy? 23:15 And that's a tough thing right now. 23:19 Somebody said, what's the one thing that you did that made a difference? I said, if I'd known the one thing, I'd have done it 16 years ago and disappeared at the sunset. 23:28 The challenge is with a public health issue, a public health approach. And I know that, you know, there's one just been set up in Melbourne. 23:35 is that actually you need to do everything. So you need to do the early years, but because you're trying to fix this whilst it's moving. So you absolutely need, and we have turned that around in Scotland. I mean, it's a huge movement in Scotland and we've been doing it now for decades. How do we support parents and children, particularly those who are living in really challenged circumstances? 23:56 How do we keep kids in school? And that trying to practice that zero exclusion, trying to keep children in school, How do we deal with those who are, you know, both victimised and into defending? So, you know, we did lots of the gang work. We did lots of work around knives. We did do enforcement, you know, because we had to, because I had victims' families saying to me, you know, the guy that just stabbed my son, had been caught three times with carrying a knife and he's on bail for every single minute. 24:26 So we did do some real hardcore interventions to almost send out a message to say, things have changed. This is not acceptable and we are changing things. And, you know, we didn't even, I mean, when we caught people with carrying a knife to begin with, and, you know, it's a long time ago now, we didn't even DNA them or fingerprint them. We just almost reported them at the scene and then they would come back six months later to go to court. 24:55 And so we changed that. 24:57 And we said to every police officer, and you can imagine how popular this was, every time you catch somebody with a knife, they need to be brought back to the station. We need to fingerprint and DNA them. We keep them overnight in custody. 25:09 And the police officers were incandescent because, of course, that's time off the street. It puts pressure on the other people. And remember, you've got busy Friday and Saturday nights. And then we had a murder of a lady. And it was a stranger murder. But the week before, the guy who had done it, who was pretty much a clean skin, had no previous convictions or anything else, they'd caught him with a knife and they DNA'd him and fingerprinted him. And it was the only reason that we detected this woman's murder. 25:39 And see that one case, that changed everybody, you know? That one thing, you solved a murder. By doing that, you solved a murder. And it absolutely changed the sort of view of, you know, the police officers, they became really involved. 25:52 But actually, policing was the hardest thing to try and turn around. Because people just thought, you know, lots of the cops that I worked with just thought, listen, we should just be jailing these people. You need to get back to your work. Get them jailed, you know? And then there was the other sort of group of police officers who just thought, We've been doing this for so long and it's not worked. So we need to try something different. You know, we put campus officers into schools, not to be the police officers in the playground, but to be good, visible role models. 26:23 Most of the teachers, I don't know what it's like in Australia, but most of the teachers in primary schools and to some extent secondary schools are all women. 26:32 So actually, there wasn't many good male role models. 60% of the families that we were dealing with came from single parent families and then were absent. Most of these young men had no idea what it was to be a good man. And so we tried to try and introduce these role models. And, you know, we did mentors in violence prevention. 26:48 Yeah, the male mentor bit, I imagine, would be really difficult to get right and get someone that can actually cut through and speak to the kids. I remember in high school, there were these Christian youth workers that would, I don't know, come and do this program aimed at preventing kids from taking drugs or engaging in violence. Yeah. 27:10 They were, you know, it's kind of like the sitting on a chair backwards. And I just doubt they were really appealing for the actual kids that were really at risk of this kind of thing, you know? So what, in your experience, made an actual effective mentor? 27:25 Well, that's a really hard thing. What makes a good... I think someone whose values are in place... 27:31 Who's, you know, and this is harder, I think it's probably easier for Australians. Someone who's actually willing to talk about how they feel about things. We are not good at that in Scotland. 27:42 I don't know. I think Calvinism does run through our blood. That was probably the most difficult thing was to try and get people to talk about how they felt, about what it was to be a man. You know, all the things that actually need good conversation to be able to talk about your emotions. And I'm sure a lot of people will be like rolling their eyes right now. But it was really important for people to talk about, and particularly for young men to talk about how they felt, whether they felt threatened, having people to speak to if they felt they were really at risk, having people to go to. You know, when we started the Mentors and Violence Prevention, what we did was we taught the six years in school. 28:16 So they would have been 16, 17 years old. So they became the mentors. They taught the fifth years and the fourth years. And we've started that so it's almost in every single school in Scotland. So we do this Mentors and Violence Prevention. So we get the kids... 28:29 to challenge the behaviours themselves. So, because they're not going to listen to me, but they listen to their peers and their peers are really important to them. And so they can change behaviour as well. 28:39 And it's the one thing that the evidence base tells us is it works. 28:44 So the World Health Organization and the Violence Prevention Alliance did this big, it's what's called a Campbell collaboration of like all the evidence base. And the one thing that he said worked was mentoring. But you have to mentor for about 18 months. 28:58 So it has to be for, you know, it can't just be, oh, we're just going to be a mentor for a couple of months. It needs to be someone who stays with you for a period of time. 29:06 And so even this, there's quite a lot in that. I'm thinking there are probably a lot of parents who, who in theory don't want kids to go to jail. They want what's best for at-risk youth, but not if it affects their kid in any way. Like they don't want their kid having to share the same classroom with someone who's, you know, hard to deal with or someone who's on drugs or, you know, it's violent. 29:29 Yeah, that's a great question. And we've seen that. So... 29:34 Here's the thing I would say to people. People think that mental health issues happen late on in life. You're in your 20s, etc. Something like 40 to 50% of mental health conditions are actually apparent in young people under the age of 14. So we've done a huge amount of work in trying to identify some of the mental health conditions that sort of emerge and can often affect how young people behave. We did a lot of trauma-informed work with the teachers to try and understand how kids were kicking off in the classroom. 30:03 That was one of the reasons we put the campus cops in. So we had, we've often children who are coming in and young people are coming in from really domestically violent households. 30:12 So you would have had, you know, the father picked up or, you know, the parents picked up the night before. They're coming in, you know, they're kicking off, you know, in the classroom. And part of that was about trying to understand about what was going on in that kid's life. 30:27 Because behaviour is telling you something. It's a tell. 30:32 And sometimes trying to understand that you can address the behaviour. 30:35 Look, in not all cases you can do it. Sometimes we've got nurture rooms. Sometimes we use nurture rooms to take kids out so that we can give them some time to calm down. 30:46 In a couple of schools in Glasgow, they've got a fantastic thing on the desk where the kids can point to a colour on the desk and it tells the teachers how they're feeling. So... as they're feeling really anxious, you know, fit to burst. Do you know that bit where pent-up aggression, they can sort of do an early identification? But it's, I mean, it's a really skilled piece of work. I mean, I love the teachers who have really engaged in this. They have fundamentally changed, and predominantly primary schools, we're at the very heart of it. We started in secondary, and then we found out actually we had to start in primary schools. 31:20 So really before the kids were like, you know, six, seven, eight, So we could start to, you know, try and really work with them. Because, you know, as I said before, this is long term. But you're right. I mean, we still have a low level of exclusion. We do have children we try not to permanently exclude. We have, like, lots of assisted learning schools. But it's an expensive business. It'll be expensive in Australia. 31:46 So, listen, this is not motherhood and apple pie. There are still children and young people who we have who are incredibly difficult to deal with. I still have children, young people coming into the justice system. 32:00 But what we have decided in Scotland... 32:03 is that we do not jail anybody under 18. We look at it as care, that what they need is care. We do use a small amount of secure care for young people who have committed really serious offences. And we have had a few of those. 32:17 And often they might transition into the adult system when they're 20, 21. But we try and make sure that we do that sort of care piece, secure care. 32:25 earlier on. But yeah, it's a really challenging thing to do. If I'm making it sound easy, I have failed spectacularly. It is not. 32:35 We sentence differently in Scotland. I mean, this is a bit that'll have people clutching their perils. We sentence differently in Scotland. So we look to all the research on how brains develop. 32:47 So for young men, adolescent brains, you don't develop until you're 25. You're more prone to risk-taking And, you know, your decision making is not as good, you know. So that part of your brain, that risk taking part of your brain is much bigger than the part of the brain that thinks this might not be a good thing to do. And so we realise that. And so how we sentence in Scotland, so we've got these big sentencing guidelines in Scotland that say if you're sentencing someone under the age of 25... 33:17 We appreciate that their brains are developing and they have a potential to rehabilitate. So we sentence them differently. Now, it is not a railroad. It doesn't mean that you can't send someone to jail. You can. 33:30 But we want to explore in a problem solving approach. How do we think about what it is you need to reenter society? Because you're going to do it eventually. And I'd rather than do it after 15 years in the jail where all you've learned is how to be a better offender. 33:47 Yeah. So you're saying there's more considerations in sentencing? 33:50 There is more considerations. And it has been quite contentious. You might not like it, but the evidence is the evidence is the evidence. And we've tried to be evidence based, but also trying to think about, you know, because there's victims out there and I need to be really aware of how they feel, you know, in the justice system. I do a lot of work at the moment on restorative justice. You know, I have victims who say, look, I would like to meet the person who armed me. I'd like to tell them how this made me feel, not about forgiveness. 34:21 But to allow victims and those who have been hurt by, you know, often violence, about, you know, how to develop agency, how to take power back, because the power is taken away from them when they're assaulted. I mean, for me, that's a really essential part of the work that we need to be doing is to have restorative justice. 34:40 What a life's work, Karen. What are you doing now? What's your work now? 34:45 I'm still doing the same thing. 34:47 So I can't stop. I'm a bit like, you know, if I stopped coming forward, I'd drown. 34:54 So I'm head of community justice. And when people say to me that, I say we're the prevention service. So my job is to stop, to prevent offending for the first third of the 70th time. So that's about looking at some of the reasons why people are in, trying to make sure that all the local areas that I've got across Scotland, I have all the support services inside. I mean, I do a huge amount of work on drugs and alcohol. So obviously we've introduced things like minimum unit pricing and a whole range of other things. So I do a lot of work on how to get people out of substance use and addiction. 35:27 You know, because that's, you know, lots of it's part of it, whether it's, you know, often the violence is part of a drug debt. So lots of work around that, around mental health, around health services, trying to make sure that they're in place. But I still do a huge amount sort of around violence and young people and trying to keep it going. And also because I've got sort of a national voice around it. 35:49 is to tell people the fact, the journey that we've come on. 35:53 I think so often right now, so negative, we are bombarded with negativity. 35:59 And you have to think about the journey that you've gone on, the good things that you've happened. So when I say to people, we've got no under-18s in prison. 36:08 And actually, by having no under-18s in prison, it will flatten the curve because those people who have never met prison when they're 18 perhaps won't come in again like when they're 25 and 35. So I'm looking forward over the next 10 years and thinking, right, well... hopefully the prison population will have flattened out, you know, because we'll have prevented so many people coming into the justice system through all the preventative work that we're doing that that'll, you know, that that'll change as well. I mean, not right now. We've still got a bit like Australia, you know, a high prison population because of COVID and a whole range of other things. 36:42 So, yes, it's... 36:45 It's a really interesting sort of place to, I suppose, apply your passions and my passions in prevention and in justice. 36:55 Well, it really is. You know, we hear about you and the work you've done a lot. Australia in general is going through quite a moment with violent crime. And whenever your work is referred to, it's kind of like, you know, something can be done about this that isn't just putting kids in prison. 37:11 Yeah. You just need to stop. 37:14 I mean, people say, you know, they hear me speaking. It's like, oh, my God, that sounds like loads of work. Yeah, it is. But you just need to start somewhere. Just start. I mean, I start with health. You just need to start somewhere and engage on this. But tell people it's long term. Absolutely celebrate your short term, you know, your short term successes and you will have them. Absolutely. But absolutely knuckle down for the long term and think, this is worth the journey. It's worth the climb. As you have fewer victims, as fewer people are offending, as your murder rate's going down or your injury rate's going down, people start to get a sense of, oh, actually, I can get involved in this. 37:54 This is actually working. If you're building more jails, Right now, for capacity in 15 years' time, that's like saying you're going to fail the kids who are in kindergarten right now. 38:06 And I think that's a licensed aspirational vision. I don't want to be building criminal justice capacity for 15 years' time thinking we're going to fail and we're just going to send people to jail. 38:17 Sorry, when my head's on a pillow at night, that's how I'll think about it. 38:26 Thank you to our guest today, Karen McCluskey. Visit the show notes to this episode to learn more about Karen's work. 38:33 If you need support after listening to this podcast, you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or contact 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or 1800respect.org.au. Indigenous Australians can contact 13 Yarn on 13 9276 or 13yarn.org.au. 39:03 The producers of this podcast recognise the traditional owners of the land on which it's recorded. They pay respect to the Aboriginal elders past, present and those emerging.