This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Conversations about the youth justice system typically focus on crime and punishment. In Australia, this has fueled increasingly populist and punitive youth justice policies like Queensland's Adult Crime, Adult Time policy or Victoria's Adult Time for Violent Crime legislation.
Although almost every young person who is incarcerated in Australia is released back into the community, surprisingly little attention is paid to their health and well-being after they leave custody. This is important because children and adolescents who experience youth detention shoulder a disproportionate burden of mental and physical health problems compared with peers who have not been detained. Most of these young people also experience complex social disadvantage that compounds their health challenges, and both factors are associated with an increased risk of premature death.
When we link youth justice and health system records, the data paint a concerning picture. Our earlier Queensland study found that children with any exposure to the youth justice system died at a rate more than four times that of their peers, with the risk of death highest for those who had been detained. But what about the rest of Australia?
Are the patterns similar in other jurisdictions and countries? To answer this question, we conducted the first global systematic review of studies on mortality after contact with the youth justice system (including both youth detention and community-based supervision), looking at young people who had contact with the justice system before age 20. Among 48,195 young people from studies in Australia, Estonia, Scotland and the United States, the findings were strikingly similar to those from our research in Queensland.
Young people with experience of the youth justice system died at a rate more than six times that of young people in the general population. Our earlier work in Victoria found that, among a representative sample of justice-involved young people, two-thirds had a substance-use disorder and almost one in five had self-harmed in the past six months. A study in South Australian youth detention found that 77% had four or more adverse childhood experiences, which can include things like physical abuse, emotional abuse and family violence.
Levels of adversity like this are associated with a substantially increased risk of chronic disease and premature death. And our latest review showed consistent findings—young people with a history of youth justice contact were at significantly increased risk of death due to preventable causes like drug overdose, suicide and homicide. Importantly, it also showed that people with a youth justice experience face an increased risk of death from accidental injury, communicable diseases like HIV and pneumonia, and noncommunicable diseases like cancer.
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