The boy is a chronic miscreant but he's just been taught a lesson he will never forget. Caught in the act of allegedly stealing money from a motel in an outback town, he was on the run from irate locals who had vowed to put an end to the teenager's perceived prolific crime wave.

The boy speaks slowly as he recounts his terror. "I was on the run from the police," he says. "I was walking home, there was a big paddock nearby. A ute came past and someone said 'where is the little black c ... ' and I was lying in the bushes just panicking.

"They were saying 'where are you c . .k sucker' and 'here's the little black c ... ' and then they jumped on me."

The boy's recollections were recorded on video by lawyer Rachel Story a week after the bashing. He describes being punched to the ground and stomped on, then bundled into the back of a utility and taken to the town's golf club. "They put duct tape on my mouth and they said that no one was going to be able to hear me," the boy told his lawyer.

One man threatened to cut off the boy's arm with a chainsaw, which sat in the back of the ute. "Let's go down to the river and do something," the boy heard one of the men say. "We should just chop you up and put you in the river."

At the ninth tee of the town golf green, the boy crouched on the ground as the blows rained down. He begged for water. Immediately afterwards, he felt the blow as a glass bottle shattered against the back of his skull.

According to the boy, as the pack assault reached its climax, one man produced a .303 rifle and held it to the boy's head. "He said that he may as well take me to the river and shoot me," the boy recounted. Another man held a chainsaw to the boy's arm and threatened to cut off his hand. "Everyone in this town is sick of you," the man snarled.

"I was on the ground and all bung up," the boy said. "I was so scared."

The video statement, recorded in the police station as part of planned a victims of crime compensation case, never reached the public record.

After the assault, the boy was bundled into the back of a police van and later charged with several property offences. He spoke with his lawyer in the station as the police allegedly cranked up the air-conditioning to ice-cold. Story alleges she was warned that if the boy complained of the assault, he would be charged with making a false statement and perjury. He was later granted bail on the property offences and fled interstate. A complaint was never lodged.

Inquirer has viewed photographs taken of the boy's injuries immediately following the assault in April 2011 and has spoken to another person who visited the boy and noted his injuries in case notes.

When questioned this week about the assault, the man who allegedly held a rifle to the 14-year-old boy's head cackled with laughter. "That's a load of rot," he said. "I don't care less what he said. It's all pretty well sorted out now."

It is a telling statement. In the black urban ghettos of white-dominated towns that dot the NSW central and far west, sorting out youth crime has proved an impossible task. As night falls in public housing estates, boys as young as 10 stalk the darkened streets. Break and enters, thefts, malicious damage and assaults head the list of police complaints.

Police are at their wits' end with the boys that make up small groups of chronic offenders. Magistrates - powerless to punish those too young to be of criminal mind - throw up their hands in despair. Communities decry the soft touch of the judiciary. Criminal lawyers stagger as they digest the harsh jail terms that seem to come out of the blue: a one-year sentence for a cleanskin who stole a packet of hamburger buns; 18 months for a chronic offender with a gram of dope.

The vigilante justice allegedly handed out to the 14-year-old Aboriginal boy is a brutal and extreme demonstration of the utter lack of trust in the criminal justice system to either punish crime or prevent it in the future.

Sentencing principles of proportionality seem to fade into insignificance in the face of the white-hot politics surrounding juvenile crime. The availability of diversionary programs across NSW is patchy, and virtually non-existent in the far west. The juvenile jail population swells; nationally Aboriginal children make up 54 per cent of the youth prison population; in places like Dubbo's Orana the number is far higher.

"Three strikes and you're out" legislation locks young Aboriginal people in prison in staggering numbers in Western Australia. In the Northern Territory there is barely a white kid inside. As a major study into the nation's children's courts revealed this week, it is postcode justice.

"We have a catastrophe on our hands," says Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner Mick Gooda. "Sometimes I get despairing that this problem is just too big. But we've got to do something. We cannot just sit on our hands."

Twenty years ago, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody spoke of the "alarming" numbers of juveniles in custody as holding "very disturbing implications for the future".

"It is a national crisis by any standard," commissioner Hal Wooten said. "The continuation of the present situation means compounding human suffering, social disturbance and economic cost."

A generation on, the numbers of children in custody are even higher and the human suffering grinds on.

This week, the young men who have nothing left to hope for have spoken of the aspirations that never seemed within reach: a carpentry apprenticeship, a job in a cotton gin. "Sometimes it's just easier being bad than good, I reckon," said Lawrence Pittman, who spent nine months in prison for a host of offences including larceny and assault.

The question of whether courts punish Aboriginal offenders differently is firmly on the table, but though magistrates have bristled at the suggestion of racism, it is the failure of society to respond in the face of the devastating scale of social breakdown at the margins that is now in the firing line. Generational welfare, drug and alcohol abuse and family violence are far from confined to indigenous households, but in the northwest region of NSW, barely three white children were sentenced to prison in any year in the past five years.

"We are continually going into highly dysfunctional households where there is very poor parental supervision, there are drug and alcohol problems, there is violence, there is sexual abuse, and the living conditions in themselves could only be described as abhorrent," says Dubbo police inspector Rod Blackman, the Orana local crime area command manager. "And yet we wonder why these kids end up engaging in criminal activity. Sometimes we have to take the blinkers off and realise there are elements in our population - there are a portions of our population - where the fundamentals aren't being met. And I'm talking about feeding, clothing, education - all those particular fundamentals."

Rivers of grog and endemic child sexual abuse are evils widely acknowledged to blight remote Australia, but the same sickening trends in the regions barely pierce the national consciousness.

Yet Aboriginal women and children are its victims no matter where they live, says WA Aboriginal lawyer Hannah McGlade, a longtime campaigner against family violence and child sexual abuse.

"The incarceration of indigenous youth and family violence are flip sides of the same coin," McGlade says. "Instead of tackling the violence and supporting the family to become a healthy family, we ignore the problem, we target the children, and they become incarcerated.

"And even when they are incarcerated we are not going to address the fact that they came from violent homes, that they might have been raped in their homes, they've been bashed, they've watched their father bash their mother. We don't do anything about that. And then they have a lifetime of criminality."

McGlade points to a critical lack of alcohol rehabilitation centres and family violence prevention services in the west as evidence of a failure by governments to invest in programs that would heal communities' social fabric.

"In Western Australia sometimes it seems like we have more interest in sharks killing white blokes. It's terrible that sharks are killing people but isn't the life of an Aboriginal woman or child just as important?"

In the national parliament, a Senate inquiry has begun taking submissions. Initiated by South Australian Greens senator Penny Wright, chairwoman of the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee, it will examine the policy of justice reinvestment. The policy has recorded stunning results in Texas in the US, which has recently closed a 1100-bed state prison and recorded the lowest violent crime rate in 30 years. The policy redirects resources away from prisons into preventative programs, diverts people from jail and extends rehabilitation efforts to parole programs and after-jail support.

"When it comes to young indigenous people, a whole generation is at risk, to the detriment of their communities and of all of us," Wright says.

"Those who go in almost inevitably come out again - back to their communities and the circumstances that led to their offending. Without addressing those factors, the cycle is destined to be repeated. Communities pay the price, in more ways than one."