The perils of positivism in the NT Royal Commission into youth detention: the case for a post-positivist frame for First Nations justice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Royal Commission into the Detention and Protection of Children in the Northern Territory (2016–17) was set up by the Australian Government following a national television broadcast of guards inflicting tear gas, physical attacks, mechanical restraint chairs, hooding and indefinite segregation on First Nations children. Through an examination of the Royal Commission's establishment, proceedings and outcomes, this article identifies how First Nations people were not afforded justice. Legal positivism tainted public hearings through adversarial proceedings and the cross-examination of First Nations young people by a hostile Northern Territory (NT) Government. First Nations witnesses were examined in court houses and convention centres according to predetermined questions. A wide berth was given to guards and managers to justify violence in youth detention. Lines of inquiry were directed to reforming, rather than transforming, youth justice and state-centred approaches. In implementing the recommendations, the NT Government failed to listen to the calls of First Nations witnesses for self-determination and decarceration. Consequently, violence in youth detention has continued unabated since the Royal Commission. This study has international significance and broad lessons for inquiries directed to First Nations justice. It demonstrates how positivist frameworks undermine truth-telling processes and fail to promote structural change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.091 | 0.070 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.137 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.014 | 0.026 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".