Criminology Research Grant: CRG 38/10-11
This study drew on methods and findings from criminal careers and place-based research to explore whether some communities generated chronic and costly offenders. The offender cohort used included all individuals born in 1990 who had contact with police cautioning, youth justice conferencing, youth court or adult court in Queensland when aged 10 to 20 years old (N = 14,171). The Semi-Parametric Group-based Method (SPGM) was used to identify distinct offender trajectories and their costs were assessed using a methodology that incorporated criminal justice system, social and economic costs of crime. The geographic distribution of chronic offenders and their total cost was explored based on their first recorded postal code. Findings indicated that the top 10% of postal codes where high proportions of the population were chronic offenders accounted for 20.5% of chronic offenders. The top 10% of most costly locations accounted for 40.4% of the chronic offenders, 47.0% of offences committed by chronic offenders, 50.5% of the total cost of chronic offenders and 35.2% of the total cost of all offenders in the cohort. Many of these locations had a high proportion of Indigenous youth, were in remote or very remote locations and experienced high levels of disadvantage. These findings highlight the urgent need for early/developmental interventions to be made available to reduce offending and for other place-based approaches to be used to reduce crime and victimisation in these communities.