Page 4345 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 25 October 2017
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Another study carried out in Queensland found that most young offenders there re-entered the criminal justice system during their adult years. Seventy-nine per cent of the offender cohort progressed to the adult corrections system and served either a community corrections order or custodial order, with nearly half of the cohort serving at least one prison term.
Based on statistics such as these, the AIC now acknowledges that “measuring juvenile recidivism requires access to data on offenders in both the juvenile and adult justice systems”. Failure to include both sources results in incomplete and therefore inaccurate data. In fact, the AIC has stated that “tracking juveniles into the adult criminal justice system is crucial to enabling jurisdictions to produce accurate and meaningful measures of recidivism”.
For these reasons, I encourage this Assembly to call upon the government to begin tracking the progression of juvenile offenders into adult corrections within the territory. The Minister for Disability, Children and Youth has confirmed, in answer to a question that I raised, that the government is currently unable to provide this data, with the information that is available being unreliable as a result of being self-identified and unverified.
I understand the government’s position that reporting on the movement of young people into interstate adult correction system is currently unviable. Doing so within the territory should certainly be doable, however. We are a small jurisdiction, with only one youth detention centre and only one adult prison. The two directorates that oversee both youth justice and adult corrections should face minimal trouble in tracking movement from one to the other over time.
I understand that, because people are transient and move interstate, this data will still not be perfectly complete. But, as the AIC has indicated, it will certainly provide us a clearer assessment of the effectiveness of the territory’s current juvenile justice interventions.
It also has the added benefit of providing a more accurate picture of how those interventions are working for different subgroups amongst youth offenders. For example, the Queensland study already mentioned above found that three risk factors—being Indigenous, being male, and being in the care and protection system—greatly contributed to the likelihood that a young person in the youth justice system would eventually progress to adult corrections, with the probability of entering the adult system closely approaching 100 per cent for those subject to multiple risk factors.
I sincerely hope that we are doing a much better job than that here in the ACT with our interventions. But the only way to know is to collect and then analyse the data. Young people are valuable. I honestly hope that every member of this Assembly agrees with that statement. I believe in second chances. I believe in the reality of rehabilitation. I believe that young people who have got themselves into trouble deserve our best efforts to go forward, put those troubles behind them and rise to great heights.
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