Youth Justice Conferencing Research Articles

The effect of firefighter-delivered fire safety education on young people who misuse fire

Youth misuse of fire is a multifaceted, complex and dangerous phenomenon that is difficult to predict and detect. Reduction relies heavily on prevention programs operated by, or in conjunction with, fire services. Youth Justice Conferencing with firefighter involvement is a tertiary prevention program implemented in New South Wales, Australia, by Juvenile Justice New South Wales and Fire and Rescue New South Wales for young people who have committed a fire-related offence. The aim of this project was to evaluate this program to ascertain whether, and if so how, firefighter-delivered fire safety education in the context of conferencing reduced the risk of misuse of fire. The evaluation involved quantitative analysis of 10 years’ worth of conferencing record and recidivism data and qualitative analysis of interviews conducted with program practitioners. Findings revealed that firefighter-delivered fire safety education in the context of conferencing contributed to a reduction in general reoffending whilst providing an avenue through which firefighters could deliver fire safety education to members of the community who were at-risk. These findings have implications for the tertiary prevention of youth misuse of fire.

Rites of passion

Youth Justice Conferencing is a form of diversionary justice for adolescent offenders introduced in New South Wales, Australia in 1997. In Youth Justice Conferences adolescent offenders meet with their victim and other relevant members of the community to discuss relatively minor offences and work out some form of community service by way of reparation (instead of going to court, getting a criminal record, and possibly serving time in juvenile detention). For some commentators conferences are interpreted as a rite of passage involving a passion play of remorse, apology and forgiveness as young offenders are positioned to say sorry for what they have done. This paper explores from a functional linguistic perspective what might be involved in an exchange of feelings of this kind, taking into account recordings of conference practice explored in Zappavigna and Martin (2018).

Book review: Michele Zappavigna and JR Martin, Discourse and Diversionary Justice: An Analysis of Youth Justice Conferencing

Book review: Michele Zappavigna and JR Martin, <i>Discourse and Diversionary Justice: An Analysis of Youth Justice Conferencing</i>

Users in uses of language: embodied identity in Youth Justice Conferencing

AbstractThis paper offers a multimodal perspective on how identities are performed and negotiated in discourse, concentrating on the interaction of language and body language within a particular genre, Youth Justice Conferencing. These conferences operate as a diversionary form of sentencing in the juvenile justice system of New South Wales, Australia. Typically, they involve a young person who has committed an offense coming face to face with the victim of their crime, in the presence of family members, community workers, police, and a conference “convenor.” We conduct close, multimodal discourse analysis of the interactions that occur during the Rejoinder step in a particular conference, and investigate an “angry boy” identity enacted by two young persons at this point in the proceedings. This persona is very different to the forthcoming and remorseful persona idealized by conference designers. The role of body language in intermodally proposing and negotiating bonds within the conference is explored.

Restorative Justice: The Ideals and Realities of Conferencing for Young People

This paper is concerned with the nature and complexities of restorative justice. It uses Braithwaite’s (Br J Criminol 42:563–577, 2002a) framework of constraining, maximising and emerging restorative standards to understand the interactions that underpin success and failure in practice, i.e., ‘restorativeness’. Using qualitative data from observations of youth justice conferences in New South Wales, Australia, the roles of empowerment (as an example of a constraining standard), restoration of communities (as an example of a maximising standard) and remorse over injustice (as an example of an emergent standard) are examined. Findings confirm that restorative justice is best conceived as a continuum of dynamic process and outcome related values. Non-domination is paramount to achieving restorative justice. However, the presence, absence, and nature of other values such as storytelling, respectful listening, victim and support attendance, and apology are also important. They affect where a restorative event falls on the restorative continuum, and they affect the likelihood of other standards being met.

Restorative Justice: The Ideals and Realities of Conferencing for Young People

This paper is concerned with the nature and complexities of restorative justice. It uses Braithwaite’s (Br J Criminol 42:563–577, 2002a) framework of constraining, maximising and emerging restorative standards to understand the interactions that underpin success and failure in practice, i.e., ‘restorativeness’. Using qualitative data from observations of youth justice conferences in New South Wales, Australia, the roles of empowerment (as an example of a constraining standard), restoration of communities (as an example of a maximising standard) and remorse over injustice (as an example of an emergent standard) are examined. Findings confirm that restorative justice is best conceived as a continuum of dynamic process and outcome related values. Non-domination is paramount to achieving restorative justice. However, the presence, absence, and nature of other values such as storytelling, respectful listening, victim and support attendance, and apology are also important. They affect where a restorative event falls on the restorative continuum, and they affect the likelihood of other standards being met.

Applied Restorative Justice as a Complement to Systemic Family Therapy: Theory and Practice Implications for Families Experiencing Intra‐Familial Adolescent Sibling Incest

This article considers the impact on and therapeutic responses to families where there has been intra‐familial sexual assault (IFSA) by an adolescent member of the family against another younger member of the family. In doing so, the article will specifically highlight the nexus between systemic family therapy ideas and an applied restorative justice response in the form of Youth Justice Conferencing (YJC), as experienced through working as a family therapist in the area of adolescent sexual offending.

Negotiating narrative

Youth justice conferencing is one of a number of programs which have been introduced into western legal systems in recent years, typically under the banner of a ‘restorative justice’ reform movement. These conferences bring young people (who have admitted their guilt), victims and other parties into a face-to-face meeting in which the impact of the offence and possible reparative actions are discussed at length. In this paper, based on field observations and transcripts, we report on our preliminary efforts to analyse the generic structure of conferencing, focusing in particular on the accounts given by young people of their offending behaviour. The flat ideational focus of these accounts and the absence of an ongoing prosody of evaluation make them quite unlike the personal recounts typically produced by young people and, while seemingly appropriate to the context of a youth justice conference, also create a genre identity for the young person which may be at odds with the expectations of other conference participants (and indeed theorists of restorative justice) who are looking for signs of sincerity and remorse from the young person.

Offenders' Perceptions of the Sentencing Process: A Study of Deterrence and Stigmatisation in the New South Wales Children's Court

The criminal court system remains society's pre-eminent response to criminal activity, despite recent innovations such as youth justice conferences. Little is known, however, about the impact of an appearance before court and, in particular, whether subjective reactions to the court process have any impact on recidivism. The current article reports the results of a longitudinal study conducted in the New South Wales (NSW) Children's Court. Two hundred and six young offenders were interviewed immediately after the conclusion of their sentencing hearing using a questionnaire designed to measure the extent to which they perceived the court hearing to be a deterrent, and the extent to which they felt either stigmatised or reintegrated by the experience of being sentenced. Other factors measured included the developmental background of the young person, their academic record, peer influence, and licit and illicit drug use. Participants with previous convictions and who felt stigmatised by the hearing were more likely to reoffend, while participants rating their likelihood of arrest in the event of future offending as high, and who reported that the sentence they received would prevent future offending, were less likely to reoffend. Some evidence was obtained, therefore, to support both deterrence and labelling theory.

Realisation, instantiation and individuation: some thoughts on identity in youth justice conferencing

This paper is concerned with identity and how it can be modelled in SFL, with special reference to the roles played by young offenders in Australia's youth justice conferences. These conferences function as a restorative justice alternative to courtroom-based retributive justice. It is proposed that a hierarchy of individuation be established, alongside and complementing realisation and instantiation, responsible for users of language, the ways in which semiotic resources are allocated to them, and the ways in which they use these resources to form social groups. This hierarchy is briefly explored in relation to teenage identity.

Youth justice conferencing and indigenous over-representation in the Queensland juvenile justice system: a micro-simulation case study

Restorative justice conferencing for young offenders is firmly established in Australian juvenile justice, and legislated conferencing schemes are operating in all Australian states and territories. While there is some variation in the terms used to describe restorative justice conferences (e.g., family group conferencing, family conferencing, or youth justice conferencing), there is much more consistency in how the conferencing process is managed across Australian jurisdictions. In Queensland youth justice conferencing is a process that brings together an offender, the victim and their supporters to discuss the harm caused by the offending behaviour and provide the young person with an opportunity to take responsibility for his or her behaviour and make amends. This paper begins by briefly sketching the development of restorative justice conferencing in Queensland and describes the Juvenile Justice Simulation Model (JJSM), a micro-simulation model developed for criminal justice policy analysis in Queensland, Australia. We use this micro-simulation model to conduct an experimental exploration of the effects that youth justice conferencing has on system-wide outcomes for indigenous young people. The model simulates the impact of interventions up until 2011 on the number of finalised youth justice court appearances. Our results indicate that youth justice conferencing is unlikely to reduce the over-representation of indigenous young people in the juvenile justice system. The simulations demonstrated that, by the 2011, youth justice conferencing would result in a 12.5% decrease in finalised court appearances. Unfortunately, this decrease was more apparent for non-indigenous young people (13.7% decrease in court appearances) than for indigenous young people, who had a 10.5% decrease in court appearances. This differential impact of conferencing is due to the different court appearance profiles between indigenous and non-indigenous young offenders, with indigenous young people initiating offending at an earlier age and offending more frequently than non-indigenous young offenders.

Apologies and Accounts in Youth Justice Conferencing: Reinterpreting Research Outcomes1

The literature on restorative justice is replete with findings showing that offenders and victims judge restorative processes as fair and view outcomes as satisfactory. There is less evidence to suggest, however, that restorative processes are in fact restorative. I first consider how apology and forgiveness feature in one form of restorative justice (youth justice conferencing) and then examine findings from two major research projects in Australia (RISE and SAJJ) to show why reconciliation and repair are not common outcomes in restorative justice conferences.