Youth justice conferencing and indigenous over-representation in the Queensland juvenile justice system: a micro-simulation case study |
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Authors: | Anna Stewart Hennessey Hayes Michael Livingston Gerard Palk |
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Institution: | (1) School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, Griffith University, Gold Coast, QLD, 4111, Australia |
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Abstract: | Restorative justice conferencing for young offenders is firmly established in Australian juvenile justice, and legislated
conferencing schemes are operating in all Australian states and territories. While there is some variation in the terms used
to describe restorative justice conferences (e.g., family group conferencing, family conferencing, or youth justice conferencing),
there is much more consistency in how the conferencing process is managed across Australian jurisdictions. In Queensland youth
justice conferencing is a process that brings together an offender, the victim and their supporters to discuss the harm caused
by the offending behaviour and provide the young person with an opportunity to take responsibility for his or her behaviour
and make amends. This paper begins by briefly sketching the development of restorative justice conferencing in Queensland
and describes the Juvenile Justice Simulation Model (JJSM), a micro-simulation model developed for criminal justice policy
analysis in Queensland, Australia. We use this micro-simulation model to conduct an experimental exploration of the effects
that youth justice conferencing has on system-wide outcomes for indigenous young people. The model simulates the impact of
interventions up until 2011 on the number of finalised youth justice court appearances. Our results indicate that youth justice
conferencing is unlikely to reduce the over-representation of indigenous young people in the juvenile justice system. The
simulations demonstrated that, by the 2011, youth justice conferencing would result in a 12.5% decrease in finalised court
appearances. Unfortunately, this decrease was more apparent for non-indigenous young people (13.7% decrease in court appearances)
than for indigenous young people, who had a 10.5% decrease in court appearances. This differential impact of conferencing
is due to the different court appearance profiles between indigenous and non-indigenous young offenders, with indigenous young
people initiating offending at an earlier age and offending more frequently than non-indigenous young offenders. |
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