Page 1834 - Week 05 - Thursday, 16 May 2019
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justice supervision, with the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people in detention almost halving.
These key indicators show that since the blueprint’s implementation the number of apprehensions of young people by ACT Policing decreased by 37 per cent from 2011-12 to 2016-17; the number of young people under youth justice supervision decreased by 27 per cent, and by 33 per cent for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people, from 2011-12 to 2017-18; the number of young people under community-based supervision has decreased by 27 per cent, and by 38 per cent for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people, from 2011-12 to 2017-18; the number of young people in detention decreased by 17 per cent, and by 45 per cent for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people, from 2011-12 to 2017-18; and the number of nights young people spent in detention reduced by 36 per cent, and by 55 per cent for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people, from 2011-12 to 2017-18.
These results have informed and guided the taskforce’s recommended focus areas, identifying where more support is needed to continue to reduce the number of children, young people and families encountering the youth justice system.
Madam Speaker, the taskforce’s recommendations address each of the emerging challenges identified by the taskforce in the previous blueprint progress report, which I tabled in the Assembly in March 2018. At its establishment, I asked the taskforce to consider several issues, including supporting young people’s transition back to the community, particularly those who have spent significant periods on remand; reducing the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people at all stages of the youth justice system; better supporting young people with disability in the youth justice system, aligning with the work of the disability justice strategy; and making sure we turn young lives around at the earliest opportunity.
The final report addresses these challenges by recommending 10 focus areas that connect the major strategic reform projects across the human services portfolios, including the ACT Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Agreement 2019-28 and the disability justice strategy.
Each focus area seeks to support the transformation of support services for children, young people and families who face long-term predictors of risk. These 10 recommended focus areas are as follows: (1) continue to address and reduce the experience of and exposure to childhood trauma; (2) achieve better outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people; (3) enhance support for young people at risk of disengaging or who have disengaged, from education; (4) develop early support for young people in the middle years, 8 to 13 years; (5) strengthen diversion services for young people at risk of contact with or further engagement in the youth justice system; (6) deliver support for young people with disability and/or mental health concerns in detention; (7) provide whole-of-family support for families involved with the justice system to address the intergenerational impact of criminal offending; (8) maintain and continually improve quality therapeutic services in detention; (9) deliver trauma-informed through-care in youth justice; and (10) collect and link data measures to enable data analytics and information sharing.
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