Juvenile Offender – Diversion through Panel - dataset 1994-1995

Brief description

This dataset describes juvenile offenders and their offences for the period mid-1994 to March 1995 that were dealt with by the WA Childrens Panel (a form of juvenile diversion in WA at that time, now superseded by alternative diversionary options such as JJTs and juvenile cautions). Data was sourced from the CHIPS system of the (then) Department of Justice.

The data is de-identified and contains a unique identifier, which distinguishes one offender from another. Each offender has a different identifier and every event record for that offender is allocated the same identifier. The aim of the identifier is to link records that are believed to belong to the same person from two or more different datasets. The unique identifier was created through the INOIS system (Ferrante, 1993).

The data for this study was made available through long-standing agreements between a number of government agencies in Western Australia and the Crime Research Centre, University of Western Australia.