‘It’s a no-brainer’: Inside a Victorian pilot program keeping kids out of jail

After hours spent confined in a police holding cell, the chance for young people to have their photo taken can provide a fleeting reprieve from the incessant boredom that follows an arrest — even if it involves traipsing barefoot down the cold polished concrete of a long hallway.

For Sergeant Steven Turner, studying each individual’s historic catalogue of photos has had a profound effect. “You’ll see a 17-year-old come through and they’ve already been in custody 15 times,” he tells Crikey. “You look at their photos and see the progression over five years, and see the light start fading from their eyes.”

Bald, brawny and bearded, Turner doesn’t deviate from the stereotype of an austere sergeant. But an innovative strategy to reduce youth crime in Melbourne’s west is a departure from the traditional notion of hardline policing, which he says has failed to reduce the number of young people entering Victoria’s youth justice system.

Turner and Angus Woodward, lawyer and lead criminal law counsel at Sunshine community legal centre WEstjustice, head up the youth crime prevention and early intervention program. Turner is responsible for assessing each young person who comes into his custody to determine whether they would benefit from a caution, diversion or referral to exterior legal and non-legal support services. Woodward connects young people to lawyers and non-legal support services with access to housing and employment providers and substance and mental health counsellors.

“We needed to try something different,” Turner says. “All the studies coming out over the last few years point to less contact with the justice system leading to better outcomes for kids.”

Turner, who has worked out of the Sunshine police station for 13 years, believes the traditional approach to youth crime doesn’t address the criminogenic factors that lead to offending. Criminogenic factors are aspects of people’s lives that may influence them to commit a crime, and could include disengagement from school, family violence, trauma, alcohol and drug use, lack of employment and undiagnosed mental health conditions. 

Instead of addressing these factors, traditional approaches advocate incarceration, which research shows has a limited to no effect in reducing rates of reoffending. “Each arrest is a point of contact, and it should be an opportunity to intervene and try to steer them another way,” Turner says.

Police say preliminary data suggests that since the program began more than two years ago, youth crime rates in Brimbank and Wyndham have declined, despite concerns over several high-profile violent crimes involving young people. 

When young offenders are referred to appropriate services they are less likely to reoffend, a study by the Victorian Youth Support + Advocacy Service found. Of the young people who were referred to its services after offending, 89% did not reoffend. “But before this pilot, we were only referring 3 or 4% of kids,” Turner says. “That made me realise it’s not working — something’s wrong.” 

Without assistance, young people were often being bailed with strict conditions and court dates long into the future. Without the tools to address the criminogenic factors in their lives, young people often breach their bail or reoffend, leading to more serious charges.

“All of a sudden these young people are being remanded, despite their first offence being something pretty minor,” says Woodward. He believes the system in place across much of the state doesn’t provide young people timely consequences for their actions. 

“If you are negotiating a diversion for a young person, the brief is often not at court until six to eight months after the alleged offence, and it then frequently needs to be adjourned. This is a massive missed opportunity to engage and support them.”

Woodward and Turner had both been separately assessing ways to address these flaws in the system before a chance meeting at Australia’s largest co-located youth services centre, the Visy Cares Hub, once the largest harvesting factory in the southern hemisphere. Today, its last remaining building hosts frequent meetings between community stakeholders and police, and it was here, in 2017, that Woodward and Turner sparked their close partnership.

“I was really impressed,” Woodward tells Crikey. “Steve had all these ideas and had done all this work off his own bat. I told him I had a lot of ideas about the diversion and the caution space, and improving outcomes for kids — and it just exploded from there.”

Together they worked to develop a youth crime prevention framework aimed at reducing the number of young people unnecessarily entering Victoria’s youth justice system. In 2022 the program received $300,000 from the Victorian government with the aim of pooling the resources of several community service providers in Brimbank and Wyndham.

The program takes a holistic approach to youth crime in the western suburbs by addressing systemic factors that affect recidivism rates (the rate at which people who have been incarcerated return to custody). These include the underuse of cautions and referrals to legal and non-legal support services, as well as long wait times for court dates and spiralling remand numbers. 

John (not his real name), 19, lives with Asperger’s syndrome, and has benefited from the pilot program. Summonsed and charged by police for three criminal offences after driving away from a minor collision in a car park, he was referred to WEstjustice, which advocated for a caution in line with phase two of the pilot. Previously, under Victoria Police policy, cautions were limited to minor shop theft and possession of small quantities of certain drugs. After consultation with the victim who was sympathetic to his circumstances, John’s charges were formally withdrawn.

“I am thankful to be able to get rid of the anxiety of needing to be in the courtroom, and it is nice not having something on my record,” John tells Crikey.

A caution is also an opportunity for police to make contact with the young person’s parent or guardian, meaning police can better gauge if there are criminogenic factors at home that could be addressed through external support services.

“The evidence shows that the later a young person enters the system, the less likely they will enter it later or be in it for as long,” Woodward says. “If we accept that evidence, which is compelling, we have to make a fundamental change to our approach.”

Turner says there was pushback from some police, but many have since seen the benefits: “I’ve had so many people come up to me and say: ‘I didn’t really rate what you were doing. I didn’t really buy into what you’re doing, but I can see the benefit of that now.’”

Turner is quick to stress that cautions are rarely considered for repeat offenders or serious offending where the offender is determined to be the instigator: “We’re still properly charging and taking people to court that need to go.”

The pilot has given dozens of training sessions to Victoria Police on topics spanning cultural competency and adolescent brain development, as well as broad training about the new youth crime framework and how to issue referrals. 

All young people who come in contact with police in the western district are referred to Ellie Serour from YouthNow, the youth support coordinator funded under the pilot, who calls the young people to triage what support they need. 

Serour also works out of the Visy Cares Hub in Sunshine, and says the young people she speaks to are not aware of services to support them: “I have the ability to not only refer them to [mental health service provider] headspace, but we also talk to employers daily, housing assistance, résumé writing classes and more. But ultimately a majority of my referrals have been for mental health.” 

She believes most of the young people she engages with are motivated to turn their lives around: “They actually do realise the severity of the situation.”

A year-long assessment comparing outcomes in the western district with several other metropolitan and regional policing districts is expected to be published around March, but several indications are showing the pilot is achieving positive results.

Since its implementation, the number of young people undertaking voluntary referrals has increased from just 3 or 4% to around 30% in Brimbank. But Turner is determined to lift that rate to at least 80% of the young people who enter his custody. 

An emphasis on fast-tracking court hearings and minimising adjournments is resulting in more timely consequences and appropriate punishments: “Now if we arrest a kid, and we’ve identified criminogenic factors, we have them listed at court within three weeks.” 

That means the new system can see young people enrolled in a diversionary program within three to four weeks from arrest, as opposed to sometimes six or 12 months later. Woodward says: “It’s parenting 101, timely consequences. You don’t tell your child off for something they did 12 months ago.”

Statistics from the interim report show the number of remands in Brimbank and Wyndham has dropped significantly, and police have become much more likely to issue cautions to young people, with the rate of cautions increasing from around 8% before the pilot to a rate of 60% to 70%. In turn, the number of cases being listed at Sunshine’s Children’s Court has fallen dramatically since the program began — a significant cost benefit to taxpayers. 

“Compared with how much it costs to put a kid through court or prison, the cost-benefit of investing in this pilot and reducing the crime rate is a financial no-brainer,” Woodward says.

Turner and Woodward hope the pilot can be expanded across Victoria, but admit resources are stretched and funding is uncertain, making it difficult to effectively operate all aspects: “Everyone wants the same thing: better outcomes for kids, community and lower workload long term. [We] don’t have all the answers, but we need to try something different.”