Foreword | Wadeye is one of the largest Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory. Over the past decade, the community has attracted much negative media attention because of the amount of violence that has occurred. This violence has often been portrayed as the result of gang activity.
This paper examines how gangs operate in the Wadeye community and provides some insight into the perceptions of gang members on their relationships with community authority structures and family support mechanisms.
Foreword | This paper examines the extent to which participants in the Drug Use Monitoring in Australia (DUMA) program under-report their drug use. DUMA participants are asked to answer a questionnaire about their use of drugs, as well as to supply a urine sample. This sample is tested for the presence of illicit drugs and compared with the self-reported answers in the questionnaire.
Foreword | Gambling has always been a popular form of entertainment in Australia, but the advent of poker and gaming machines, casinos, TABs and lotto-style games has contributed to a substantial growth in the gambling industry. The Productivity Commission (1999) reports that 82 per cent of the Australian adult population engaged in some form of gambling in 1997-98, with gambling taxes and levies paid to state and territory governments nearly doubling over the past 10 years.
Foreword | In recent years there has been increasing concern about the prevalence of drug driving in Australia. Over the past four years, the majority of Australian states have introduced legislation that makes it an offence to drive with the presence of a range of drugs in the blood or saliva. Using data from the Drug Use Monitoring in Australia (DUMA) program, this paper examines the prevalence of drug driving among a sample of police detainees in key sites in 2005 and 2006.
Foreword | The criminal justice system is a complex process involving police, courts and corrections. Historically these component parts have tended to act autonomously yet their actions impact on each other. Increasingly criminal justice policy-makers have come to recognise the need to understand the long term impacts of policy changes across the whole system. To effectively and efficiently manage the criminal justice system, policy-makers require analytical tools to project the relative effects of changes to policies based on current system information.
Foreword | This paper presents the key findings of the 'Youth Justice: Criminal Trajectories Research Project', a project that focused on recidivism among young offenders. It makes a significant contribution to the evidence base as it provides the offending trajectories of 1,503 young offenders over a seven year period.
Foreword | Modern corrections practice requires an assessment of the risk of reoffending on at least two levels. First, risk assessments are necessary to decide which offenders should be targeted for rehabilitation. Second, risk assessment is necessary to deal with the increasing demand by the public and politicians that offenders who are at a high risk of reoffending, especially violent and sexual offending, should not be released prematurely. This paper reports on a risk assessment tool that has been developed specifically for Indigenous offenders.
Foreword | Concern regarding the diversion and non-medical use of prescription pharmaceuticals continues to grow as anecdotal evidence and other research points to a sizeable increase in the illegal market for such drugs. Estimating the prevalence of illegal use and understanding how pharmaceutical drugs come to be traded in the illegal drug market remain key research priorities for policymakers and practitioners in both the public health and law enforcement sectors.
In the 1990s, the number of known victims of armed robberies in Australia increased from around 5,000 per year to a peak of over 11,000 in 2001 (Figure 1). Between 2001 and 2005 the number dropped steadily to around 6,000 (ABS 2006). The number of banks robbed and the number of victims of armed robberies involving firearms have generally mirrored this pattern. It is unlikely that these statistics represent the full extent of armed robbery in this country, as these data reflect only offences reported to and recorded by police.