When it comes to crime, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. When I was a child and growing into young adulthood, that prevention generally included corporal punishment and much more parental and authoritarian assertiveness over those behaving aberrantly and in an antisocial manner. 

Gone are these elements of control, and youth-related criminal behaviours are met with tepid response at best. Forgiveness, pardon, and minimising reactions to the mayhem created by young people are paramount.

Encouraged by weak authoritarian reaction and court leniency, miscreants continue to push the envelope to see how far tolerance will go.

The new government is trying to curtail wrongdoing, but will the corrections system buckle under the volume of criminal dysfunction it is striving to counter?  Only time and government perseverance will tell. But I hope so for the sake of our future.