At 14, he had his first interaction with the criminal justice system.

And at 25, having spent most of his adult life behind bars, Polyak is considered beyond a mere risk of institutionalisation and is already at serious peril of spending the majority of the rest of his life in jail. His case, as Judge Peter Whitford, SC, lamented in Newcastle District Court last week, is "yet another tragic example of how as a community we have failed adequately to value and support Indigenous Australians".

While on parole, Polyak committed six robberies and 10 break and enters over a number of months during late 2017.

He was found guilty of 17 offences after a trial and on Friday was jailed for a maximum of 10 years, with a non-parole period of five years. He will be eligible for parole in June, 2023.

The robberies would have been "terrifying" for the victims, Judge Whitford said. While the break-ins were committed predominantly in unoccupied commercial premises in the early hours of the morning when no one was likely to be around.

But it was Polyak's profoundly deprived upbringing and the system that was inevitably going to entangle him that Judge Whitford spent much of his judgment discussing on Friday.

"This case is yet another tragic example of how as a community we have failed adequately to value and support indigenous Australians," Judge Whitford said.

"What his experience reveals, like that of so many others in a similar position, is the manifest inadequacy of the legal system, as presently constituted, effectively to deal with what in their origin are problems of health and social welfare, and which should attract a far more appropriate response than early and repeated intersection with the criminal justice system. "It can only be hoped that some recent initiatives, such as justice reinvestment, and some only presently proposed, like the Walama Court, might be capable of stemming this early diversion into a system ill-equipped and inadequately resourced properly to respond to the multitude of factors that need to be addressed in order to prevent entrenched disadvantage being inevitably converted into entrenched penal institutionalisation, with the corresponding cycle of offending and incarceration to which that state of affairs persistently seems to give rise."