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The Australian Government Attorney-General's Department funded the Australian Institute of Criminology to undertake the Drug Use Careers of Offenders study. The first two parts of the study looked at men and women in prison. The third part comprised research into the lifetime offending and substance use patterns of 371 juveniles, aged 10 to 17 years, incarcerated in Australian juvenile detention centres. The study confirmed that young people sentenced to detention have extensive offending and drug use histories.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), through its membership of the Australasian Consumer Fraud Taskforce (ACFT) and its SCAMwatch website, monitors scams and informs consumers and small business about how to recognise, avoid and report them. In March 2006, as part of a pilot study, 85 percent of callers (n=103) to the ACCC's national hotline agreed to complete a questionnaire concerning their experiences of consumer scams over the 12 months from March 2005. Callers were asked whether they had received an unsolicited scam and what method was used to contact them.

The Australian Institute of Criminology's National Firearms Theft Monitoring Program was established in 2006 to examine all incidents of firearms theft reported to police. In the program's first annual report, for 2004-05, almost 1,500 firearms, or less than 0.1 of one percent of all registered firearms, were reported as stolen in 668 incidents (Borzycki & Mouzos 2007). This represents a downward trend since earlier research (Mouzos 2002). The figure below shows the majority of rifles (80%), shotguns (82%) and handguns (60%) were stolen from private residential premises.

The most recent statistics on motor vehicle theft indicate there were 139,943 motor vehicles stolen in 2001 - a one per cent increase on the number recorded stolen in 2000. In cases where the place of motor vehicle theft was specified, 61 per cent occurred in community locations, namely streets/footpaths (42 per cent), car parks (11 per cent) and other community locations (eight per cent).

A recent study by the Australian Institute of Criminology has analysed trends in bank robbery based on information from the Armed Attacks Database compiled by the Australian Bankers' Association, and data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Of the 808 bank robbery incidents between January 1998 and May 2002 in which the number of offenders involved in the hold-up was recorded, more than half (55 per cent) were committed by lone offenders, about 25 per cent by pairs, and around 20 per cent by three or more robbers (that is, gangs).

The Australian Institute of Criminology has recently released a paper that examines the circumstances and characteristics of various types of family homicide in Australia. The data analysed in this research is taken from the National Homicide Monitoring Program (NHMP) at the AIC that covers the period from 1 July 1989 to 30 June 2002.

The Australian Institute of Criminology has recently released a paper that examines the extent to which participants in the Drug Use Monitoring in Australia (DUMA) program under-report their recent drug use. Detainees who tested positive for drugs were more likely to self-report use in the past 30 days than in the last 2 to 3 days. Detainees with the most to lose were more likely to under-report their drug use.

Firearm Related Deaths in Australia, 1991-2001 examines the use of firearms to inflict fatal injury in Australia. The data focuses on five types of fatal firearm injury: suicide, homicide, accidents, legal intervention and those deaths classified as undetermined by the coroner. In total there were 5083 registered firearm related deaths in Australia between 1991 and 2001. Suicides accounted for the majority of these firearm related deaths (77 per cent), followed by homicide (15 per cent). In 1991, there were 629 firearm related deaths compared to 333 deaths in 2001.

The majority of Australian prisoners will one day return to the community as only four per cent of sentenced prisoners are serving "life" sentences. A paper recently released by the Australian Institute of Criminology examines various issues linked to the provision of post-release services to prisoners. The paper draws on both international literature and a roundtable discussion held at the Australian Institute of Criminology.

The Drug Use Careers of Offenders (DUCO) study released by the Australian Institute of Criminology examined the lifetime offending and drug use careers of over 2000 adult male inmates incarcerated in mid-2001. This project is funded by the Australian Government Attorney General's Department under the National Illicit Drugs Strategy. The study found that the majority of offenders reported using illegal drugs, and poly-drug use was common. More than 80 per cent had used any of the four main drug types - cannabis, heroin, amphetamines and cocaine.

The capacity of professionals working in child protection to do their job effectively is affected by their morale, competence and staff turnover. There is growing concern that these professionals are subjected to increasing levels of violence, threats and intimidation. The Australian Institute of Criminology has recently released a report on the key findings from an Australian study into the experiences of violence, threats and intimidation by professional groups working in child protection.

The Drug use careers of female offenders study, recently released by the Australian Institute of Criminology, is the latest addition to the DUCO project which has previously examined over 2,000 male offenders. In the female study, 470 women incarcerated in prisons in six jurisdictions were interviewed. The project was funded by the Australian Government Attorney-General's Department under the National Illicit Drug Strategy. The study found that a majority (80%) of the female offenders reported having ever used any illegal drugs.

The Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) has released an Issues paper raising a series of questions about the sentencing and management of offenders convicted of federal criminal offences. The Issues paper analyses the limited data available regarding federal offenders. More than 4,000 persons are convicted of federal offences each year, the bulk of these being summary social security offences. There are no available data on the sentencing outcomes for all federal offenders, but as at 1 January 2005 there were 687 federal offenders in state and territory prisons.

The number of women incarcerated in Australian prisons has almost doubled since 1991 from 607 to 1,124. An Australian Institute of Criminology paper "Women Prisoners and Correctional Programs" (details below), discusses some of the major trends in the incarceration of women including the disproportionate rate of Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander women currently imprisoned. While the rate of incarceration for men per 100,000 has increased from 194 to 240.5 since 1991 (an increase of 24 per cent), the rate for women has increased from 9.2 to 15.3 (an increase of 66 per cent).

A recent publication by the Australian Institute of Criminology shows that Indigenous Australians account for a disproportionately high number of both homicide victims and offenders. Although Indigenous Australians represent approximately two per cent of the total Australian population, they accounted for 15.1 per cent of homicide victims and 15.7 per cent of homicide offenders over the 11-year period between July 1989 and June 2000. The rate per 100,000 for homicide victimisation of Indigenous persons fluctuated between 12.6 and 13.8 in the early 1990s.