By Anna Chalton, Dugan Dallimore and Paul McGorrery

Threat Offences in Victoria examines sentencing outcomes from 2015 to 2019 for five types of threat offences: threat to kill, threat to inflict serious injury, threat to destroy or damage property, threat to commit a sexual offence and threat to assault an emergency worker. It considers the offences co-sentenced alongside threat offences and the prior and subsequent offending rates for people sentenced for threat offending.

Melbourne: Sentencing Advisory Council (VIC), 2021. 76p.

By Paul McGorrery and Felicity Stewart

Adjourned undertakings perform a critical role in the Victorian criminal justice system. They are a low-end community order that requires the offender to be of good behaviour for a certain period of time, and they may also require the offender to comply with certain additional conditions, such as making a charitable donation or participating in a rehabilitation program. They are primarily designed to provide a response to less serious offending, to first-time offenders, to vulnerable offenders or even to serious offending if there are extraordinary circumstances. Because of this broad scope, adjourned undertakings are highly prevalent. In 2019 alone, there were over 17,000 adjourned undertakings imposed, mostly in the Magistrates’ Court, making up 18% of all sentencing outcomes in adult courts that year. Yet despite the importance and prevalence of adjourned undertakings, this project has been the first detailed examination of their use since their introduction in 1985. In that context, this report follows the consultation paper we published in August 2022 and presents 26 recommendations for reforms to adjourned undertakings and related orders. Those recommendations are a product of extensive data analysis, legal research and consultation over the last two years. Our overarching aim in making those recommendations is to refine a sentencing order that is already held in high regard by those who work in Victoria’s criminal justice system. Adjourned undertakings are a highly flexible and useful order, and we do not want to fix what isn’t broken or cause unintended consequences. With that in mind, we have grouped our recommendations according to certain themes.

Melbourne: The Sentencing Advisory Council (VIC), 2023. 102p.

By The Center for Human Rights

The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred urgent and growing concerns about the health of immigrants held in detention centers in the United States. In fact, awareness of the problem is not new: in 2016, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) inspector general raised deep questions about the agency’s preparedness for a possible pandemic event,[1] concerns that were reiterated last December when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) denounced DHS for having medical infrastructure it described as “not sufficient to assure rapid and adequate infection control measures.”[2]

Here in Washington, over the course of recent years, increasing activism by people detained at the Northwest Detention Center[3] (NWDC) and community supporters has spurred pointed criticism by elected officials at the local, state, and national level of conditions within the facility. Sustained media attention and multiple lawsuits have also forced the facility to defend its practices. In March 2020, the Washington State Legislature passed HB 2576, a law mandating inquiries into state and local oversight mechanisms regarding conditions in the NWDC, further underscoring the perceived need to address gaps in understanding regarding the health and welfare of those housed within the facility.

In this context, the UW Center for Human Rights (UWCHR) considers it important to make our ongoing research on conditions within the NWDC available to the public. As part of our longstanding effort to examine the human rights implications of federal immigration enforcement in our state, UWCHR has sought, since 2017, to obtain information about conditions of detention in public and private detention facilities where immigrants are housed in Washington state.[4] While our efforts to obtain information about conditions within the NWDC have been only partially successful due to the lack of transparency surrounding the facility, the information we have obtained is sufficiently concerning, particularly in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, that we are choosing to share our initial findings with the public even as our collection and analysis of further data continues.

This report will be published as a series discussing areas of human rights concern at the facility, including background, methodology, and relevant human rights standards; sanitation of food and laundry; allegations of medical neglect; use of solitary confinement; COVID-19 and health standards; reporting of sexual assault and abuse; and uses of force and chemical agents. The report includes research updates covering concerns about cleanliness at the detention center going unanswered and a look at the context for Charles Leo Daniel’s death at the NWDC.

The Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, University of Washington

By  Eiri Ohtani

The three alternative to detention (ATD) pilots provided case management to 126 individuals with irregular immigration status. 86% remained engaged, 12% disengaged or absconded and 2% were forcibly removed. 25% achieved case resolution, with a permanent or temporary migration outcome. ‣ Consistently across the two evaluations in 2018 and 2020, it has been shown that the case management has had a positive impact on individuals’ ability and capacity to work towards case resolution and can help them to stay engaged in migration processes. Case management had at least some impact, and in many areas a huge impact, on a wide range of areas of individual wellbeing and engagement. 99% of individuals had improved ability to participate in informed decision making and 96% had improved ability to engage with the immigration procedures over time. ‣ The positive impact of case management through the pilots can be more confidently asserted in this second evaluation due to the much larger size of the sampled data: client summary sheets of 99 out of 126 clients (79%) were examined in detail in 2020, as opposed to 31 out of 93 clients (33%) in 2018. ‣ A wider range of data examined for this evaluation, including 30 case studies and 12 client interviews (of which 7 were conducted by the evaluator), generally corroborate the data provided by the pilot implementors in the client summary sheets. ‣ Although the evaluation considered whether the cost-effectiveness of the three pilots can be established, limitations in the available data and other factors make it difficult to draw conclusions. Approximate average costs of case management per beneficiary per day for each of the pilots. ‣ Given the positive impact generated by the pilots, their approach and principles could beneficially be extended more broadly throughout the migration systems. The pilots also identified gaps and shortcomings in each country’s immigration system which are exposing individuals to unnecessary risk of detention and which, if addressed, can reduce the use of detention. A sustained and collaborative process of reform, based on the learning of the pilots and involving structured collaboration among governments, migrants, civil society and other actors, could deliver systemic improvements that would benefit all stakeholders.

Belgium, European Programme for Integration and Migration. 2020, 55pg