Michael Kwan
CEO / Director
I was fourteen the day I left home.
I packed the few belongings I had and walked down the street knowing, for the first time, that I no longer had a home.
Without stability and with the wrong people around me, a viscous spiral began. I left school, fell in with gang members and became desensitised—and involved in—violent and antisocial behaviours. At sixteen, I was sentenced to four years in youth justice for a long list of offences, the most serious being GBH.
That life cannot, in any way, be romanticised. My circumstances contributed, but it was my choices that landed me in the justice system.
My turning point came on my very first night in Cobham Youth Justice Centre. With great thought, prayer and with the strongest of convictions, I made a decision: I am going to change. I didn’t know how. That internal decision didn’t magically fix anything, but it did set a new direction that lead to an incredibly tough few years.
I went back to school while at Cobham—failing almost every subject in Year 10, but continuing on through Years 11 and 12 nonetheless. I was very lucky with people who supported me—I was randomly selected to be in Joe Kwon’s pilot program for Confit Pathways, met chaplains who were experienced scholars and even had an English teacher who delayed his retirement just to help me improve my English mark. It was truly extraordinary.
Slowly, this positive network of people started to change me. They showed me not only that a different future was possible, but the steps I needed to take to make that future a reality.
When I did receive my ATAR, it was one of the proudest moments of my life. To most, it’s just a number—a small, forgettable number in the grand scheme of a longer career. For me, it was two years’ worth of delayed gratification. Two years of showing up every day in an environment where education is an “optional (discouraged) extra”.
The ATAR was the beginning of a new trajectory. I went on to start an engineering degree, run mentoring programs for younger youth and gain employment from the Waratah Pre-Release Centre, securing my own private housing upon release.
However, there is one huge issue I still struggle with: my journey was unprecedented. The statistics say that I should have returned to custody—not be sitting in one of the best universities in the world, learning how to apply partial differential equations.
Through four years in youth justice, I saw fewer than five young people complete their HSC. I saw even fewer secure their own accommodation upon release. Why? It starts with the public’s voice.
We often hear that we have a youth justice crisis in Australia and that the solution is harder laws, tougher policies – “lock them up and throw away the key”. But youth justice data, research, my lived experience, my observations of thousands of other young people all point to a simple statement:
Locking up children does not work.
The thing is, we actually know what does work.
Housing. Mental Health. Employment. Education. Connection.
We’re comfortable with labels—“offender”, “criminal”, “risks”—and less comfortable facing the reality of:
- young people leaving custody into homelessness;
- dysfunctional and unsafe family environments;
- limited community support; and
- systems built to respond to crisis, not to enable long-term stability and change
We are sending young people—on a systemic level—back to the criminogenic environments that led to offending behaviours in the first place. There is little to no support for young people being released from custody. We are in a cost-of-living and housing crisis that is exacerbated for justice-involved young people. Current systems are inefficient, overloaded and producing absurd results. 86% of young people released from sentenced detention will return within 12 months.
We started Praxis Youth to effect real change in this space—to translate talk, ideas and theory in real action for young people. So that more young people get what I was given: a real chance to choose a different future and the support to make that choice last.
