Drug law and the Youth Court

The connection between youth offending and drug and alcohol use cannot be denied, contends Principal Youth Court Judge Andrew Becroft, and this is a non-negotiable source of concern for the courts. While dealing with young offenders’ drug and alcohol issues is complex, requiring a whole-of-community approach, judges must uphold their duty to eliminate illegal drug use by young people.

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Alcohol and drug use are part of the personal stories of most young offenders in New Zealand. International criminological and drug literature also supports the view that young people who use illicit drugs are more likely to engage in criminal activity.

Further, McAllister and Makkai report that their study shows a clear link between the age at which a young a person first tries marijuana and the likelihood they will engage in antisocial behaviour. Worryingly, the age at which young New Zealanders are first using cannabis is dropping.

Youth Court judges and those within the wider youth justice system must be alive to the influence substance abuse and dependency can have on why a young person has come before the court. Courts must also understand the options for helping young people and their families turn their lives around, while still holding them accountable.

Young people in New Zealand aged 14–16 commit approximately 31,000 offences annually. Around three-quarters of this offending is diverted away from court and into the community through police diversion programmes, warnings and family group conferences.

Only about 4 percent of the 7,000 offences by young people brought before the courts each year are reported as drug offences. However, most young offenders fit a common profile involving unhealthy use of drugs and alcohol. In probably 20 percent of cases, patterns of drug and alcohol use amount to chronic dependency.

His Honour Judge John Walker estimates that 80 percent of young people appearing in the Youth Court have alcohol or drug issues that are connected with their offending. He believes that, by the time these 15- and 16-year-olds come to court, their dependency is well established, with many having histories of use that started when they were as young as 10-years-old. These young people are often in households where drug and alcohol use is a normal part of life.

Judge Walker labels drug and alcohol problems as an underlying cause of young offending. In his view, responding to this issue in order to reduce youth crime requires a multidisciplinary, interagency, whole-of-community attack.

New Zealand researcher Kaye McLaren has looked at risk factors for youth offending and whether they can usefully be addressed by interventions. In her 2000 paper she groups problems that lead young people into crime into five broad categories. Drugs and alcohol appear as risk factors in four of these. This suggests that drug and alcohol risks are widespread to the extent that they appear in every facet of a young person’s life. They are difficult for the young person to avoid and they are difficult for the authorities and the community to deal with ‘criminogenically’ because anything other than a comprehensive approach is unlikely to remove the connection between the young person’s offending and their use of alcohol and drugs.

It is uncontroversial to say that dealing with young offenders’ drug and alcohol issues is complex. A recent study of young people attending treatment services in New Zealand showed that young people present with a range of needs including mental health issues, criminality, family conflict and disengagement from school. The study reported over half of the sample had criminal convictions and over a quarter had spent time in a youth justice residence. When the same sample was narrowed to include only the more serious day and residential patients it was discovered that 80 percent had been convicted of a crime and 45 percent had been incarcerated.

The study also threw up concerns about the co-morbidity of dependence on two or three of the substances surveyed (nicotine, alcohol and cannabis) and a worrying gap in treatment opportunities for girls with dependence issues. Other comments from the authors included:

• a perceived reluctance amongst providers to record psychiatric diagnoses

• a high rate of discharges from treatment programmes for disciplinary reasons

• a tendency (internationally) for adult treatment services to be simply modified for young people, rather than specialist programmes being created that take a more positive youth development approach.

Beer and cannabis appear to be the most common drugs used by young New Zealand offenders and, in our view, the two most important factors influencing this are price and availability. The amount of beer available to buy in New Zealand is about 330 million litres per year, which is the 15th highest volume in the world, slightly behind the United States and Spain.

Of the half of New Zealand young people (aged 12–17) who drank alcohol in the year prior to the 2004 Health Behaviours Survey, an average of more than 12 percent drank large amounts of alcohol at least weekly.

The incidence of heavy drinking amongst Mäori young people was measured at almost double this average. That Mäori continue to be overrepresented in all youth justice measurements and statistics is of great and ongoing concern to all judges.

Amongst all those young male drinkers surveyed in 2004, between half and three-quarters had alcohol bought for them by family or friends, and up to a quarter tried to buy alcohol from wine shops, wholesalers, dairies, supermarkets and sports clubs.

Cannabis is also widely used by young New Zealanders appearing in the Youth Court. There is evidence of new hybrid strains of cannabis, which has meant a significant increase in the potency of this drug. Also, the age at which cannabis is first used in the population is dropping, and the numbers of young people aged 13–16 using cannabis for the first time is increasing.

Fortunately, methamphetamine is not yet a widespread problem facing the Youth Court. ‘P’ is seen only sporadically thus far, and it is our view that any increase in young people using this drug would signal a major social catastrophe.

Given the reality outlined above, the Youth Court in New Zealand is forced to take drug and alcohol use and dependency very seriously. Making young people accountable for their actions and restoring their self-esteem and links to the community is much easier in an environment where drugs and alcohol are not major distractions.

Drug and alcohol treatment for young people requires youth-specific intervention approaches. Thankfully, outpatient youth drug treatment programmes catering for young offenders, such as those supplied by WellTrust in Wellington, are available in most major metropolitan centres. Residential treatment services are still lacking, however. Many areas of the country are not supplied with any of these services, delivered either residentially or for outpatients. This lack makes the job of the Youth Court extremely difficult.

One significant Youth Court initiative designed to address the effects of drugs and alcohol on the process of youth justice is the Christchurch Youth Drug Court. This specialist court is based on principles of therapeutic jurisprudence and designed to enhance the opportunities for collaborative multiagency work with young offenders.

Young people with moderate to serious substance issues are screened by on-site specialists and referred to the Youth Drug Court. The Drug Court Judge spends more time with the young person in each appointment and takes a more active role in monitoring the young person’s progress through their treatment and community work. The court has shown good results in terms of reduced re-offending and reduced drug and alcohol use.

While the link between drugs and offending is complex and not always causal in an obvious way, the use of illegal drugs is a non-negotiable source of concern for the court. For the Youth Court, the debate between ‘harm minimisation’ and ‘total abstinence’ is rather academic. Youth Court judges cannot resile from their duty to eliminate illegal drug use by young people and to assist in the elimination of the illegal supply of alcohol to young people by family and friends.

Beyond that, our mission to oversee joint processes of accountability, restoration and rehabilitation for each young person will only succeed if comprehensive youth-specific drug and alcohol services are made more widely available.

If the enacting of healthy drug laws was enough to ensure that dependent young people received all the treatment they needed to return to society in a positive way, then the Youth Court could rightly be seen as the last word in therapeutic jurisprudence.

The reality is, however, that the court desperately needs the support of other agencies and community providers to give young offenders the best chance of not completing the graduation to the adult courts.

• His Honour Andrew Becroft was appointed Principal Youth Court Judge of New Zealand in June 2001.

References

Ian McAllister & Toni Makkai, Antisocial behaviour Amoung Young Australians While Under The Influence of Illicit Drugs, The
Australian and new Zealand Journal of Criminology Vol 36 Number 2, 2003 211-222.

Jin Chong, Youth Justice Statistics in New Zealand 1995 to 2006, Ministry of Justice 2007, 41.

Kaye L McLaren, Tough Is Not Enough, Ministry of Youth Affairs, June 2000.
His Honour Judge John Walker, Address to the ALAC Conference, 4 May 2007.

Schroder et al, Profile of young people attending alcohol and other drug treatment services in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 2008; 42:963-968.

Statistics New Zealand website

Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.or /wiki/List_of_countries_by_beer_consumption_per_capita.

Ministry of Health, Health Behaviours Survey – Alcohol Use 2004.