Podcast: Researcher Rob Bonnett’s “ripple effect” theory for reducing crime without using prisons
When a young person commits a crime, some people might call for them to be sent to jail. A place to punish them, to keep the community safe, and to deter others from doing the same thing. But the evidence tells us prisons aren’t effective at stopping crime. Eighty per cent of young people in Victoria will reoffend within a year of leaving detention, and the experience of being isolated in a harsh prison environment doesn’t help someone get on a better path.
Now, new research shows that an approach called group conferencing is nearly twice as effective in reducing reoffending – without sending kids to prison. Today, researcher Rob Bonnett tells us why. Rob’s PhD research evaluated the effectiveness of the Victorian Government’s Youth Justice Group Conferencing program – the program brings together people who have offended with the victims of their actions in dialogue, to restore relationships, heal harm, and change behaviour.
Here's what Rob found, why it works, and what this research could mean for youth justice in Victoria.
And you can keep scrolling to read the full transcript of this conversation.
Sophie Raynor
Welcome to the Worth A Second Chance podcast, where we explore true stories, challenges and solutions from the frontlines of Australia's youth justice systems. My name is Sophie Raynor.
When a young person commits a crime, some people might call for them to be sent to jail. A place to punish them… to keep the community safe… and to deter others from doing the same thing. But the evidence tells us prisons aren’t effective at stopping crime. Eighty per cent of young people in Victoria will reoffend within a year of leaving detention, and the experience of being isolated in a harsh prison environment doesn’t help someone get on a better path.
Now, new research shows that an approach called group conferencing is nearly twice as effective in reducing reoffending – without sending kids to prison. Today, researcher Rob Bonnett tells us why.
Rob Bonnett
We all have ways that we justify our behaviour. It’s much easier to justify the behaviour when you know that there's something that you've done… for example, I know that I stole someone’s car, so I’ve already justified why I stole that person's car. The thing that I didn't know was that person needed to take their husband to critical care treatment the next day. There’s this kind of ripple effect, there's a broader effect of that is like: I didn't know. And I wasn't ready for that. So that affects me, and I feel bad about that.
Sophie Raynor
Rob’s PhD research evaluated the effectiveness of the Victorian Government’s Youth Justice Group Conferencing program. The program brings together people who have offended with the victims of their actions in dialogue, to restore relationships, heal harm, and change behaviour. Today, Rob tells me what he found, why it works, and what this research could mean for youth justice in Victoria.
So, Rob, do you want to start off by introducing yourself?
Rob Bonnett
So, I'm a psychologist, I work at Forensicare. Before I trained clinically, I had a long work history in sort of not for profit, non-government organisations, working around disability, youth justice, and child protection areas. I worked with Jesuit Social Services for like, I think, eight years, all up. And in part of my work that I was exposed to, they said, like go see a conference. And so I did, and I was just captivated. I was like, wow, this is unreal.
Sophie Raynor
So that first conference, you observed, what were your first impressions – what was unreal about it?
Rob Bonnett
The victim wasn't there. But there was this kid who was in custody at the time, and there was the arresting police officer, there was the young person's family. And there was like support people, custodial staff. And then the victim’s representative who was the victim support agency worker, and then just this, this format of the conversation going around in a circle, and the way it was orchestrated. And I felt… I felt so intense for the kid. But I also felt so intense, so intensely for the family of the young person, and that they were, they were… they were just in tears. And they were just so ashamed. They were a migrant family. And I think for the police officer, as well like to see this kind of like, shift happen within the police officer of being this sort of like angry, sort of hard-edge towards the kid to this, this way that it resolved into the police officer was essentially saying, I don't think you're a bad guy. But what you did that night, meant that we couldn't, we couldn't do anything about bad guys if they were doing something. So it was like, the story was that like, that these kids had gone on this like series of heists doing robberies at service stations, and they needed like all of the police units in the western suburbs to track this kid and his friends. And then he did this police officer just said to him, if someone was getting murdered, or someone was getting raped, we wouldn't had any units to respond to that because of you and your friends. And I don't think that you're… so in essence was like, I don't think you're a bad guy. But you got in the way of something that's very important. And that was like, I think that was a very powerful message. I don't know if they could receive it or not. But um, yeah, I was quite captivated by this process.
Sophie Raynor
I'm curious about the distinction that police officer made between a person's character and their deeds… You've done a bad thing, but you're not about person. Do you reckon the young person has had that distinction made for them before?
Rob Bonnett
There was an implicit value judgment there, where the police officer was, in essence, saying you're not a bad guy, you know? Like you're just a kid who's doing dumb things, you know? Yeah, I don't know. I think the thing that was the most profound about it, though, was that was that, although the way that the conversation structured, does sort of, in essence, make that split like about, we were talking about the behaviour of the person, and it facilitates that kind of division of the behaviour from the person. I don't know that anyone was all that cognisant of it at the time, like I was trying to work it out afterwards; I remember just thinking about it. And that's why I ended up doing, you know, four years of study on it. Was that… was that it was like, I was just like, how does it how does this work? You know, like, this is, this is so interesting, but it just, it seemed like such a human, such a human experience in the way that it was so emotional, and the way that it was structured in a way that helped it come to some sense of resolution, as though it was more like that this thing happened, this thing opened up, and then it closed again. And everyone seemed a bit different afterwards, you know, and that was like, that's a very profound kind of thing to witness.
Sophie Raynor
So I want to take our conversation now from your experience of observing and participating in group conferences as a lay person or as a support worker, and towards your research. How did you choose the group conferencing program for your PhD?
Rob Bonnett
The research on conferencing, there's been a lot of work done, but it's actually quite weak, you know, and the data is really old, that the evidence base is based on. And so it was an opportunity to kind of fill a gap in the in the literature. I was interested in the relationship between conferencing and recidivism, ultimately, you know, it's like, it's there to say, we want to change, you know, the behaviour of young people. And it promises to do that. And then when I was actually looking at the literature, you know, the outcomes were quite weak to suggest that it did. And like in the literature, they assumed that the thing that would change a young person's behaviour was a face-to-face victim-offender interaction. Whereas that's not the way that our program runs here. And it's actually not the way the programs run in most places. And sorry, as well, there's that automatically, there's no evidence to suggest the conferencing should work to reduce recidivism as the way that the program's run. There is is lots of research on it. But it's, yeah, even that even that assumption is like, oh, we'll do some research about that to find out. And so yeah, that was sort of the question that it came down to, I wanted to know, does it work? And how does it work?
Sophie Raynor
And so how did you go about answering those questions. Were those interviews, or desktop research?
Rob Bonnett
I did a data linkage project. So I got data from the Children's Court, from Youth Justice, from Corrections Victoria, and complete offending histories from, I think it ended up being two and a half thousand young people went through between like 2012 and 2018. So it was like 850 young people that went through the program with Jesuits, and then with some, with a matched cohort of another 1500 that went through the Children's Court at the same time. And so then I used it, I used some file data from, from the grid compensation reports that that are held by the Jesuits. And then I linked up with all the data in the other databases.
Sophie Raynor
And in a soundbite, what did you find?
Rob Bonnett
The program as it runs in metropolitan Melbourne, between those years was very effective. But it's difficult to say, because like I didn't run, I can't say that it caused a reduction in offending because we didn't run an experiment, you know, to test it was randomised. But I can say that, when we looked at the offending trajectories of young people who went through the program, they were much less likely to continue offending, even after the first recidivism event. So that was something that I did that people hadn't done before is that I looked at whether they were whether the effect continued after they reoffended, you know, and so it was like, throughout the rest of their development, they were that they were still less likely to offend compared to someone who hadn't gone through the program.
Sophie Raynor
So then if you can establish from your research that the program was in fact effective in that period, what made it so why was it so effective?
Rob Bonnett
So that was the second part of my project. The first part was comparing the data of like, comparing the offending trajectories of people who went… who were referred to the program against those who weren't. The second part of our project was looking at elements within the program that I could identify through file review. And because it was a file review project, I couldn't say I couldn't do any like, pre- and -post measures of like, you know, psychological variables that might reduce recidivism. I saw, I looked at what I could look at through the file review. And so I actually looked at who was present at the conference, I wanted to test this idea of like, is it the victim-offender interaction? Or is it something else? I thought that was the most important bit, because if it has to be a face-to- face victim, why are we running conferences without victims? You know, like, what's the what's the point. And so that was ultimately like one of the things that interested me the most. And so I coded the variables from the files as to the most, the most important ones that I looked at were: was it was there a primary victim present, which is a which is the person who was directly harmed by the crime? Was there a secondary victim present, which is a person who was indirectly harmed. So that might be in the case of someone who was assaulted, it might be that that person's family member or that person's mother, so a kid assaults another kid, a secondary victim would be lucky, if mother or if a person like on vandalises a large business, it could be the person who works for that business that then has to clean up the mess. I looked at whether investigating police officers present or whether it was a Youth Resource Officer, which is more like a, you know, hybrid social worker-police officer kind of… like, they do assertive relationship-building. I wanted to know whether it made a difference whether the investigating police officer was there. And then I looked at some of the ones like did it matter if a co-offender was present? And did it matter what kind of court order that they got afterwards? A bunch of things like that. So then what I found was, it didn't matter if whether a primary victim was there, someone who was directly harmed, or not, there was no difference in reoffending outcomes. But if a secondary victim was there, with the primary victim, then the recidivism rate and the recidivism likelihood, was like dropped by half. So it was a huge, it was a huge difference. And that was consistent even when the secondary victim was there without the primary victim. So that was a big thing. It was like people who were indirectly harmed, like the ripple effects of the offence, people who were indirectly harmed were assessed, if they were present, there was a huge reduction in recidivism, which was, which was fascinating. The other big one was that if an investigating officer was present, that young person was four times less likely to reoffend, which was, which is enormous. And so I think that there's something very important there, because out of all the conferences that I've observed, the police officers who do the investigative work, they come with this very powerful first-hand experience, either they say, this is how it affected me. Or they say, I had to sit with that person's mother while they were crying, because I know that this person was so afraid to do this because of what you did. Or they just give this like, more broader perspective about what the impact of that behaviour was on all the people and on the justice system. And I think that they're the kinds of things that kids in particular don't think about. And they're not expecting to find out about how their behaviour was so disruptive to so many people. So I think that's yeah, that's really important.
Sophie Raynor
Finding that broader perspective on how their actions have ripple consequences. Sounds just like that first conference you observed?
Rob Bonnett
Yeah, actually, in that first conference, the thing that I think, from watching the young person, the thing that got through the most, was that the police officer said that having the police helicopter out, pursuing those kids cost $5,000 an hour to keep in the air. And that figure, I think, just like that kid's head, just like what the hell like, you know, like that there was there was one bit of information that might have hit home. And it wasn't all the emotional bit, because I don't think that kid was like to defend it; to really let that in at that time. But it's just like, there's one thing that he didn't expect that took him by surprise. And people were just like, Oh, my God, that's terrible. And there was another one, there's another one that I observed with these kids. Like, they were like, throwing rocks at a train station, throwing rocks at like, like, what are they called, like the PSOs. You know, the not police, but the police, that kind of police. Like throwing rocks at those guys. And then they disrupted the whole of train services for the south-eastern suburbs at peak time. And so like, all the train services, shut down, like on the Frankston, Dandenong lines, just because these kids were being like, ratbags, really, and then for the police officer to be able to say, like, there was like 10,000 people trying to get home and they couldn't because of you and they were just like, like, that's not… I didn't mean for that to happen. I just wanted to, you know, just let this PSO so know that I hated him, or something like that. It's like, a real petty kind of motivation that they didn't know disrupted so many people's lives. And I think that that police officers have that knowledge and they can bring that, you know that wider perspective to a conference.
Sophie Raynor
Yeah. And I want to ask you about those secondary victims of crime as well, when we're talking about wider perspectives, and why their presence is so important. What I want to do here is, like, splice together what you've just said about police officers having first-hand experience and having that be so persuasive to a young person who's offended. Is there the same logic true of a secondary victim of crime?
Rob Bonnett
We haven't tested you know, but I think that that's the case like, because with all people who offend, or you know, who commit crimes, or do behaviours that harm other people, there's ways that we justify that to ourselves, you know, that there's like in psychology, it's called… one of the theories is mechanisms of moral disengagement, is how we disconnect ourselves from the from the normal emotions that people get when they transgress. Normally, people feel guilty, or they feel ashamed or whatever. But it's how we can like switch that off, to allow us to do something that harms another person. And in criminology, it’s called techniques of neutralisation, there's like, you know, I just deny that someone was harmed. I was like, you know, that it didn't harm them that much. So, you know, a classic, one of those is like, if a kid steals a car, he goes, it doesn't matter if they had insurance anyway, you know, and so there's like, we've got, like, everyone's got their ways of doing things. It's not unique to people who commit crimes, but it's like, we all have ways that we justify our behaviour. It's much easier to justify the behaviour when you know that there's something that you've done. And so for example, I know that I stole that person's car. And so I've already justified why I stole that person's car. The thing that I didn't know, was that person needed to take their husband to a critical cancer treatment the next day. And so there's like this kind of ripple effect, there's a broader effect of that is like, I didn't know that. And I wasn't ready for that. So I'm undefended against that. So that affects me, I feel bad about that. And that's that kind of like, that's where I think the secondary victim comes in as it surprises people, because they weren't ready for that piece of information to hit them. So yeah, I think that that's it, I think that you're exactly right, you're on the money, but we don't know yet. We'd have to test that.
Sophie Raynor
Yeah and on that point of testing, with your research more generally, do you have plans to experiment further with what you’ve found?
Rob Bonnett
Yeah, we talk about it. In my, my colleagues at the Centre for Forensic Behaviour Science, we would we would like to continue this research, but also had this like, being an emotional blockage of like, I've just finished this piece, I would like to do something more, because I'm busy. And God, I don't know if I can even open my thesis again to like, try and get my head around it. So yes, I would love to, and I still need to publish the papers from the thesis. They still haven't been published in journals yet. So yeah, there's a lot of work to do in relation to it. And I would like to see the work done, however that can happen. So yeah, kind of watch this space out. But I hope that even with, with the findings from the research that we did complete, I hope that that filters back, you know, into, into the research base, into the literature, and then other people can pick up those questions as well.
Sophie Raynor
And right at the beginning of this conversation, you said that you wanted to produce an applied piece of research. So I want to know, is there anything that could be changed or reformed with the program, based on your findings?
Rob Bonnett
I don't think anything needs to change, like, and I think that that's a really important finding in itself is that, like, the research justifies the use of the program as it's running. And there's certain bits of the research that have big implications like at like, anecdotally, I've heard a lot of people talk about how hard it is to sell police officers on conferencing, you know, as a perception of being a wishy-washy process light on crime, easy on offenders, all this sort of stuff. It's actually a super confronting experience for a young person to go through. And if anything, it's easier for a kid to just go to court and have, you know, a sanction slapped on them, and they walk out, and they don't have to change anything about it. Because when kids go to court all the time, when they're so used to that when they float in and out of custody, they never think about the repercussions of their behaviour. It's just that's their life, is just getting sanctions and floating in and out of custody and having shitty interactions with the police. And this process is a completely different experience to that normal form of sanctioning. And I think it's very difficult for people to go through; it's very confronting, and so part of this research justifies its use, you know, as it runs currently, it says that you don't need victims to be there so victims have the discretion to attend if they want or not attend if they want. There's no rationale for saying something like, it's going to be less effective if you don't attend, because it will be just as effective, you know, which is really important. But getting the investigating officers, getting secondary victims there, you know, this kind of this research can go some of the way to convince people that it's a worthwhile exercise. So it justifies the way that we use it at the moment, which is important. And I think, practice-wise, it just might add some weight, you know, to the invitation to come and participate, that maybe wasn't there before.
Sophie Raynor
And to close our conversation, one final question for you, which is a sort of existential question about the program in and of itself, like, what's its value? We know that it reduces reoffending. But beyond that, what's the value of the group conferencing program?
Rob Bonnett
So this is a huge question. And I’ve got to be careful not to just give you a long convoluted answer. Recognising that behaviour is complex, and people are complex, and that I think there's something very powerful in the idea that criminal sanctions should recognise that harm has been caused. Yeah, and that's implicit in in the law, but there's this kind of, that we should sit with this, this harm, and we should, we should let the harm have air time, you know, in the justice process, beyond a victim impact statement, which is the traditional way of that happening in a court case. So I think that that's very important, and to sit and have conversations to put things into words, that's the, that's the basis of the idea of psychotherapy, you know, is that like, people can have these overwhelming experiences, that makes them feel like shit day in and day out. But somehow articulating it and putting it into words, is powerful. So there's something powerful about putting something into words that I think is important, and the notion of putting into words, and putting it into a space that that is built for that, I think is very useful, especially if the person who harmed you is there in the space, they get to hear it. Like another thing that I think is very important is recognising that crime happens in a social context. And so it's, it's there's a bringing in the system around a young person, it's their, the young person's family, it's all the support services around them. It's the legal system itself, like, and the police as an institution, it's like they can they can turn from adversaries into supporters, you know, and that's that kind of systemic approach that I think can sometimes be lacking in traditional court processing that this experience offers. So I think that it's very worthwhile and that it's, um, you know, it's good because it is crime in a social context. And a places responsibility for, for the criminal behaviour patterns that can be added in involves them in the solutions for it. So I think that that's, that's a really important perspective.
Sophie Raynor
That was Rob Bonnett speaking to Worth a Second Chance about how restorative justice approaches can reduce crime and change behaviours.
Worth a Second Chance is a community campaign from Jesuit Social Services. We’re calling for a more fair, humane and effective youth justice system – and we need your help. Learn more, and join the campaign at worthasecondchance.com.au
Thanks to Rob Bonnett for speaking with me today, and you can find new conversations every second Wednesday. My name is Sophie Raynor, and this was Worth A Second Chance.