From childhood system intervention to adult criminal conviction: Investigating sex and Indigenous status inequalities in Queensland administrative data
Matthews, McVie and collaborators at Queensland University, Australia
It is well known that youth justice intervention is associated with a criminal conviction in adulthood. What is less well known is whether “cross-over” children, who have contact with both child welfare and youth justice systems, experience relatively worse outcomes and, if so, whether these outcomes are exacerbated by important demographic factors, such as sex and Indigenous status. Criminal careers scholars have examined the existence and patterning of adult convictions for different groups, but attempts to understand inequality of outcome have been constrained by limitations of standard statistical analysis. Using administrative data from the Queensland Cross-sector Research Collaboration, we adopt a novel regression model specification more commonly used in epidemiology to explore the cumulative effects of childhood system contact on adult conviction trajectories, and how these associations vary by sex and Indigenous status.
Fifty years after the Race Relations Act 1965, people from ethnic minority backgrounds still face barriers in access to education, justice and the labour market, resulting in social/economic exclusion and tensions within and between communities. The Equality and Human Rights Commission (2016), for example, found significant ethnic inequalities in the UK across 10 different domains of economic, social and personal well-being. Much of the detailed research on ethnic inequalities, however, has focussed on England and Wales and so there are significant gaps in the literature with respect to this issue in Scotland.
Our aims in this research strand are to understand the implications of changing patterns of of poverty for ethnic minorities and to develop micro-level longitudinal evidence on the long-term relationship between changes in ethnic mix and the impacts on life outcomes. We are particularly interested in how “white” migrants from European accession countries affect, and are affected by, these issues, and whether ethnic minorities experience greater multi-dimensional inequality in Scotland compared with the rest of the UK. More specifically, we also seek to investigate whether changes in the ethnic/cultural mix of pupils in schools can affect education outcomes for pupils from different backgrounds, and whether there different employment trajectories and different neighbourhood effects for different ethnic groups.
Below are some of the papers related to this area of research.