This assessment requires you to analyse one of the following juvenile justice interventions:
◦ a Child Welfare policy that provides for the removal of children from their families (in NSW or any other Australian jurisdiction)
◦ the NSW Youth Drug Court
◦ a Youth Diversion strategy (such as cautions, warnings, or conferencing)
◦ Boot Camps
◦ Youth detention
◦ Alternatively, you can chose another intervention, however this should be discussed with the subject coordinator prior to commencing your essay.
Your essay should include the following:
◦ a description of the intervention and who is targeted (eg programs for 13-18 year olds)
◦ objectives of the intervention (eg to reduce crime, rehabilitate offenders etc)
◦ policy and/or legislation governing the intervention (eg Young Offenders Act 1997)
◦ limitations and strengths of the intervention
◦ relevant theoretical perspectives (eg Strain theory, Marxist theory)
◦ your own critical analysis of the intervention (eg based on evidence, is the intervention helpful; is it politically motivated?; what are the likely impacts?; could there be an alternative?)
Your intervention should be thoroughly researched and critically analysed. It should encompass relevant theories, policies, legislation, and practices, and should be written in your own words, drawing on relevant literature. Your research should be evidence-based and critical, rather than simply a description of an intervention.
Your essay should be well structured in a way that clearly sets out your argument, beginning with a clear introduction to your essay, and concluding with a summary of your argument. The body of your essay should flow and be logically set out. Please reference all your work with in-text references and reference list at the end.
Marks will be deducted for inaccurate/missing references.
Rationale
Successful completion of this assessment will achieve the following outcomes:
◦ be able to demonstrate an understanding of the historical foundations of the modern system of juvenile justice and child welfare
◦ be able to provide a general overview of the statutory framework of intervention with respect to juvenile offenders and other children and juveniles deemed in need of ‘care’ and their families
◦ be able to critically analyse the institutional frameworks and principal sites of interventions into the lives of children and families, including policing, schooling, child welfare and the children’s court
◦ be able to demonstrate an understanding of the effects of, especially the inequalities produced and/or compounded by, this network of agencies and practices
◦ be able to demonstrate an understanding of alternatives to judicially processing young offenders, specifically focusing on pre-trial diversion, cautioning schemes, youth conferencing and other community based prevention and control initiative.
TO THE WRITER:
THE Youth Diversion Strategy I have chosen:
YOUTH ON TRACK –
http://www.youthontrack.justice.nsw.gov.au/Pages/yot/about_us/yot-model.aspx
• Text book to be referenced:
Juvenile Justice, Youth and Crime in Australia 4th Edition
By, Chris Cunneen and Rob White (Chapters 10, 11 & 13)
• A document given to students to help cover the CRITERIA of the research essay has been provided by a lecturer:
1. Describing an intervention program:
Juvenile Justice NSW has information about its intervention programs on the relevant links on its home page:
http://www.juvenile.justice.nsw.gov.au
It may also be worth looking at one of its recent Annual reports as this summarizes these interventions and provides data about them.
The Australian Institute of Criminology has been collecting data about crime and criminal justice policy and interventions since the 1970’s. It provides a perspective at the National level. It has information on juvenile justice programs in Australia, including some research reports on these programs at:
http://www.aic.gov.au/criminal_justice_system.html
It is worth scrolling all the way through this page to find relevant information eg if you click on ‘juvenile court system’ and keep scrolling down you will find a lot of monitoring information and research reports, including on the NSW Youth Drug Court.
The NSW legislation that governs juvenile justice in relation to formal criminal justice interventions can be found at:
http://www.legislation.nsw.gov.au/maintop/scanact/inforce/NONE/0
(look under legislation starting with ‘Children’…)
Young Offenders Act 1997 can be found at:
http://www.legislation.nsw.gov.au/maintop/scanact/inforce/NONE/0
2. Some useful links for a critical analysis of juvenile justice interventions.
After describing your selected intervention, this essay requires: ‘your own critical analysis of the intervention’ (Subject outline, p 10). It is recommended this analysis ‘should be evidenced-based and critical’ (p 10). Since the emergence of the ‘justice’ model of juvenile justice in the 1990’s, Australian policy began to adopt an evidence-based practice for selecting and evaluating juvenile justice interventions. These evidence-based policies were derived from Northern hemisphere, Western criminal justice jurisdictions, in particular Canada, North America and the United Kingdom. Since adopting that policy, we have learnt a lot more about the effectiveness of criminal justice interventions, in particular in relation to identifying the major risk factors that are linked to the risk of re-offending as well as the relative effectiveness of differing interventions in desisting from crime/re-offending. These evaluation studies continue to shape the ever-evolving shape of juvenile justice interventions, although it might be argued that the way in which this research is conducted both dictates how interventions are developed as well as narrowing the objectives and programing of these interventions. Predicted or probable risks are not necessarily always trajectories to criminal offending, and, risk models may not always meet the needs and desires of individuals to desist from crime.
The Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research is frequently used to evaluate adult and juvenile justice interventions in NSW. Since the late 1990’s it has developed an ever-expanding data-base about juvenile offenders, the risk factors correlated with intervention and the effectiveness of many of the interventions that have emerged in juvenile justice over that time. This is the link to those studies and other publications in relation to juvenile crime:
http://www.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/Pages/bocsar_topics/bocsar_pub_itol.aspx#juveniles
This is BOCSAR’s listing of publications for conferencing:
http://www.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/Pages/bocsar_topics/bocsar_pub_utoz.aspx#youth_justice_conferencing
This is the listing for publications on the Drug Court:
http://www.bocsar.nsw.gov.au/Pages/bocsar_topics/bocsar_pub_dtoh.aspx#drug_court
These are taken from the A-Z subject list of publications on the website, you may find other relevant material there. The first evaluation of the Youth Drug Court was conducted by Eardley et al (2003), Evaluation of the NSW Youth Drug Court Pilot program.
The Australian Institute of Criminology has a lot of publications that have evaluated criminal justice interventions, including in the juvenile justice system. Use the following link, especially publications in ‘research and public policy’ series and the ‘trends and issues’ series. There is also a link there under ‘monitoring’ that reports juveniles in detention, juvenile contact with the justice system using longitudinal data across all states and territories in Australia.
http://www.aic.gov.au/publications.html
In 2010 Noetic Solutions submitted a report to Juvenile Justice NSW, Review of effective practice in Juvenile justice. This commissioned report reviews international, Australian and NSW interventions in terms of evidence-based best practice. It remains a benchmark of ‘what works’ that indicates what the current forms of evaluation consider to be best practice.
3. Categorizing juvenile justice interventions:
In order to effectively critique an intervention, it is helpful to have a clear idea about what sort of intervention it is and how it may differ from other sorts of interventions. If you are clear on this you might already be able to consider:
★what are its strengths and weaknesses? (including in relation to other possible interventions)
★ what possible effects may it have on young offenders? (these may be intended effects [eg to rehabilitate a young person, to reduce re-offending, to reduce risks in young people’s lives, to address the harms of crime, to provide input from victims of crime, to control risks or dangers that pose a threat to others etc) – or these effects may be unintentional (eg the level of intrusiveness generates resistance in the offender, the intervention increases the likelihood of self-identification with the criminal tag, the intervention widens the level of surveillance on the offender, her or his family or even her or his community, the intervention suppresses or punishes cultural difference etc)
★ what theories may have informed this intervention? (eg labeling theory may help to legitimate diversionary interventions, republican theory may influence conferencing)
★ what political motivations may influence the character of an intervention? (eg conservative views about young people being out-of-control, public fear of crime, economic concerns with the cost of crime and the cost of interventions, human rights advocacy etc)
Here is a typology of the listed interventions for this task as listed in the Subject outline. I’m going to use an analogy used by Cohen (1985) Visions of social control about the criminal justice interventions being like a fishing net that is cast by different social control authorities into society or the community [the ‘ocean’] (eg the police as key gatekeepers who select who will enter system and at what level of intervention) in terms of the degree to which the intervention penetrates the space(s) in which the young offender lives or frequents. To put it crudely, is the intervention encircling the young offender at the deep end (where there is considerable control exercised over the offender, often by multiple authorities and in several of the cultural spaces that the offender might reside [eg home, recreation, work, education, health, welfare etc]? -or is it closer to the shallow end (where this is the first offence, it is a minor offence, the intervention is diversionary, the intervention is preventive and addresses the risk of offending)?
The basic point of Cohen’s analysis is that even a soft end intervention is likely to have a net-widening effect (that is, it is likely to deepen the offender’s involvement in the criminal system). In more contemporary terms, one likely explanation for this is that the intervention over-exposes the offender to increased surveillance and regulation that multiplies the possibilities for criminalization (eg if two risk factors are identified then interventions will be in two domains that the young person inhabits eg schooling and health – the more disadvantaged the person is the more risk factors that will be identified, and the more places that the person inhabits that will be subjected to surveillance and risk control, and possibly, violations of the young person’s human rights).
• Shallow end
★ Any preventive intervention that specifically addresses the risk of offending (not in the list) – pre-crime interventions
[in NSW legislated under the Young Offenders Act, 1997]
★ Youth diversion – in order of intrusiveness: (i) warning (informal)(ii) caution (formal) – gatekeeper is police; least intrusive, no long-term criminal record (labeling theory, statistical evidence that young people grow out of crime), no other intervention other than the ritual of the police warning/caution (which is entered into a data-base for future surveillance)
★ Youth diversion – conferencing: gatekeeper is police and/or court; addresses harms of crime, may address the needs of victims and offenders; originally was an ‘alternative’ to criminal intervention, no long-term criminal record, although recorded in data-base for future surveillance; origins in republican theory, conflict resolution and Indigenous conflict resolution; agreed plan to address harms of crime is monitored but no formal risk control intervention; incorporates the needs and participation of the victim, may help to shape the offender to feel remorse and to take responsibility for crime.
4. Other uses of theory and research for critique
It is possible to use theory and research to critique weaknesses in an intervention eg colonial theory or critical race theory could be used to identify the ways in which particular cultural forms are being challenged, marginalized, ignored or destroyed by white dominant interventions; longitudinal research about disadvantage may actually provide evidence that risk based interventions over-estimate the risk of re-offending and may place unwarranted interventions into the lives of young people. It is worth considering the research design and methods used to evaluate an intervention program. Most criminological research conducted by BOCSAR (for example) is quantitative research – it is a form of statistical positivism that draws its data from a population of those young people who receive justice interventions in NSW; it assumes a linear model of crime causation. As such the data does not include any information about young people who are not detected for committing crimes and the factors behind their desistance from crime. Other research methods (eg using qualitative research, using different sampling methods etc) will generate different findings that may provide new insights that may be complimentary or
conflicting perspectives on juvenile offending and desistance from crime.
5. Racial biases, dominant cultural assumptions and attempts to regulate or assimilate cultural difference
One way to consider the racialised aspects of juvenile justice is to gather statistics on the under- and over- representation of youth offenders from ethic and Indigenous backgrounds. This demonstrates how the discretion of gatekeepers such as the police and the magistrate may be selecting or rejecting offenders for participation in particular kinds of intervention (eg the more punitive interventions in the deep end of the system). Another way is to consider the ‘cultural appropriateness’ of the intervention – what particular efforts to be culturally appropriate does it undertake (if any at all)? The unit has argued that justice interventions seek to shape the conduct of the young offender to be a particular kind of citizen – that is, someone who is an active citizen who plans for the future, adopts a (normal) ‘pathway’ to adulthood that involves education and training to become employed in the labor market. To what extent does the intervention have assumptions from the dominant white culture that differ from other cultural ways of living? How does it seek to assimilate and destroy cultural difference? eg in Australia a lot of effort is now made to enlist Indigenous elders into justice interventions – this helps to penetrate deeper into the lives of Aboriginal young offenders, their families and communities, often involving high levels of regulation from dominant white institutions where Aboriginal people experience discrimination, marginalization and rejection (eg consider the high levels of truanting and suspension of Aboriginal students in the education system). To what extent are these interventions operating within the Aboriginal domain rather than the white domain?
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