Jesuit Social Services recently released Dropping off the Edge 2021: Persistent and multilayered disadvantage in Australia. This is the fifth report in a series that began in 1999, the products of a long-term collaboration between the late, great Professor Tony Vinson AM and Jesuit Social Services.
Dropping off the Edge documents how disadvantage is concentrated in a small number of localities in every state and territory of Australia. This geographical concentration and the cumulative and compounding nature of the disadvantageous structural factors that generate it have profound intergenerational consequences, including chronic criminal offending by children as young as 10 years old.
The geographical distribution of deprivation in my home state of Queensland is broadly similar to patterns in other states and territories. A small minority of localities, mostly situated outside Greater Brisbane, suffer from disproportionately high rates of a wide array of problems including low income, overcrowding, long-term unemployment, particulate matter in the air, no internet, child maltreatment, and youth crime. These different strands of disadvantage pile-up and interlock, countering attempts to break free.
The web-like structure of disadvantage comes into sharp focus when one examines the most disadvantaged 3 per cent of Queensland locations. In these 15 places family violence, prison admissions, and juvenile convictions occur at shockingly high rates, both reflecting and reinforcing high rates of poverty.
I recently delivered the 2021 Tony Fitzgerald Lecture in Brisbane in which I focused on the early prevention of chronic youth offending. As a ‘pathological optimist’ I argued that the combination of prevention science and community empowerment through the co-creation of community controlled, data-guided, and evidence-based solutions tailored to the needs of local children and families can be one of the circuit-breakers that is needed by the most severely disadvantaged communities.
I also argued that this community-oriented public health approach to the seemingly intractable problem of youth crime can be a circuit breaker that policy makers need to break free from the ‘get tough’ punishment-oriented public discourse that disproportionately criminalises and incarcerates socially disadvantaged and First Nations children.
'The program was sustained for 10 years and had many positive outcomes, including at age 25 a 31 per cent reduction in violent crime and a 35 per cent reduction in crimes involving illegal drugs.'
Being optimistic does not mean being unrealistic about the formidable challenges entailed in this radical early prevention agenda. The poverty and violence of the home and community environments from which most serious, repeat youth offenders