Impact of Police Diversion on Re-Offending by Young People

Abstract

In Australia, most young people who offend and have contact with police are diverted from formal processing via a formal police caution or referred to a restorative justice conference (hereafter referred to as a ‘youth justice conference’). The focus on diversion is based on the perceived criminogenic effects that formal court processing may have on young people. Labelling theory provides the primary theoretical basis for diverting young people from formal processing, by predicting that being labelled ‘deviant’ by the courts can have a detrimental effect on the individual’s self-image and the label that others attach to them. Stigmatisation caused by this negative labelling makes it increasingly likely for the young person to gravitate towards other negatively labelled young people and engage in subsequent offending behaviour. Thus, if the predictions of labelling theory are true, those diverted from court should be less likely to re-offend, all other factors being equal. This thesis provides an examination of how effective the police diversionary strategies of formal police cautioning and youth justice conferencing are for reducing recidivism by young people in comparison to a finalised youth court appearance. However, the decision by police about whether to divert or formally process alleged young offenders is not due to random allocation, but is based on a complex interplay between various legal and extra-legal factors. Thus, a comparison between these two groups of young people on outcome measures may be impacted by selection bias, or reflect pre-existing differences between the groups on outcome measures. Propensity score matching (PSM) provides the ability to deal with the problem of selection bias by matching groups on a number of covariates to achieve statistical balance, and therefore approximate experimental conditions.