Queensland’s youth justice system is trapped in a vicious cycle of enforcement and harm. In a recent article, AARJ (Australian Association for Restorative Justice) suggests a new approach, one that prioritizes prevention, support, and community engagement. Can justice reinvestment and restorative practices offer a way forward?
Youth justice is one of several areas where criminal justice and public health overlap – and where there is ongoing tension between police as force and as service. This tension runs through the history of policing in Anglo-American jurisdictions. As first responders, police can function as:the frontline of the criminal justice system, &/orpart of a multidisciplinary social support team. Well-coordinated social support can reduce rates of crime – and this population-level effect enables resources gradually to be reallocated from responding to harm towards preventing harm and promoting wellbeing. This is a virtuous circle, for which the preferred contemporary term is justice reinvestment. Although it seems eminently sensible public policy, reformers working for justice reinvestment have struggled against a vicious cycle: excessive use of enforcement undermines social support, increasing the need to respond to harm.
It is relatively easy to identify harms caused by the criminal justice system, while making the case to divert cases away from it. It is harder to develop a counterpart system towards which cases can be diverted with confidence, because skilled frontline service providers can address the complexity of presenting cases, and coordinate social support.
With a state election pending, Queensland’s youth justice system is once again experiencing the vicious cycle in which simplistic enforcement policies:worsen the complex problem they claim to be fixing, &increase political and social polarisation.There really is a problem in youth justice – and systemic bias towards enforcing control over providing support is exacerbating that problem. The mutually reinforcing elements that feed this vicious cycle include:
representative democratic electoral systems that reward the more visible activity;organisational management systems that focus on the most measurable activity.
IMPROVING POLICY FORMATION
Electoral reward for visible activity is part of the political logic for bias towards enforcement. Elected officials fear that they will receive fewer votes for coordinating support than they receive for enforcing control, incanting a mantra of ‘zero-tolerance.’ Coordinating effective social support is generally complex, takes time, and is not politically visible.
This is just one of many examples in which short-term electoral politicking thwarts effective social policy over the longer-term.
An emerging reform movement is seeking to address this systemic problem – by augmenting representative democracy with participatory democratic processes that bring citizens more actively into decision-making.
So-called citizens assemblies are comprised of a representative sample of citizens, who are authorised to deliberate on a specific topic, often with input from subject-matter experts.
These mechanisms for harnessing the wisdom of the crowd have been shown to produce policy responses that are both:
appropriately complex, & socially-and-politically acceptable. Reformers hope that the systemic use of citizens assemblies can produce ‘democratic healing’ across multiple levels of government.
IMPROVING SERVICE RESPONSES
The challenge of politics thwarting policy is compounded by a related challenge of organisational governance: organisations find it easier to measure activity and outcomes than to monitor processes.
For example, police managers can readily collect data on arrest rates, which are a measure of the activity of officers and of outcomes for whole groups or cohorts. It is much harder for managers to monitor a dynamic process – such as a meeting to diagnose a situation, and determine how to improve it.
As it happens, this organisational challenge can also be addressed through mechanisms that bring more people into decision-making.
Rather than assembling a representative sample of citizens to develop policy for the ‘macro-community’ of a jurisdiction, mechanisms for increasing social support engage the ‘micro-community’ of all-those-affected by a specific incident or issue – through the restorative practice of working with people to set relations right.
Restorative practice provides a range of processes and techniques that support people to (i) learn from the past, (ii) heal in the present, and (iii) work together for a healthier future.
This is essentially the same formula as used in trauma-informed or trauma-aware practice. However, restorative practice augments awareness with the skills to facilitate processes, in which people make sense of their situation, and coordinate their efforts to improve it.
Away from electoral season bread-and-circuses, some Queensland public servants areworking hard to develop appropriately complex youth justice policies and practice.
Fortunately, they can look to emerging programs that combine the energy and commitment of local peacemaking initiatives with the resourcing available to multi-agency forums. A key part of the formula for success appears to be resourcing roles to improve:
ADMINISTRATION –by coordinating programs across different service-providing agencies, &
FACILITATION –by building the capacity of frontline workers to facilitate restorative processes.
As many of our Association members know, an effective way to build regional capacity for restorative practice is to provide joint foundational skills training for workers from multiple service-providing agencies, followed by guided learning-on-the-job, supported by a multi-agency restorative Community of Practice.
A recent study of the history of restorative group conferencing in Queensland found that the process ‘remains substantially underutilised [due to] the discretionary gatekeeping role of police, the absence of a systematic and comprehensive consultation process with victims and accused persons, and governments ignoring the science of restorative justice.’
Queensland policy-makers and service-providers could break the vicious cycle of excessive enforcement-undermining-social-support, and drive a virtuous circle of justice reinvestment – by building capacity for restorative practice across each and every region of the state.
