Page 4346 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 25 October 2017
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This is an aspiration that has already been enshrined in the Blueprint for Youth Justice. One of the goals in that guiding document is that children and young people will be “given every possible chance to be successfully integrated into the community upon leaving detention”. And how are we to measure this? According to the blueprint, it will be by measuring “the number and rate of young people who reoffend, both as young and adult offenders”.
In the ACT we do not know the number or rate of young people who reoffend as adults. This means that we cannot accurately determine if we are reaching this lofty goal or not. We must start collating this data and make it available so that we can know. I commend this motion to the Assembly.
MS STEPHEN-SMITH (Kurrajong—Minister for Community Services and Social Inclusion, Minister for Disability, Children and Youth, Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, Minister for Multicultural Affairs and Minister for Workplace Safety and Industrial Relations) (4.10): I move:
Omit paragraph (2), substitute:
“(2) further notes that:
(a) the AIC report referenced at (1)(f) details the challenges in establishing a comprehensive recidivism indicator for youth justice that reflects outcomes beyond the youth justice system;
(b) the sharing of identifiable information about young detainees and former detainees for the purposes of data matching is not allowable by law;
(c) the sharing by the Justice and Community Services Directorate of identifiable information about adult offenders for data matching is also not allowable by law;
(d) people who served youth justice sentences in the ACT may reoffend as adults interstate, and sharing information across jurisdictions raises additional governance and infrastructure challenges;
(e) the importance of the appropriate sharing of information has been raised by the Moss Review, with work already underway by government;
(f) ACT Corrective Services is implementing a new data system (CORIS) which could potentially capture relevant youth justice data, with appropriate privacy considerations; and
(g) the ACT Government recently established a Youth Justice Taskforce to take stock of the considerable success achieved over the first five years of the Blueprint for Youth Justice 2012-22, and provide advice on next steps to continue to improve outcomes for young people in the ACT youth justice system; and
(3) calls upon the ACT Government to:
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