Page 3430 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 17 September 2019
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Mr Muir’s report acknowledges the complex lives of the young people involved in the incident—not to excuse their behaviour but to contextualise it—and the impact of this complexity in managing a youth justice centre. As he notes:
The management and staff at Bimberi manage young people every day who are deemed too high a risk to be in the community due to their offending. In addition to this many of the young people involved in this event have histories of abuse, neglect and exposure to significant domestic and family violence.
On behalf of the ACT community, I again want to publicly extend my sincere appreciation for the work Bimberi staff do to rehabilitate young people with complex needs and difficult backgrounds at Bimberi, and the teachers, health professionals and community partners who work alongside them every day.
I also want to acknowledge the principled decision-making of three young people who were also in the unit where the incident started, and who actively chose not to participate. These young people are to be commended for their behaviour and for following all directions of Bimberi staff at the time.
Today I would also like to reflect on the fourth Bimberi headline indicators report, which I will table shortly. As members would be aware, I instigated this report in 2017 to provide greater transparency around the centre’s operations. As with previous reports, I note that caution should be taken when interpreting data in this report as it uses unpublished data which has not been cleansed by an external agency, so it may not be comparable with data from youth justice centres in other jurisdictions.
The report also relies on operational data that is extracted through a manual count. All information is quality assured before tabling, to ensure accuracy. The new client information system currently in development will allow for the improved extraction of data in the future.
I am pleased to inform the Assembly that during the 2018-19 financial year only two segregation directions were required to be made for young people, compared to 10 in the 2017-18 period. In addition to this, 22 operational lockdowns occurred, compared to 179, which is a significant decrease and is also less than in 2016-17.
During this period the number of assaults at Bimberi continued the downward trend, from 64 assaults in 2009-10 to 14 in the current 2018-19 reporting period. The number of strip searches for young people entering detention was at zero for the year, as staff continue to apply a risk-based assessment for the types of searches necessary.
These searches are necessary at times to maintain the safety of the young persons themselves and others within the centre. However, it is acknowledged that every effort should be made to reduce strip searches to a minimum, given the trauma that has often been experienced by young people entering custody.
I note that there has been an increase in category 1 incidents in this report, compared to 2017-18, when there were none. The six incidents in the first half of the year, which
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