Page 4344 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 25 October 2017
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The central purpose of a juvenile justice system therefore is to help young people grow out of crime, as they continue to develop cognitively and socially, hopefully adopting law abiding lifestyles as adults. To give them the best chance at this, jurisdictions around the world do things like prohibit the naming of young offenders or the recording of their convictions. The goal is to avoid stigmatising them as criminals, which could entrench them in the criminal justice system.
Because they are young and lack maturity in judgement, we seek to make it easy for them to put any offending well and truly in their past and move forward into responsible law-abiding adulthood. I strongly suspect that a number of us in this chamber today have personally benefited from this wise approach to youthful indiscretion.
As Kelly Richards, a research analyst with the Commonwealth government’s Australian Institute of Criminology, or AIC, has observed, because young people are “neither fully developed nor entrenched within the criminal justice system” interventions can have an enormous impact on them. This is good when the interventions are effective but—to quote Richards again—“conversely, the potential exists for a great deal of harm to be done to juveniles if ineffective or unsuitable interventions are applied to juvenile justice authorities”.
It therefore becomes extremely important to be able to assess the suitability of what happens in our youth justice system. To quote from the government’s Blueprint for Youth Justice:
Programs, initiatives and services are grounded in evidence and are regularly evaluated to ensure effectiveness and efficiency.
Though it is not the only way to measure this, recidivism is widely acknowledged to be one of the key indicators of the effectiveness of juvenile justice interventions. This is a point that has likewise been endorsed by the Blueprint for Youth Justice, which has as one of its stated goals that the number and rate of young people who reoffend will be reduced.
The way we track how many young people reoffend, however, is also important. As noted by the AIC, all the studies into youth recidivism in various Australian jurisdictions have exclusively looked at incidences where youth have reoffended whilst still classified as young people. The results of this research has suggested that the probability of reconviction was small: approximately 30 per cent. The same report notes that this information has strongly influenced juvenile justice policy. It also shows up in a 2002 report prepared by the AIC for the ACT government.
More recent research, however, has taken a much broader view and tracked repeat offending not just within the youth justice system but also well into adulthood. The results of one study carried out in New South Wales have “challenged the long-held belief that most juveniles do not reappear in court after their first criminal conviction”. In fact, it found that 68 per cent of those appearing in the children’s court reappeared in a criminal court within eight years, either as youth or as adults.
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