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Teenagers are Australia’s most arrested people - ANDREW KOUBARIDIS April 20, 20153:26pm
THIS group of Aussies are three times more likely to be arrested than anyone else. And it might surprise you who they are.
Australia’s worst group of criminals are people in their late teens.
BY the time they are 17 and 18, most Australians are focused on finishing school and planning the next stage in their lives — but it’s also the time they reach their criminal peak.
By their late teens, Australians are at their most dangerous with the highest rates of offending in several categories, according to figures from the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC).
In 2013, the offending rate for people aged 15 to 19 was three times that of all other offenders, 5340 per 100,000 compared with 4,479 per 100,000 for those aged 20 to 24.
The Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC) said while the figure had slightly declined in recent years, the highest number of offenders over the past four years had been in the 15 to 19 year-old group.
A breakdown of figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics reveals people aged between 10 to 19 represented just under a quarter of all offenders — despite only making up 14 per cent of the population.
Theft, acts intended to cause injury and illicit drugs lead the way in young people’s offending.
The figures don’t surprise one expert in youth offending, who told news.com.au youth offenders could be split into two groups.
Professor Mark Halsey from Flinders University said most young offenders will commit just the single, or a few offences, and grow out of that sort of behaviour.
Those who don’t grow out of it run the risk of becoming career criminals.
“A small number of them go on to be persistent offenders and keep going back to court [and] graduate to the adult system.”
Solving the problem required taking action when the individual first began to misbehave, “not necessarily when they first offend or when the conviction is entered.”
“It’s at the age of onset when they are nine, 10, 11, 12,” Prof Halsey said.
And doing that didn’t mean “labelling” them as offenders and creating a stigma. “Because you don’t want to make the problem worse.”
They might be the most arrested age group, but one expert says the majority of teenage criminals will not go onto a life of crime.
Prof Halsey said the “ones who created the problem” often flirted with drugs and were truants from school from a young age. Despite that, he believed the figures showed a relatively small number went onto serious crime.
“It’s not often in your twenties [out of nowhere] people start offending — most start earlier.”
A NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research paper on the causes of crime found truancy, the influence of peers, performance at school and poverty all could be factors in crime-prone individuals.