Toowoomba intensive case management program to target 25 high-risk youth offenders

More than two dozen of the Darling Downs’ most serious high-risk youth offenders will be the target of a new program rollout that aims to reduce offending by 50 per cent.

Toowoomba and the Darling Downs has finally been given access to a successful intervention program that will target more than 25 of the region’s most serious repeat youth offenders.

New Youth Justice Minister Di Farmer revealed on Friday the Garden City was one of three new areas (including Ipswich and north Brisbane) to join the pioneering intensive case management program, which is already in 13 locations across the state.

The program will hire eight staff, including six case workers, to liaise with 25 of southwest Queensland’s most prolific and high-risk youth offenders and their families to reduce both the frequency and severity of reoffending.

“We know if we work with them intensively and their families and carers in a program like this, we have a better chance of keeping them away from the justice system or keeping them from re-entering them,” Ms Farmer said.

Discussing the launch of the state government's intensive case management program in Toowoomba are (from left) Darling Downs Superintendent Doug McDonald, Youth Justice Minister Di Farmer and Department of Youth Justice southwest regional director Nima Pulou.

“We want to keep the community safe, but we don’t want to see them back in the system.”

Department of Youth Justice southwest Queensland regional director Nima Pulou said each case worker would interact almost daily with up to five families to address the core factors leading to the reoffending.

“This is a real opportunity to improve community safety, because we all know that if we don’t tackle those embedded factors that lead to young people continuing to offend, we don’t get to the crux of their offending,” she said.

“It is challenging work, and there is never just one issue that needs to be worked on, (the issues are) embedded and intertwined and intergenerational.”

Ms Pulou said those issues included domestic violence, poverty, homelessness, substance abuse, mental health issues, disengagement from education.

It comes after independent evaluations of intensive case management found the program had reduced the rates of reoffending as well as the seriousness of the crimes committed since it had been first introduced in 2019.

“The recent independent evaluation of ICM (found) a reduction of reoffending, but also there is the reduction in the severity of offending,” Ms Pulou said.

“The intensive case management has been trialled in other locations, we’ve been watching with anticipation on the results, and the recent evaluations shows there is success in the model and we hoped it would come to Toowoomba.

“Some of these young people, they’re deemed to be high and very high risk so they may have already spent time in custody, but that doesn’t dissuade us from the fact that if you put the attention to where it needs to be, there is success.”

When asked why it had taken four years for Toowoomba to see the rollout of the program, Ms Farmer said the independent evaluations needed time to assess the long-term benefits.

“When you’re evaluating something, you want the immediate results, but you need the long-term results as well, so we’re able to say that the results we’ve quoted earlier are not only for the first six months but in fact the young person has not re-entered the youth justice system at all (over several years),” she said.

Ms Farmer said while she believed the number of youth offenders initially involved was a significant amount of the region’s most high-risk young people, she would be open to expanding the program in Toowoomba.

“These programs aim to either keep young people out of the youth justice system or keep them re-entering them,” she said.

“I have asked my director-general to evaluate every single one of the programs to make sure they’re working.

“We are not only increasing the number of locations (of intensive case management), we’re expanding the program in eight of those existing locations.

“Where something works, we want to do more of it.”

Originally published as Toowoomba intensive case management program to target 25 high-risk youth offenders