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Proceedings of a seminar held 24-27 June 1985

Contents

• Editors' preface
• Welcoming address
  
  David Biles
• Opening address
  
  Neville J. Harper
• Nature and extent of burglary in Australia
  
  Satyanshu K. Mukherjee
• Break and enter offenders in South Australia
  
  Ian Crettenden
• Break and enter offences in South Australia: a police perspective
  
  F.A. Richardson and A. French
• Breaking and entering: the plague of modern society
  
  K.G. Barlow

South Australia’s Intensive Bail Supervision program for domestic and family violence (DFV) offenders today received a silver award in the community-led category of the 2021 Australian Crime and Violence Prevention Awards (ACVPA).

The ACVPA recognise best practice in the prevention or reduction of violence and other types of crime in Australia and play a vital role in highlighting effective community-based initiatives to prevent crime and violence.

Foreword | Studies of the specific deterrent effect of criminal sanctions have mostly focused on prison. This is, in some ways, unfortunate as non-custodial penalties are far more frequently imposed than custodial penalties. In this study, the authors use propensity score matching to assess whether the length of a bond or suspended sentence makes any difference to the time to first new offence. The results suggest that it does and that offenders given long bonds or suspended sentences take longer to reoffend than offenders given short bonds or suspended sentences.

Foreword | Bot programs allow attackers to remotely control vulnerable computers and form virtual networks of zombies - botnets. Botnets can be leveraged to orchestrate concerted attacks against other computing resources, for example, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against targeted networks. The shift in motivation from curiosity and fame seeking to illicit financial gain has been marked by a growing sophistication in the evolution of bot malware.

Foreword | This paper reports findings from statistical analyses of Indigeneity and lower court sentencing in New South Wales and South Australia from 1998 to 2008. The aim was to explore the probability of Indigenous versus non-Indigenous defendants receiving a prison sentence over time, while controlling for other key sentencing determinates (ie sex, age, criminal history, seriousness of current offence, plea, bail status).

Foreword | The use of cocaine in Australia, among both the general population and 'high-risk' groups, has traditionally been low. However, several indicators suggest that use of this drug has increased, especially among 'high-risk' groups during the recent heroin shortage. There have also been increases in the number of arrests related to cocaine over the past few years, which is a cause for concern.

Gamblers can often resort to criminal activity to support their chronic habit, fraud being one means of obtaining funds (Dohley 2000; Sakurai & Smith 2003). In Australia, it is estimated that 10 to 25 percent of problem gamblers commit gambling-related offences (Lahn 2005). A study of offenders on community corrections orders in the Australian Capital Territory found that, of those who reported problem gambling, 26 percent admitted that it contributed to their offending, and 46 percent said they had obtained money illegally to pay for gambling or related debts (Lahn 2005).

Foreword | There is now a strong evidence base that problem behaviour by young children is one of the strongest predictors of both adolescent delinquency and later adult offending. The Pathways to Prevention project began in 2001 with the aim of involving family, school and community in a broad set of planned interventions to prevent anti-social behaviour among this group.

Foreword | A juvenile pre-court diversion scheme was introduced in the Northern Territory in 2000. Administered by police, it uses warnings and conferences to divert selected juveniles from the court process. This paper reports on an analysis of Northern Territory police records on 3,597 apprehended juveniles over a 5 year period. Findings showed that the great majority of juveniles (76%) did not reoffend within the first year after their initial diversion or court appearance.

Foreword | Project STOP, an online database in which pharmacists record sales of pseudoephedrine (PSE)-based medication, was implemented in 2005 to aid in reducing the diversion of PSE-based products for use as precursors in the domestic manufacture of methamphetamine. Australian evaluations of regulations governing the sale of PSE-based medications and the impact of Project STOP have so far been limited. This research explores the impact of the mandatory recording of PSE-based medication sales on PSE diversion and clan lab detection in Queensland.

Action research is a technique designed to actively bring about change in a situation while researching the change as it occurs. It is a deliberately interventionist strategy which stands in contrast to observational and experimental studies, neither of which may have any direct impact on the situation in practical application. This technique achieved tangible results in the context of crime prevention in the Boston Gun Project's Operation Ceasefire (Kennedy, Braga & Piehl 2001).

Foreword | Children are vulnerable to many forms of abuse and exploitation and have long been victims of trafficking for the purpose of both sexual and labour exploitation. There has been some analysis of trafficking of children in Asia, where trafficking persists despite significant prevention efforts, however, comparatively little is known about trafficking in the Pacific.