Page 4343 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 25 October 2017

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(d) as noted by the Australian Government’s Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC), large numbers of juvenile offenders progress to the adult corrections system;

(e) tracking recidivism only within the youth justice system as opposed to across both jurisdictions therefore fails to create an accurate and complete picture;

(f) consequently the AIC report Measuring juvenile recidivism in Australia states that “measuring juvenile recidivism requires access to data on offenders in both the juvenile and adult justice systems” and that “tracking juveniles into the adult criminal justice system is crucial to enabling jurisdictions to produce accurate and meaningful measures of recidivism” and to reduce this recidivism; and

(g) yet according to a question on notice from 4 August 2017, the ACT Government is unable to provide reliable data on the number of sentenced young people in the ACT who go on to serve a custodial sentence at the AMC; and

(2) calls on the ACT Government to:

(a) recognise the important contribution to accurate and meaningful data collection provided by tracking the progression of juvenile offenders into adult corrections within the Territory;

(b) establish policies and mechanisms that will allow for the robust collection and sharing of this data (including the usual indicators of male/female, Indigenous/non-Indigenous, and other relevant indicators); and

I am pleased to move this motion today and to address this very important topic relating to young people in this territory. In the past, children who broke laws were treated no differently from adults, with even very young children imprisoned and punished alongside grown-up offenders. Those were definitely not the good old days. Thankfully it is now widely acknowledged both in Australia and internationally that juveniles should be subject to a system that is separate to the adult system, one that recognises their inexperience and their immaturity.

Having a distinct justice system for young people is based in large part upon what we know separates juvenile offenders from adult offenders. As all of the parents in this space will no doubt attest, kids are not just smaller versions of grown-ups. As the government’s Blueprint for Youth Justice makes clear:

Children and young people are biologically different from adults. This is particularly true for the brain and how it functions.

Growing children have not yet developed full competence in decision-making, and they tend to consider risk from social and emotional perspectives, being heavily influenced by their peers.

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