The criminal legal system should make our communities safer. But abuse of powers by police and detention authorities causes profound harm and erodes community trust.
The Justice and Equity Centre provides critical oversight of NSW Police, prisons and youth detention centres, to protect human rights and ensure fair and lawful treatment.
Heavy-handed law and order approaches are too common in NSW. Already marginalised communities are over-policed and over-incarcerated, resulting in cycles of criminalisation and disadvantage.
Our policing and detention team exposes and challenges inappropriate and unlawful practices, particularly those disproportionately impacting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, young people and people experiencing homelessness.
Working in collaboration with First Nations partner organisations, we call out discriminatory police practices that impact Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities – practices that are driving the shamefully disproportionate rates of arrest and imprisonment of First Nations adults and children.
We stand with First Nations peak organisations and advocates to demand First Nations involvement in decision-making to reform policing practices and legal system responses that heavily impact their communities.
Read more about our work to expose and challenge discriminatory policing.
Young people are regularly targeted by police and may not understand their legal rights.
We represent young people who have experienced harassment or unlawful treatment by police, to get them justice and compensation. Our casework informs our advocacy to drive system change, so fewer young people are harmed by police in their interactions.
Our successes include securing a class action settlement for more than 50 young people falsely imprisoned because of NSW Police data failures, and overturning the secretive and oppressive Suspect Target Management Program, responsible for on-going police harassment and unlawful targeting of young people.
Children and young people from communities experiencing marginalisation and disadvantage are overrepresented in Australian prisons and youth detention centres, including people with disability, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and people who have experienced homelessness.
Our youth detention work provides oversight of practices in youth detention centres, to ensure young people are treated with dignity and respect.
Detaining children and young people causes life-long harm and should only ever be a last resort. Our work seeks to ensure that children in detention are treated appropriately for their age and retain their rights to contact with family and legal services, in accordance with international law.
A particularly harmful practice we challenge is the use of solitary confinement. Locking a young person alone in a cell for days on end is not just inhumane, it has serious and lasting effects on physical and mental health. It is rightly prohibited by international law – but widely practiced in Australian youth detention facilities.
The Justice and Equity Centre is a leading independent law and policy centre. We help build a fairer, stronger society by tackling injustice and inequality.
We are a Deductible Gift Recipient. All donations over $2 are tax deductible.
Gadigal Country
Level 5, 175 Liverpool Street
Sydney, NSW, 2000, Australia
P +61 2 8898 6500
F +61 2 8898 6555
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ABN 77 002 773 524 | ACN 002 773 524
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