Prof Kate Steinbeck [00:00:00] Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome. I'm Kate Steinbeck and it’s my pleasure to chair this WH&Y series webinar for August, and welcoming Associate Professor Garner Clancy to present to us today. Garner is an Associate Professor in Criminology, and before joining the University of Sydney Law School in 2011, he worked with a number of clinical justice agencies, including Juvenile Justice in New South Wales and the New South Wales Police Force. As a crime prevention specialist and consultant, Garner's work focuses on the intersection between research, policy, and practice, and currently Garner is working to develop a whole of Sydney University approach to youth justice and youth crime issues, which I think we'll be talking about further. 
 
Prof Kate Steinbeck [00:00:58] Before we have Garner's presentation, as usual, I would like to acknowledge all our partners and collaborators who are part of the WH&Y Wellbeing, Health and Youth Centre of Research Excellence. I'd also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the country throughout Australia. We are probably on many grounds today and recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and culture and we pay our respects to their elders past, present and emerging. 
 
Prof Kate Steinbeck [00:01:38] I encourage you, as always, to look at our website and to be part of our Community of Practice. We are constantly adding new things and there's been some important additions looking at the WH&Y Commission, our young research collaborators. I'm just going to remind you that during the presentation your microphone will be muted and your video switched off. And if you have something to say, or want to ask a question, please put it in the chat panel. And type comments into the bottom of the field at the bottom of the panel as shown on this slide. We will leave time for questions. And Garner has indicated he's very happy to take questions. So, welcome again to present for us today a holistic approach to youth crime and youth justice. Over to you. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:02:43] Thank you very much, Kate. And thank you for the opportunity to speak today. And also thanks to Natasha for her work behind the scenes to make this possible. I too, want to acknowledge the traditional custodianship and of the country on which the University of Sydney campuses stand. I'm on Gadigal land of Eora Nation, and pay respects to those who have cared and continue to care for country. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:03:12] My presentation today is going to cover some of these issues. I acknowledge it's very New South Wales centric, which may not be particularly helpful for some of you, but I'm really trying to focus initially on New South Wales and then perhaps take some of the ideas to other parts of the country. So what I want to cover is trends in youth crime and youth justice in New South Wales and point to some trends that I think haven't received enough attention, some positive trends that are worthy of analysis and theorising. I want to talk about young people in custody and particularly the Youth Health Survey data. I want to then speak to what is a work in progress and is relatively new. We're into one year of a memorandum of understanding between the University of Sydney and Youth Justice New South Wales, and I want to speak to some of that collaboration and the opportunities arising from that collaboration and ideally think about how some of our lessons can be applied in other contexts, in other jurisdictions and by other universities and research centres. And then there'll be time for questions and answers, and I'm very happy to take questions and answers. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:04:32] To begin, I want to speak a little bit about some key trends in youth crime and youth justice in New South Wales. And some of these trends are reflective of broader trends not just in Australia but in other parts of the world, and I will highlight some of those. Because this area is somewhat dynamic, it's often difficult to speak with confidence about contemporary trends, contemporary practices in different parts of the criminal justice system. But I will foreshadow some of the key trends. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:05:07] But I want to begin by saying that one of the difficulties we have in this space is the sensationalisation of youth crime and youth justice practices. These are just some images from a quick Google search that I did in preparing for this presentation that highlights some of the contemporary debates. There's particular focus in New South Wales at the moment on knife crime. And some of these images also point to practices in youth justice centres or detention centres, which have attracted incredible attention across the country in the last six years, particularly as a result of the Royal Commission into the treatment of detainees and young people in the Northern Territory, that followed the exposé from the ABC Four Corners program into the running of the Don Dale Detention Centre there. But at the moment there's an inquiry running in Tasmania into the Ashley Detention Centre. There's been inquiries into a number of disturbances in the Victorian system and the New South Wales system and more recently also in Western Australia. So almost all jurisdictions are going through a process of review or have been through a process of review and thinking about how to improve the youth justice system to respond to the diverse needs of young people who enter that system. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:06:34] But the media portrayals often stimulate a perception that just isn't true. And particularly in recent news, generally speaking, you'll see through some of my slides there's been a decline in youth crime. In a number of countries around the world, this decline has been really quite significant and sustained. In a number of jurisdictions we're talking 20 year plus declines in youth crime, which have often resulted in reductions in the number of young people coming into the youth justice systems in those jurisdictions, which is incredibly positive news for a variety of reasons. You don't have to know much about this area to know that entry into a youth justice centre is often damaging and traumatic for young people and often stimulates or augments a negative life pathway. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:07:33] You will probably know there's a big debate currently about the age of criminal responsibility, which in New South Wales and other Australian jurisdictions is between ten and 18 years. So the youth justice systems in Australia deal with young people between ten and 18. The argument is to raise that lower minimum age of criminal responsibility in response to a lot of the findings coming out of neuroscience and other aspects of health science that say children as young as ten don't have the same capacity to understand that what they're doing is against the law, as is true for older, young people. ACT has been the first  jurisdiction to really move in this space, and other jurisdictions are looking very closely at whether they will raise the minimum age of criminal responsibility. Happy to answer questions about that at the end if that proves to be a topic of interest. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:08:28] So to some data. We've been looking at police reports on youth crime in New South Wales over a 23 year period, so going back to the late 1990s and looking to see what has been happening. Now, this data is slightly problematic because it's young persons of interest, so young people between ten and 18 who come to police notice, get captured on the COPS (Computerised Operational Policing System) database in New South Wales who are referred to court, who receive a caution or who are referred to a youth justice conference. Three of the options that police have in dealing with young people, they have other options, and we're not including that data here, but those other options include no formal action, so often young people are involved in very minor criminal offending, the police observe that behaviour and effectively take no formal action, they just speak to them and tell them to kind of correct their ways, in effect. Police can issue fines for a variety of offenses, and we know that young people receive a significant number of fines, they can be small fines, large fines, depending on the behaviour that's resulted in a fine being given. incidents of catching a train without paying or swiping on can result in a fine. And through the COVID period, obviously there's been lots of commentary about the number of fines issued for breach of public health orders, many of which went to young people. And those fines are significant and can add up. Many young people in the system end up with many thousands of dollars’ worth of fines, which can become particularly difficult for them to pay. There are arrangements that they can work off those fines by doing counseling, education and other programs. The police might also issue a formal warning where the young person is officially warned, their details are taken and that is entered into the COP system. And then the escalation of intervention moves into a formal Police Caution Youth Justice Conference that the police can refer a young person to and then ultimately referred to court. So we've kind of captured here the three most significant or serious interventions the police can mobilise against young people, them being cautions, fines, youth justice conferences, and court in that order of severity. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:11:08] We see a general trend, particularly in the last decade, trending down, having gone up around 2008 - 2009. We're not particularly sure why. And that isn't something that seems to be replicated necessarily in other jurisdictions. We also noted that the number of young people in custody went up around that period. So clearly something was going on that was bringing young people to the notice of police. But generally speaking, we've seen quite significant declines for particular offense categories. Now young people commit a variety of offenses, and I'll just speak to a couple of these. What I want to do is try and give you a sense of the nature of what the youth justice system, the children's courts and the police are dealing with in terms of offending behaviour. So figure two talks to the number of young persons of interest for breaking and entering. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:12:06] Burglary, we've seen generally in New South Wales and lots of jurisdictions year on year declines of burglary from about the year 2001. For young people, there was a decline from that period, but then it moved up again around 2010 and then a steady decline. There's an interesting kick in the tail of that graph with an increase in the COVID years, which is completely counterintuitive and contrary to some of the international literature that suggested that because opportunities for burglary were reduced by virtue of people being in their homes, that there were significant declines in that offense. We don't have an explanation for that. We want to look at that in more detail to see if there are particular explanations. And often, as you will know, the young people who participate in crime will be over-represented with respect to coming from particular parts of the state: there will be particular postcodes that have a high number of young people coming to police notice for their involvement in crime. There may be a really key geographical dimension to that counterintuitive trend. I've also included information here on the number of young persons of interest for non-domestic violence related assaults. And also a concerning trend in recent years, a slight increase, not dramatic increase, but a slight increase of, generally speaking, common assaults. So that just gives you a flavour there of a variety of offenses and I'll move to some children's court data in New South Wales to give you a flavour of the types of offenses that bring young people before children's court. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:13:58] It's important to note that police have the discretion to make a decision about what sort of intervention they will put in place against the young person who's come to notice for committing a crime. The goal of our jurisdiction and many jurisdictions is really to reduce the numbers of young people appearing in the children's court. The logic being that if we can divert young people from the formal criminal justice system, often we see that they don't return. They don't further offend. They go about their ways in a pro-social manner. So let's not over intervene. That's a really tricky dynamic within our system to get right, to try and promote diversion and keep the back end of the system, children's courts and youth justice centres for those for  whom there are few options, for whom they may have committed really serious offenses, and the view of the police, or magistrates, is they need to be held in custody either before having their sentence finalised or after they've had a finding of guilt and they're sentenced to a period of incarceration. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:15:10] These figures often don't change much from year to year. We see very small numbers of young people coming to the notice of police and appearing in children's courts for homicide and related offenses. But we do see quite a proportion coming to notice for acts intended to cause injury. And we also notice quite a number for property offenses, whether theft and related offenses or unlawful entry with intent, burglary, break and enter. And often these young people are responsible for a significant number of offenses. And so police, with their capacities and technologies around DNA evidence, are better equipped to ultimately find a young person responsible for a multitude of burglaries, which they may not have been able to do in the past, prior to DNA legislation coming in in the late 1990s, early 2000s. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:16:12] I also draw your attention to the bottom of this table, which is offenses against justice procedures, government security and government operations. Basically, they're offenses. that are associated with the criminal justice system. And so what we see a lot of and probably an increasing amount of in recent years is young people coming into the system and the system hanging on to them in various ways. So that might be young people failing to appear at court or breaching bail. There may be a variety of government kind of interventions that sit around those young people that then almost ensnare them in the system because they're getting greater police attention, they're being watched, they're having their bail conditions enforced vigorously, which might mean police knocking at the door of their home if they've been told to reside as directed between 7pm and 7am, the police might pay them a visit and say, "where's little Johnny? We want to see him to make sure that he's not in contravention of his bail conditions". That kind of more criminal justice focused response has come with a bit of churn in the system where young people are often more vigorously policed and more closely monitored. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:17:40] I'll just take a kind of slight deviation to the question about diversion from court, not re-offending. What's the nature of the diversion? Historically, the nature of the diversion has been police cautions, really simple, really cheap to administer. A young person comes to notice for an offense such as graffiti or maybe some form of burglary, often a minor one where there's no aggravation. The police say based on what we've seen, you've admitted guilt and we think a caution is appropriate. You will come back to the police station in, let's say, 12 days, you will come with your parents or guardian or support person, and we will issue an official police caution. That official police caution is often delivered by a youth liaison officer in New South Wales who will speak to the young person and his parents or guardian and basically lay down the law. It might be a form of brief intervention, but often it's really about a kind of deterrence. We are letting you go with official police caution on this occasion because you don't have a lengthy previous offending history, there was no violence involved, and we want you to now take responsibility and manage your life in a more pro-social way. Very high numbers, in the order of around 70% of young people who receive police cautions, don't come to further police notice. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:19:12] What we do know in our youth justice system is that many young people offend and they mature out of it and some interaction with police or the criminal justice system will be sufficient deterrence and often their parents or guardians will rally their resources around that young person and protect and support them. And that will be enough. They'll go on to being law abiding citizens, probably be in one of my classes in the future and do well for themselves. But then there's a very small group and the numbers vary depending on the research and the jurisdiction, but a small group who are persistent and prolific offenders and often they are starting their criminal careers early and unfortunately continuing their criminal careers in adulthood and often with many years of incarceration, both in youth justice and the adult correctional space. So diversion works for many, but for those who end up being frequent offenders, unfortunately, diversion is often just a stepping stone towards appearing in a children's court and ending up in a youth justice centre. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:20:22] And so moving to talk about the back end of our system, the Youth Justice Centre. Once a young person comes to a children's court, the children's court has an array of options. Again, the emphasis is on diverting and putting in place the least restrictive form of intervention in the hope that it helps prevent further offending. Children's court magistrates can issue, in effect, a caution and dismiss the matter. They can impose a fine, they can release the young person into their own recognisance and if they don't re-offend in 12 months, then the matter is dealt with and there's no further repercussions. Or they might receive a probation order with supervision, or they may be sentenced to a period of incarceration. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:21:13] Now, perhaps to your surprise, the number of young people in custody is the lowest it's been in my working life, and I started work 30 years ago in a youth justice centre, an inner city remand facility, and was a custodial staff member locking doors, kind of keeping kids in custody. And so it's very heartening for me to see that the figures are so low in New South Wales currently and are generally low in many jurisdictions, or certainly much lower than they were ten or 20 years ago. In the June quarter of this year in New South Wales there are 194 young people in custody. Just to break that up, 58 were sentenced, so only 58 of those young people were sentenced to a period of custody. They'd been to a children's court, they had their matter finalised and they were in custody for a set period determined by the court. The bulk were on remand. And this is one thing that's changed quite dramatically in recent years, where the number of young people coming into the youth justice system for very short periods of time on remand has grown. That is problematic for a variety of reasons. And one of the reasons I'll point to in a moment, but it means there's a lot of churn in the system with young people coming in, often for less than 48 hours, to then be able to be granted bail or to have their conditions met, to then go to a children's court, have their matter dealt with and not be sent to custody. Putting them in custody is expensive and damaging and is an area that lots of work is being applied to. Really problematically, as you would know, is the ongoing over-representation of Aboriginal young people in the system, it is an abhorrent, ongoing, wicked social policy problem. According to the latest figures, 51% of the young people in custody in June were Aboriginal. That fluctuates, but the 51%, given those young people are only 3.5% of the New South Wales youth population, is really concerning. The numbers of young women in custody is very small and that is pleasing,  that also fluctuates but it was only 13. It's a very small but damaged group. The young women in custody have really poor mental health, high levels of self-harm and suicidal ideation, high drug use, a really damaged and difficult client group. And because of their small size, they fight to have recognition in the system. So all systems struggle to provide very specialist care for young women in custody. 

A/P Garner Clancy [00:24:25] Okay. I'm just going to move to the next slide. There's other data that can be dug out, but I encourage you to look at the slides later and look at some of the references should you wish. I just want to speak to something that you probably are all familiar with. As I understand it, we're collecting more data this year to update the 2015 survey, but we've had three major rounds of health data collected from all of those young people who are in custody in a particular period in 2003, 2009 and 2015. I've pulled out some highlight figures here, many of you will know this data, it's depressing, and it really speaks to the multiple vulnerabilities of multiple and multiple challenges that young people in custody face. And therein lies some of the challenges, particularly delivering services to young people who have a variety of conditions, co-morbidities and the like. A number of young people, about one in five, have experienced some form of child protection intervention, have been in care before the age of 16. There's a lot of talk about the cross over kids, as they are referred to, that cross over from the child protection system into the justice system. They're a group that demands special attention because they often come to notice for very minor offending behaviour in group homes and end up being kind of trapped in the criminal justice system because they don't have the family supports, often they don't have the resources to draw on when they first get involved in some crime. A high proportion don't attend school or have very poor school attendance records. In the 2015 data, 73% were not attending school prior to custody. That is obviously problematic given that the bulk of the population will fall under 17 and therefore legislated to be attending school. A proportion comes from homelessness into custody and a proportion will return to homelessness either directly after custody or soon thereafter. So the itinerants of the population present problems for service providers such as yourselves and others. In this space, a number are already parents or will be parents, so around 10% are parents, so quite young to be parents and often having all of the same problems that you could imagine in the adult prison system about contact with their children. High levels of familial contact with the criminal justice system, particularly prisons. So in 2015, over half of the young people had had a parent ever in prison. Illicit drug use, as you would expect, high and as a result, high diagnosis of substance related disorders. Unsurprisingly, but disappointingly, high levels of borderline and extremely low IQ. About over half of the population fall into those two scales and high levels of abuse and neglect. And when I mention the young women in custody, the figures are higher for the young women than they are for the young men. So any childhood abuse or neglect around 70% and severe abuse or neglect nearly 30%. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:28:09] I just want to speak to some additional health data and then talk to some of what I'm hoping to do and trying to do to respond to some of these issues. So, from the 2015 report, I just pulled out some very particular health related data giving your likely interest. 28% reported past year problems with tooth decay. So lots of dental difficulties, 24% never or more than two years ago saw anyone about teeth or related problems. So one in five have very poor dental histories in terms of service provision or contact with dentists. 22% of the males and 52% of the females ever had a head injury, resulting in loss of consciousness. So lots of closed head injuries, lots  of head trauma. It struck me years ago when the young boys came into one of the centres I worked at, they didn't have to get their head shaved, but they often elected to. And once you saw underneath their hair, their skulls were often covered, crisscrossed with scars. 61% reported regular three times per week consumption of takeaway food. And so as a result, quite high levels, nearly 50% overweight or obese. 22% had never seen or two years or longer since seeing a doctor. So again, more than one in five with pretty poor histories of connection with the health care system. And so the health care system then often gets mobilised, particularly through justice, health in the custodial environment, but has relatively short periods to work with these young people. The periods of remand are often in the number of days so many young people will be remanded in custody for less than seven days, which is really often an opportunity to detox, to induct them into the centre, and then prepare them for release. So there's not really a long period to do much else with them. And young people on control orders who are sentenced to imprisonment, generally sentenced to about four months, which isn't really a very long time to start to unravel some of these health and mental health problems that have kind of accrued over many years. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:30:42] One of the things that we're looking at is whilst those individual periods in custody or contact with the criminal justice system are often brief, over the ten-18 year period that young people can come into the system, they're often repeat visitors. And so what could we do to think about joining up all of those periods of custody and all of those contacts and thinking about client centered interventions and responses to their needs that take a more longer term view rather than just slices of legal mandate, which is what youth justice has to often deal with. Providing ongoing care is a challenge, absolutely. As I mentioned, the itinerant and chaotic lifestyles that many of these young people come from mean that they're just not connected to the sorts of systems whether it be education or health or other systems that would ideally ensure they get access to services on a regular basis. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:31:49] What is the impact on siblings of children in detention? I would have to go back to the health surveys to answer the question about the impacts on siblings of children in detention. My kind of anecdotal experience working in a number of centres is that often there was a high propensity for other siblings to end up in the same centre or another centre, and that it was often very much a part of their milieu that they had fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, brothers, sisters all caught up in the criminal justice system. And my point earlier about the system kind of not letting them go so easily can be really difficult for families because they then become known. Some policing academics refer to this situation as police property. They're so frequently in contact with police that any misdemeanour is a minor kind of criminal infraction, is punished, and they quickly become ensnared in the criminal justice system and find it hard to depart. Some colleagues in the adult correctional space kind of talk about perpetual punishment, this notion that they become really trapped in criminal justice systems. So that's not a particularly empirical answer, but I think there's really clear evidence that the children and young people coming into the system often have siblings follow them or proceed them. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:33:27] I mentioned the detrimental impacts of detention, and there are obvious impacts on young people who've had trauma going into a system that can be intimidating, can be scary, can involve searching and strip searching and those sorts of incidents that will kind of exacerbate any kind of underlying mental illness or trauma. I'm perhaps unduly focused also on the cost of these activities and the costs of criminal justice sanctions, because it is a very costly business. It's not nearly as costly in a system context as the adult system. The adult system has about 12,500 people in adult prison or adult correctional centres at the moment, which obviously dwarfs the less than 200 young people in custody. But per young person, compared to adult inmates, the cost is substantially higher for young people. At the moment, $714,000 to lock up a young person per year. It's an incredible figure and it's depressing in that we often don't see perhaps good returns on that investment. The figures on the number of young people who've returned to custody or who go from the youth justice system to the adult system, and they're alarming. Those figures tell us generally that if young people come to police notice and end up in the youth justice system between ten and 14, so the younger age range, they are very likely to reoffend and they are very likely to end up in an adult prison in their life. And so these costs compound and the life opportunities kind of close off as they move into the adult system and kind of become repeat customers of the adult system. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:35:33] So, getting it right early and kind of wrapping services around young people, even despite all of the challenges that faces because of their itinerant, chaotic lifestyles, they're often inability or unwillingness to comply with conditions that might be imposed by courts or may be offered to them by various health or other youth services. I think there's a number of imperatives to try and do better, and one of the things that I've noticed since coming to the University of Sydney is that often our responses are somewhat fractured, that there may be really wonderful work happening that relates to youth crime and youth justice in one part of the university but doesn't connect up with another part of the university. And it kind of speaks to the silos that our systems struggle with. And I think all of our criminal justice agencies and systems struggle with coordination and collaboration. So I've been working on this idea of a whole of university response to youth justice in New South Wales for the last couple of years. Part of it was premised on being invited in to do reviews and saying, look, reviews are great, but I think there's so much more we can do for you that rather than just being commissioned to do a piece of research that invariably slices an issue in ways that doesn't kind of pick up the macro and the holistic issues. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:37:00] So what's the rationale for collaboration? From my point of view, these are some of the points. The youth justice system is home to some of the most disadvantaged young people in the state. We and other universities and partners can contribute an enormous amount, particularly if we move beyond siloed responses. There's a chance to unlock nontraditional responses and approaches that I don't think have been mobilised in this space. There's a chance to create novel approaches. There's a chance for us at the University of Sydney and other universities to learn the intricacies of running a youth justice system and for Youth Justice New South Wales to learn how to confidently expect more from a university. I really do believe government agencies are often not very good at understanding how to approach a university and to kind of demand more attention and resources than perhaps they get by just coming in doing desk lectures and taking the odd student intern. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:37:59] So what have we done? We signed an MOU a year ago with Youth Justice New South Wales, and since then we've done the obligatory student placements which we hope will grow. But I'm really interested in the nontraditional areas, moving beyond criminology and social work and psychology, for example. We've had students from politics going into the corporate affairs area. We've had media and communications students in the corporate affairs area. But the media and communications students, I think, potentially could do a lot of good by developing podcasts and videos to help young people communicate to other young people in the system. There are so many other options here. I want to see our occupational therapists, our speech pathology students working in this space. And I especially want to see our exercise and physiology students and dietetic students working in this space. We can do a lot of good through student labour if applied appropriately. And often there are problems in youth justice centres each of which in New South Wales has a school in it when those schools lose their teachers to school holidays, often that's when problems happen. We can really help remedy some of those problems. We've done a number of student-led projects, law reform projects with law students. We've had digital innovation students develop virtual reality content for Youth Justice New South Wales to use in staff recruitment and training. We've got an oral history project running that involves students from different parts of the uni, just collecting stories from long term custodial staff, partially in the hope that that process will be somewhat cathartic and beneficial for staff who work in really tough circumstances. Working in a youth justice centre can be demoralising when you see young people come back. When you've built up a young person, you can feel that there's the chance for them to flourish, and then three weeks later you find that they're re-offending and they're back in the system for a number of years for a serious offense. So we're trying to do some stuff in that space very early days and we're planning an industry and community unit next year and a variety of other student-led activities. Because I do think our 74,000 students here at University of Sydney, many of whom, if tapped and directed in the right direction, have a lot to offer the system. My experience is they actually really like being involved in the cut and thrust of a system like this because it presents them with lots of opportunities for future employment, but also to do good, which is what they're often seeking. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:40:47] This is a visual of what our digital innovation team did to help youth justice design some VR technology that hopefully will get used to trained staff and also recruit staff going into detention environments. The goal is to try and have a VR experience that gets them thinking about what  it would be like to work in detention before they sign on. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:41:16] Just a couple of other things. We've got a small project out of architecture to record acoustics in youth justice centres. I'm particularly interested in how the physical design impacts on young people's ability to hear directions and how the background noise affects their mental health. Over time, I think we've gone to design palettes that often are not good acoustically, and that may make life more kind of damaging for young people at one level. We've just got ethics approval to start collecting data on the nature of the collaboration and relationship, because I want to track this as we go. We've got a big event planned for the 24th of November, Youth Crime and Youth Justice events here at Sydney Law School that will bring together stakeholders from the criminal justice system, the non-government sector and the university to try and map out where some of the gaps are that we might be able to fill. And we've got numerous events planned to continue to connect through webinars and hopefully a big conference here next year with Youth Justice staff. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:42:27] So they're just initial activities. My vision is really to have student hubs in the youth justice centres and community settings for youth justice where all of these students are working on real world problems. I'd love to see the kind of digital technologies intersect here where we would get serious gaming output, where kids are thinking about relapse prevention and thinking about how to prevent further offending through engaging with serious games developed by our students. Really keen to see the Allied Health students in key locations to conduct assessments early. I want a Workforce Development Partnership Strategy to grow our  future workforce. We've had one of our students offered a job in the youth justice sector, which is quite a small sector. If we could be creating a pipeline of students who are really job ready because they've done internships and placements and they've done training in the youth justice space, then they're absolutely ready for employment. I'm keen for longitudinal outcomes research, and the building of a local evidence base. It's probably no surprise to you to hear me say that lots of our evidence about what works is gathered in the Northern Hemisphere and transplanted here. Given our significant and continuing overrepresentation of Aboriginal young people in the system, I think there's a real need to rethink the application of that research evidence and to develop a local evidence base and ultimately to influence future state systems planning. I'm very keen to get our Sydney Informatics Hub, our big data people looking at kind of crunching some of the numbers to think about how we understand trends, how we understand what the future population will look like and how we respond to the complex needs of those young people. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:44:23] So lots to do. And I appreciate I'm probably speaking to the converted in some of what I've said and also that I'm too Sydney Uni focused probably for many of you, but the reason for me to start with the uni is to really pull together the key experts that often don't speak. We've got amazing research centres, the Matilda Centre, doing wonderful work in alcohol and other drug use in young people and mental health. We have the Create Centre doing really innovative educational design, the Brain and Mind Centre doing fascinating stuff around the neuroscience of young people with mental illness. I want to try and harness that and then hopefully with that under the belt, we'll go and try to do what Kate's done with an amazing group of universities and partners outside of this place. So thank you. Very happy to take any questions and respond to those that have been popped in the chat. 
 
Prof Kate Steinbeck [00:45:23] Thank you, Garner, for a fabulous presentation. I really don't know where to start with the questions, but I will. And thank you too for being an excellent lecturer and being able to lecture and answer questions at the same time as they pop up. I've noticed, obviously, not unexpectedly, that some of our people are very interested in health care. We've had a few messages saying that things happen in the acute remand or incarceration stage, and you've raised the issue of trying to join up dots and continue to see young people with their chronic issues. We can deal with the acute, but the chronic seem to be sadly neglected and I think we're probably all overwhelmed with the data that you've shown us. They are sad and you're clearly looking for action rather than just producing more data, I think there's plenty to be getting on with. I'm just going to start with a few questions and I'm going to start with one from Vanessa, which is "what have you seen has the greatest impacts on youth involved in the justice system?" And I guess that's a way of asking, too, if you had a big pot of money, what would you spend it on? 

A/P Garner Clancy  [00:46:46] It's a really tough question but thank you for asking it. I think the early intervention is easy to say, but hard to do. That's really, I think, where we get most bang for our buck. But that often I think in a state like New South Wales, in a country like Australia, often means very place-based initiatives. Thinking about how we develop capacity in communities that produce a large number of young people who end up in the system. That's not easy work, that often doesn't conform to relatively short timeframes that funding bodies might be interested in. But we have incredible evidence of success around the early intervention. I think that's the real hope, and then having a system that allows for young people who kind of fall through the cracks, being identified early and supported in community, by services, in community. So I almost see a kind of secondary prevention network across New South Wales where we get the data about those postcodes and those geographies where lots of young people are coming to notice and we're allowed to kind of grow and develop programs and services in those areas in response to that. I think it's a kind of an interesting time we live in. There's almost an endless amount of data, but often I think the data that service providers need is often not as accessible as would be ideal. So that's kind of a long answer. But I think the early intervention work is really where we get greatest bang for our buck and hopefully we put in place lots of barriers and lots of opportunities for young people to take and use those services and not end up requiring the $715,000 to be spent on them going into custody for a year. 
 
Prof Kate Steinbeck [00:48:36] Thank you. A great question. Great answer. I've got another question. There's a comment saying, have you become involved in those working with sexual health in the university? Because presumably that's another group who may well be of interest to you. And then I have a comment too from Tammy, saying that there are now nearly 100 WHIN (Wellbeing & Health In-Reach) nurses who are from the Ministry of Health and have been placed in selected schools to identify and offer early intervention and wondering whether there's been any attempt at trying to join the dots between health, education and the NGOs, who are often the groups that see these young people. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:49:32] It's fantastic that those nurses are in those locations. Joining the dots, I think we still struggle, to be frank, that there are, say, three major government providers in this space in the youth justice custody context. Youth Justice New South Wales, Department of Education who run the schools, and Justice Health. I think there's still more work to be done to have them kind of connect the dots. And then there is this NGO sector that I think there's a relative maturity to their capacity in this space, but often, in my experience, don't have a unified voice or a kind of platform from which to speak from. And so one of the things I want to try and do is bring them into some of these discussions more. I do think there's work still to be done in that space. And look, if I was to be super frank, I'd say the age old issues around resources and turf continue. And that sometimes disappoints me that some of the resources that are clearly paid for by the New South Wales Government are clung to by particular agencies and not shared in quite the way that the young people would benefit from or the system would benefit from. 
 
Prof Kate Steinbeck [00:50:55] I think you'd find many people nodding in agreement if we had our audience on display. I'm just going back to another question, which is, "Do you think that there should be more work working with the families as opposed to only the person?" 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:51:21] It's been a really tricky area of practice. So, yes, absolutely. What that work looks like is difficult. We've had attempts at that over a number of decades. We've had very kind of concerted efforts to replicate the multi systemic therapy that has been shown to be successful in Western Australia and other jurisdictions and not necessarily had the same positive results. Often the difficulty is without a mandate and there is no mandate in this case to rally the types of when I say the kids are often living chaotic and itinerant lives, and that's because their families are living similarly chaotic and itinerant lives. And so the ability of government and non-government organisations to intervene can be compromised by the work coming from a criminal justice agency, which immediately sets off red flags to some families and communities, or it's seen as being a precursor to some punitive intervention, or the histories of child removal and contemporary practices around child removal, mean that people are reluctant to engage. I think the great difficulty we have is how to get the right services to those people who need it the most in circumstances where there is no obvious kind of mandate. Other jurisdictions have moved the parenting orders and been punitive about this, which I don't think many people would wish to embrace, but it can prove to be a difficult area to do and to do well. But I absolutely think it's critical to the picture. Yes. 
 
Prof Kate Steinbeck [00:53:04] Thank you. The questions are coming in very fast. One question here. "Is there a link for information about the Youth Crime and Justice Forum on the 24th of November? If you give that to us, we can circulate it through our community of practice list and our registrants here." 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:53:33] Fabulous. That's about to come out. So give me a week and you'll be able to have that link. 
 
Prof Kate Steinbeck [00:53:38] Thank you. One comment saying, "Justice Health & Forensic Mental Health Network is working in schools to divert young people from the courts". There's also a message from Berry Street organisation saying, "love to marry theory with action from an initiative in Ballarat, Victoria." And I would suggest that maybe the person who posted that email address might contact Garner because it sounds like this matching the dots and linking the dots are really important. And I just noticed we're getting very close to the end of time. Look, there's another one here and something that our group is very interested in is, "I'd love to hear more about the VR initiative if you were able to elaborate. Thank you."
 
A/P Garner Clancy  [00:55:06] Only a little. It's kind of ignorance that stops me from saying too much more. The virtual reality content was developed by our students for the purposes of giving prospective employees an immersive experience or an attempt to give them an immersive experience of what a day in the life of the youth officer looks like in detention. And so Youth Justice, like many criminal justice agencies, have had problems where they recruit people into jobs and then they discover they don't really like those jobs because they're violent or they're repetitive and they leave. And all of the money has been spent on training them and preparing them, and then they don't stay for very long. So the logic is that VR content will potentially be used in that kind of early screening process and potentially also then staff training to think about scenarios. We think there's a whole digital innovation platform that we could develop for youth justice around that, but also serious gaming, I'm really especially interested in having peer to peer conversations across centres, through avatars to kind of talk about how to survive the first 24 hours in custody, how to survive the first week out of custody, how to prepare for release. What you do with the phone call from your girlfriend to say that she's no longer your girlfriend, all of those sorts of issues that we could do some really wonderful peer to peer work. So that's kind of the VR content. But we scratched the surface. There's a much, much bigger world of VR and augmented reality that we could get into. 
 
Prof Kate Steinbeck [00:56:51] Have you had any conversations with Cyber Psychology? I know they're part of the Digital Health Informatics Network led by Andrew Campbell. So I think there's something about visual learning which overcomes so much, I think. And when we're looking at the young people with visual learning that overcomes, I assume, the major literacy issues that are there. Now I think that we're probably going to have to draw this to a close. Garner it's very obvious that this has been a really fascinating presentation. I think we'll definitely ask you back again. I hope that you do make some collaborations with some of the people here. Please, I encourage everyone. And I also, just in the last minute, I'm going to ask you to respond to a comment that said, "sorry, I just dialed in did you mention FASD (Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder”. I'm not certain that you did, one minute to cover a big topic. 
 
A/P Garner Clancy [00:58:16] I didn't, I could have mentioned the numerous neurodiversity kind of issues. FASD through the work in WA has been shown to be really significant and prominent issues for kids in custody in WA and no doubt is true here. I think the difficulty for us is the variety of diagnostic tools to collect information about the variety of difficulties and problems that young people experience. But it is absolutely a critical issue. 
 
Prof Kate Steinbeck [00:58:48] Well, look, I'm going to take the prerogative of the host to finish so that we can properly say goodbye to you Garner and thank you again and hopefully we'll see some of our audience on the 24th of November. Thank you. Thank you again for taking part.