Essay Shortage of Dedicated Facilities to Accommodate Young Offenders – Law Assignment Help

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QUESTION 1

In Queensland, there is a shortage of dedicated facilities to accommodate young offenders who are denied bail prior to trial. This has resulted in children being detained in adult watch-houses. In 2020, the ABC’s Four Corners program reported that some children as young as 10 had been detained in adult watch-houses, and a report by the Queensland Children’s Court recorded that some children were detained there for as long as 15 days. In recent times a number of high-profile incidents have occurred in which young people accused of criminal offences have been released on bail but have then committed further offending while in the community. This has prompted criticism of the youth justice system among some members of the community, and in some extreme cases individuals have engaged in vigilante actions in an effort to address the problem themselves. Following these events, the Youth Justice and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2021 (‘the Act’) was introduced to the Queensland Parliament, and passed into law in April. The Act changes the law in a number of ways, including the following amendments in relation to young offenders released on bail: – Section 24 creates a presumption that a young person accused of a serious offence will be refused release on bail unless they can show why detention in custody is not justified. This reverses the previous presumption that bail will be granted. – Section 26 allows a court to impose electronic monitoring on a young offender who has been released on bail in order to track their movements and deter them from further offending. The electronic monitoring can only be imposed on a person over 16 years of age, where the young person has previously been found guilty of an offence and where they live in a discrete geographical area. When introducing the amendments to Parliament, the Police Minister Hon Mark Ryan explained that: “The data shows that around 90 per cent of youth offenders do not repeatedly offend, with many not reoffending after their first interaction with police. While this data is encouraging, the data also shows that there is a cohort of serious recidivist youth offenders, outliers, who are causing significant harm to the community. This cohort of recidivist offenders, representing just 10 per cent of all youth offenders, account for 48 per cent of all youth offending. Combined with the government’s five-point action plan, which has already helped facilitate a 23 per cent drop in the number of young offenders in 2019-20 and a nine per cent reduction in the number of charges, this bill will form an all-round strategy to tackle this cohort of persistent youth offenders.” The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service in Queensland has criticised these reforms, saying they will disproportionately impact on Indigenous young people, who are already over-represented in the youth justice system and more likely to be held in detention than nonIndigenous offenders. Question 1 continued overleaf 2 LLB104TOA3.211 cont/…

Question 1 continued The Queensland Law Society submitted the following statement when the amendments were being proposed: “…the proposed amendments in the Bill are not appropriately adapted to the aim of reducing youth offending…The Bill’s measures are punitive and likely to increase the number of children in detention. This ultimately fails to address the underlying drivers of youth crime, and is consequently unlikely to provide an effective and enduring solution.” Using a theoretical framework based on human rights, justice, access to justice or critical race theory (or a combination of these), analyse the new reforms and explain whether or not they are justifiable.