Page 535 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 21 February 2012
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MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Leader, ACT Greens) (4.13): I welcome the opportunity to contribute my thoughts on the issue of preventing and diverting young offenders from the youth justice system. We know there is a large amount of literature and international research in the area of youth justice. What we strongly know and is well documented is that any interaction of a child or young person with the youth justice system can have potentially negative outcomes.
History shows that many jurisdictions continue to invest heavily in tertiary prevention through strategies such as child protection and community youth justice, and the capital investment into buildings to house and detain young offenders. But this is all at a cost. The consequence is a lack of investment in the primary and secondary prevention and diversion strategies.
This is an area of public policy that needs lots of attention, as the ACT has recently had many reminders that we are not diverting or preventing young people from entering our youth justice system. The ultimate aim of prevention is to guide young people away from the life paths that are likely to lead them towards developing difficult life experiences and exacerbate the risk factors in their lives. Those difficulties and risk factors are the common issues we hear about all the time: unemployment, adult criminal behaviours and entry into the adult justice system, and mental and physical disease. These same issues make people vulnerable and socially isolated from the one thing that has the ability to guide and assist them to find better outcomes—the community.
Too often in here we hear about the negative outcomes for young people, some of which include educational underachievement, economic disadvantage, social isolation and myriad poorer health outcomes, including substance misuse and involvement in offending. These are financial costs that we should not have to pay, and social and community costs we cannot accept in this day and age.
So the ultimate benefit of prevention for young people is access and opportunity to achieve better outcomes with positive life choices. The benefits for the community are that we are safeguarded against antisocial and undesirable future consequences and we avoid the cost of lost productivity, higher crime rates, larger detention and prison populations and increased costs to the health system.
Something that strikes me in the literature is that many, if not all, young people involved in the tertiary end of the youth justice system have been known to the prevention system and community services for some time. International research would indicate that many of the young people in custody have sustained some kind of trauma through childhood abuse and neglect. We continue to see a number of young people whose brain development has been interrupted and as such live in a hypervigilant state of fear in their everyday lives. We also know that increasing numbers of young people with foetal alcohol symptoms or syndrome are committing crimes due to poor impulse control and consequential thinking and are incarcerated with very little recognition or support provided that is backed up by clinical assessments and treatment.
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