The National Justice Project made a submission to the National Children’s Commissioner at the Australian Human Rights Commission to provide input into the Youth Justice and Child Wellbeing Reform Project.
Our submission covered a number of factors that contribute to children’s and young people’s involvement in youth justice systems in Australia including:
- Discriminatory policing
- Systemic discrimination and the criminalisation of First Nations children and young people
- Criminalisation and over-incarceration of people with disability
- Criminalisation and over-incarceration of people experiencing mental ill-health
- Remand systems and bail determinations
- Failure to divert people away from the legal system
- Lack of culturally appropriate services for young people
- The over-representation of First Nations children in out-of-home care
We argued for a national approach to provide more consistent monitoring, regulation and accountability opportunities to help facilitate thorough evaluation and capacity to respond to issues.
Read the submission from the National Justice Project here
We also endorsed the submission of the Partnership for Justice in Health as well as other P4JH member submission. Read more about P4JH here
