Ms Rosol – Is it still your government’s intention to build five new youth justice facilities?
Mr JAENSCH – When the Youth Justice Reform Blueprint came out, we prepared another piece of work which we referred to as a facilities plan, which indicated what our intention was to support fewer young people being in detention in the future, and that was to ensure that more of them had the opportunity to be supported under a bail arrangement while awaiting the outcomes of their court processes rather than being in Ashley. More of them were able to be supported as they exited detention to rejoin the community and be supported to not reoffend after a period of detention.
The initial model that we put out envisaged a single smaller detention facility at the heart of that and establishment of one or more assisted bail and supported accommodation facilities either side.
Further work on that and discussion with the NGO sector in particular indicates we might be able to get a better outcome more quickly by working with some of the service providers. So, instead of building a bail house somewhere in the state or in two or three locations, another government institution set up to house young people as part of our correction system or our youth justice system, we might do better by the young people by being able to support them in their communities through the use of some existing providers and facilities and services that are already there but brokered to meet their individual needs.
We do have organisations like 54 Reasons, Colony 47, JCP Youth, Anglicare, and others who already work with some of these young people or people in similar situations to them, who also may be involved with provision of things like special care packages in their out‑of‑home care system. Our initial focus is working with them to see how we build their capacity and their capabilities, not necessarily as a one‑stop shop, but as a component of a brokered package of supports that we can put around a young person that enables them to stay in the community with support rather than being remanded in the detention facility.
If we find ultimately that there’s not enough capacity there, we need to build more physical facilities that are suitable for providing a bail house, then we’ll do so, but first we wanted to exhaust the capacity of the NGO sector to work with us around packages individually tailored to the needs of young people. The difficulty we have is each time we create another building and put a number of young people with complex behaviours in it, we run into the same issues that we have in Ashley. After all, we’re dealing with some of the same young people in a different setting. We need to do better by them.
