This speech was delivered on 12/09/2013 in the NSW Upper House. You can read the original contribution here.
Mr DAVID SHOEBRIDGE [3.40 p.m.]: In the recent budget estimates hearing I asked both the Attorney General and the Chief Executive Officer of Juvenile Justice, Ms Valda Rusis, several questions about the rate of juvenile imprisonment in New South Wales. The series of facts and figures that came out are greatly troubling. One of the most stark problems is the rate at which New South Wales continues to jail our juveniles. On the day I asked the chief executive officer about the number of juveniles in detention that night in New South Wales jails there were 302. That is roughly four to five times the rate that children are jailed across the border in Victoria. When one digs deeper into the figures they become even more troubling in terms of the make-up of the juvenile justice population and the children in juvenile detention who are being held on remand.
First, I refer to the proportion of Aboriginal juveniles held in detention. As long as records go back, there has been an appalling overrepresentation of Aboriginal children in juvenile detention facilities. The figures from 2008-09 to this year show that the rate of Aboriginal children in juvenile prisons remains between 49 per cent and 51 per cent of the juvenile prison population. From an overall population base of about 2.5 per cent or 3 per cent of the population, they represent half—sometimes slightly more than half—of the children in jail on any particular night. That is a gross failing by the criminal justice system of this vulnerable part of our community, which fails on so many other grounds including health and life expectancy.
If we look even further into the figures we realise that 49 per cent of the juveniles being held in detention at any given moment are not being held because they have been found guilty of an offence; they are being held on remand. Primarily they are being held on remand because the authorities, the Children’s Magistrate or the magistrate they come before, cannot be satisfied that if they are given bail they will be found some safe and secure accommodation from which they will be able to report to court. It is extraordinary that, of the 50 per cent or 49 per cent of the juvenile justice prison population that are being held on remand, a remarkable 82.8 per cent of those juveniles either get a non-custodial sentence or are acquitted when they come to trial. Nine times out of 10 those juveniles should not have spent one night behind bars, let alone often months waiting for their trial.
When we look at the number of Aboriginal children who are being processed through the juvenile justice system, and we look more deeply at the orders and the proportion of Aboriginal children receiving different custodial orders or sentencing outcomes in the Children’s Court, the trend is even more worrying. When a child comes before the Children’s Court for sentencing, an array of options is open to the magistrate. The three principal orders are: a child can be ordered to attend a youth justice conference, where the child is encouraged to take responsibility for his or her offence and sometimes to meet with the victims of the offence, which is a non-custodial path; sometimes they can attend orders under community supervision; or they can go to jail.
When we look at the proportion of Aboriginal children who are ordered into the lesser youth justice conference stream we see that 27 per cent of the children going down the youth justice conference stream are Aboriginal; 42.4 per cent of children going down the community supervision path are Aboriginal; and 50 per cent of the children going to jail are Aboriginal. Aboriginal youth are grossly overrepresented in jail and disproportionately underrepresented in those other classes of sentencing. There is a systemic failing in the way we deal with juvenile justice, particularly for Aboriginal children. The department has accepted that those figures will continue. We need a new path and a new pattern.