AIHW: Youth Justice in Australia 2016-17

The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare have recently released a report titled "Youth Justice in Australia 2016-17". The report looks at young people aged 10-17 under youth justice supervision in 2016-17. It explores the key aspects of supervision orders in the community and in detention as well as recent trends. The report found that the majority of young people in detention were unsentenced, with 3 in 5 or 61% of young people in detention awaiting an outcome such as sentencing. There were 4,473 (4 in 5) young people under supervision in the community compared with 913 (1 in 5) in detention. The Youth Justice report also found the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people in the youth justice system has increased. In Queensland, Indigenous young people were 17 times more likely to be involved in the youth justice system compared with non-indigenous young people. Overall, rates of young people involved in the youth justice system has decreased over the past five years, with declines in community-based supervision (from 21 to 17 per 10, 000) and detention (from 4 to 3 per 10, 000). The report found significant variation based on the sex of those young people under youth justice supervision, males were four times more likely as females to be under supervision on an average day during 2016-17.

Download the "Youth Justice in Australia 2016-17" (9.6MB PDF)