Justice Collaboration 

Monthly Update 

20th Edition, June 2026

Welcome to the Justice Collaboration’s June update!

The University of Sydney's Justice Collaboration aims to improve justice outcomes and to ultimately prevent crime.

The University of Sydney has numerous strengths in this area and has a track record of work across disciplines, faculties and research centres directly and indirectly relevant to justice systems and people in conflict with the law. 

In this edition we showcase recently funded projects, new publications, PhD theses from the archives, some helpful resources and upcoming events!

Funding News: Justice Collaboration members and affiliates awarded Australian Research Council funding

Two projects led by Collaboration members and affiliates were awarded funding by the Australian Government in the latest Linkage Projects funding round. The Australian Research Council Linkage Projects scheme supports new research tackling some of the nation’s most important social, economic and environmental challenges by bringing together universities with industry, community partners and government agencies.

Collaboration member Dr Jedidiah Evans leads a project that was awarded $542,050 to address a lack of meaningful education and personal development opportunities for Australian women in prison. In partnership with Corrective Services NSW, this project will investigate the implementation of an innovative humanistic education program with incarcerated women in NSW. Employing participatory action research methods, this project will generate new knowledge about the experiences and needs of women in prison and the impact of humanistic education on their wellbeing. Other expected outcomes include an expanded evidence base for gender-responsive programming and lived-experience informed strategic and policy recommendations and resources for correctional centres. This project will provide substantial benefits to prison reform for women at a national level.

Collaboration affiliate Associate Professor Justine Humphry leads a project that was awarded $448,422 to coproduce media for education and policy with young people involved in the youth justice system to foster safe and inclusive digital media use. This project expects to generate insights into the social media literacies and digital cultures of this group - over half of whom are First Nations young people - utilising innovative, participatory methods including media-making. Expected outcomes are digital literacy knowledge, enhanced digital media skills and evidence-based digital safety education co-designed with young people. This should provide significant benefits by developing effective preventative strategies and sector-wide service integration to improve outcomes for justice-involved young people throughout Australia. Partner organisations for the project are Youth Justice NSW, The Alannah & Madeline Foundation, the Telstra Foundation and Youth Action.

You can read more about the Linkage Project funding round here.

New Publication: Post-traumatic stress disorder and hazardous alcohol use among incarcerated adults: associations with criminogenic needs and reoffending in New South Wales, Australia

A recent article, co-written by Collaboration affiliate Dr Marlee Bower and researchers from the Matilda Centre, examines the prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), associations with criminogenic needs and reoffending and the role of alcohol use in these associations among adults in custody.

Researchers drew data from a linked dataset combining health (data collected in 2015), correctional and reoffending records for 1,033 incarcerated individuals in Australia. Most participants were male (66.9%), mean age 35.57 (SD = 11.6) and 15.9% meeting criteria for current PTSD. Two in five participants (43.8%) exceeded the threshold for hazardous alcohol use prior to incarceration, with 28% meeting criteria for alcohol dependence. PTSD and hazardous alcohol use were independently associated with higher criminogenic needs. Hazardous alcohol use, but not PTSD, was associated with greater odds of, and a shorter time to violent reoffending. There was no evidence of any association between PTSD and reoffending.

The findings underscore the importance of trauma-informed rehabilitation programs that are responsive to the psychological and emotional needs of individuals in custody, but also to substance use issues that may elevate risk.

The article, published in Advances of Dual Diagnosis can accessed here.

Raising the Bar Sydney - Dr Jedidiah Evans on Reading, Writing and Redemption  

Collaboration member Dr Jedidiah Evans recently participated in Raising the Bar Sydney, presenting on his work in NSW prisons. 

For over a decade, Collaboration member Dr Evans has run workshops in NSW prisons, bringing poetry, philosophy, and creative writing to incarcerated men and women. His research shows that meaningful education builds communities on the inside and networks on the outside. And crucially, it reduces the likelihood of people returning. This is restorative justice in action, one poem at a time.

Prior to the event, Dr Evans joined Canny Chifley on 2SER Must Listen to discuss reading, writing and redemption in prison. You can listen to the interview here. 

Project News: Better understanding online safety education delivery in Youth Justice - Indigenous perspectives 

This is an initiative by an interdisciplinary research team at the University of Sydney — in partnership with Youth Justice NSW, Alannah & Madeline Foundation, Telstra Foundation and Youth Action — to gather views and perspectives from young people, educators, Youth Justice workers and community members about the status of online safety education in youth justice and assess the feasibility of our proposed research design.

The consultations are scoping for the recently funded project - Digital Media for Youth Justice: Co-producing media for education and policy - which has as its aim to investigate the digital literacies and social media cultures of justice-involved young people and to co-create tailored online safety education that responds to areas of digital risk and develops essential safety skills and literacies. The purpose of the consultations was to gather views and perspectives from project participants and stakeholders, focusing on First Nations young people and their communities, to inform how we go about designing online safety resources and assess the feasibility of our plan to co-create educational resources with young people involved in youth justice in the form of videos and podcasts, to be embedded in school and community learning programs.

The consultations were carried out in December 2025 and March 2026. The consultations were supported by a grant from the University of Sydney’s Ngarangun: Sydney Indigenous Research Strategy Grants 2025, which enabled us to employ an Aboriginal youth justice specialist to help access and engage with young people in YJ centres and covered researcher travel to the consultation sites in Western Sydney and Grafton. University of Sydney researchers in the project are: Associate Professor Justine Humphry, Dr Catherine Page Jeffery, Associate Professor Jonathon Hutchinson, Professor Jakelin Troy and Associate Professor Garner Clancey.

Funding News: Justice Collaboration members and affiliates receive funding from Sydney Law School

Two projects involving Justice Collaboration members and affiliates have received funding from Sydney Law School. Dr Jedidiah Evans, Associate Professor Garner Clancey, Dr Lobna Yassine and Dr Sacha Jamieson have been awarded funding to continue working on a project exploring how to improve the way the University of Sydney engages with those with lived experience of the criminal justice system. Collaboration director Associate Professor Garner Clancey was also awarded funding to commence research on careers in criminology and criminal justice.

Associate Professor Jo-An Occhipinti

Associate Professor Jo-An Occhipinti is an epidemiologist and systems scientist at the Sydney School of Public Health, University of Sydney. She is an NHMRC Principal Research Fellow and leads Generation Mental Wealth, a national research program developing new measures and policy insights to improve the mental wellbeing of young people by strengthening social participation, social cohesion, and other systemic foundations of wellbeing. She is also Co-Director of the University of Sydney’s Mental Wealth Initiative, a transdisciplinary initiative spanning public health, economics, business, law, and systems science, and working in partnership with global research, policy, and industry leaders to inform wellbeing-oriented economic and social policy.

Associate Professor Occhipinti recently published a policy brief in collaboration with the Orygen Policy Centre. It shows that the headline unemployment rate conceals a deteriorating structural position for young people that has been building for nearly half a century. Even when young people find work, they cannot get enough hours. The youth-to-adult underemployment ratio has reached the highest levels ever recorded.

Young men experienced a sharp post-COVID spike that has partially corrected. Young women show a steady, accelerating climb, with no sign of peaking. Young women aged 15–24 now have a higher underemployment rate than young men of the same age (16.4% versus 12.6%). Any policy response that treats youth underemployment as a uniform problem will misdiagnose the mechanism in both cases.

This matters beyond the labour market. Work provides identity, purpose, inclusion, and social connection. There is strong evidence that unemployment and underemployment are causal drivers of suicide mortality. And these record gaps are emerging just as generative AI begins to reshape demand for exactly the roles a university education is designed to prepare young people for. The youth mental health emergency and the youth labour market failure are deeply interconnected problems. If we are serious about the future of young Australians, the labour market is where upstream policy attention needs to be directed.

You can read the full policy brief here.

Dr Milica Stilinovic

Dr Milica (Milly) Stilinovic is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate working on the ARC-funded project Governing Immersive Technologies, led by Dr Joanne Gray, Dr Ben Egliston, and Professor Marcus Carter.

Her doctoral research analysed how far-right and white supremacist groups mobilise and recruit online, establishing the foundation for her ongoing work on platform power, technological harm, and digital extremism. She has since extended her scholarship to artificial intelligence, coining the concept of the “underspheres” to describe decentralised AI communities whose emergent and unregulated practices challenge existing governance frameworks.

Prior to academia, she worked in journalism and narrative strategy, with reporting published in TIME, Forbes, BBC, Nine News, and Amnesty International. This background informs her commitment to research that is publicly engaged, policy-relevant, and accessible beyond the academy.

Dr Stilinovic has been featured in recent media coverage on digital harm. She joined Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens on ABC’s The Minefield podcast to discuss smart glasses and the gap between technological development and law reform. You can listen to the episode here, and read Dr Stilinovic’s accompanying opinion piece here.

Many PhD theses developed at the University of Sydney over the years may be of interest to those working in criminal justice. We are going to highlight some of these freely available theses in this and upcoming newsletters. 

Inattentional blindness in eyewitnesses to crime: Consequences for eyewitness safety, memory and credibility - Hayley Cullen (2020)

When attention is focused elsewhere, individuals may fail to notice unexpected events in plain sight, a phenomenon known as inattentional blindness (IB: Mack & Rock, 1998). In legal settings, eyewitnesses may experience IB and fail to notice entire crimes occurring (Hyman, 2016). The current thesis aimed to assess the impact of IB on eyewitness safety, memory, and credibility. In the first two studies, IB for an assault crime was measured. The presence of a weapon was manipulated (Study 1), and memory for the crime was assessed (Study 1 & Study 2). The results showed that weapon presence did not impact rates of IB. Study 1 found that IB impacted the quantity, but not quality, of witness memory. However, when manipulating the recall instructions in Study 2, IB negatively affected both the quantity and quality of memory. Given that witnesses who experience IB may testify in court, subsequent studies were conducted to explore perceptions of eyewitness IB. In Study 3, lawyers, psychology students, and members of the public were surveyed regarding their beliefs about IB in legal scenarios. All populations overestimated visual detection across most legal scenarios. In Studies 4 and 5, mock-jurors read a trial containing two key witnesses: one who saw the crime, and one who experienced IB. Both studies showed that the witness who experienced IB was perceived as less credible than the witness who saw the crime. In Study 5, several factors (witness role, witness familiarity with defendant, and expert testimony) did not influence the negative perceptions of IB. Therefore, Studies 6 and 7 aimed to determine whether demonstrating IB and providing expert testimony on IB would improve perceptions of witness IB. Neither demonstrating IB nor expert testimony rectified the negative perceptions of witness IB. The findings within this thesis indicate that IB among eyewitnesses presents a unique challenge in criminal settings.

Hayley Cullen’s thesis can be accessed for free here. 

'When the stars align’: decision-making in the NSW juvenile justice system 1990-2005 - Elaine Fishwick (2014)

This thesis examines decision-making in the New South Wales juvenile justice system. It investigates what factors and which people influenced the setting of policy agendas and the choice of policy options during the period 1990 – 2005. Using data from in-depth interviews with key policy actors and from documentary analysis, it aims to identify the dynamic interplay of historical, institutional, legal, professional, pragmatic and political factors within wider economic, social and public policy contexts to explore how and why juvenile justice policy developed in the way that it did during this period. The time frame for the study begins with the publication of the report Kids In Justice: A Blueprint for the Nineties by the NSW Youth Justice Coalition, and continues to 2005, a year marked by the publication of the NSW Law Reform Commission’s Report on Young Offenders, public street disturbances in suburbs of Sydney and the resignation of the Labor Premier the Hon. Bob Carr on August 6th. This time frame is significant as it epitomizes what appears to be a gradual, although not complete shift in approaches to juvenile justice policy: from the promise of potentially progressive diversionary strategies envisaged in the Kids in Justice Report to an approach which increasingly appeared to be concerned with control and punishment and with appeasing media demands. The thesis is a trans disciplinary study. It draws on insights from law, policy studies, media studies and criminology, and pulls them together to develop a unique analytical approach to juvenile justice. It adopts a blended theoretical perspective by combining key elements of critical social sciences with complexity theory together, in an approach, which has been termed by Byrne (1998, 2011) as ‘complex realism’ and by Carroll (2009) as ‘critical complexity’. The thesis concludes that decision takes place within an historically contingent context of what can be termed ‘negotiated order’. There are elements of certainty in the decision-making process but it is also characterised by serendipity and change. Policy processes are dynamic and change can be at times minimal and incremental and at other times monumental. It is argued that people and their ambitions, emotions, skills and experiences are absolutely fundamental to any understanding of policy and this thesis emphasises their role in decision-making. It is anticipated that the insights gathered from looking at this moment in the history of juvenile justice and the influences on decision-making will not only contribute to a more detailed understanding of the policy process in criminology and related disciplines, but might also provide those engaged in advocacy and reform with some tools for even more effective action.

Elaine Fishwick’s thesis can be accessed for free here. 

Here we highlight some free professional development opportunities and training resources. We hope these resources will assist those working with people at risk of engaging in criminal activity. 

Comorbidity Guidelines Online Training Program

Created by the University of Sydney’s Matilda Centre, this online training program has been developed to assist alcohol and other drug (AOD) practitioners work with clients with co-occurring mental health conditions.

The program consists of 12 online self-paced modules and takes around 12 hours to complete. Once all modules and quizzes have been successfully completed, a completion certificate will be available to download. The program is free for anyone. You can find out more and register here. 

Cracks in the Ice Online Training 

Created by the University of Sydney’s Matilda Centre, this page collates training modules for health workers to enhance existing skills and knowledge to effectively assist clients who use methamphetamine, as well as their family, friends and colleagues.

A variety of topics are covered and all training programs are free. You can find out more here.

19th Reintegration Puzzle Conference

Presented by the Justice Reform Initiative, Reintegration Puzzle Conference has become the largest and most pivotal annual event for people with lived expertise of the justice system, community and public sector practitioners, First Nations leaders, researchers, and advocates in a unique gathering that focuses on sharing expertise and building a collective response to the systemic failures of imprisonment and re-entry.

Keynote speakers include: 

Major ‘Moogy’ Sumner AM (Ngarrindjeri/Kaurna Elder)

Karyn McCluskey (Chief Executive of Community Justice Scotland)

Matelina M. Aulava (Youth Facility Administrator for the Office of Youth Services at the Kawailoa, Youth & Family Wellness Center, Hawaii)

David McGuire (Chief Executive of Diagrama Foundation (UK))

Vincent Schiraldi (Founder and Executive Director of the Centre on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (San Francisco) and the Justice Policy Institute (Washington))

Shona Reid (South Australia’s Guardian for Children and Young People)

Uncle Frank Wangutya Wanganeen (Kaurna / Narungga Elder)

Dates: 24-25 June 2026
Location: Hilton Adelaide, Adelaide, SA.

You can register for the conference here.

2026 Applied Research in Crime and Justice Conference 

Griffith Criminology Institute and NSW BOCSAR are hosting the 2026 Applied Research in Crime and Justice Conference (ARCJC), showcasing practical, policy-relevant research that bridges evidence to real-world criminal justice practice.

Join policymakers, academics, and stakeholders on 21-22 July 2026 at the Brisbane Convention & Exhibition Centre for the theme Transforming Criminal Justice Systems: Bridging Research & Evidence-based Practice. Explore subthemes like: Evidence-based Policing, Indigenous Justice, Technology & Crime, Youth Justice and more.

Invited keynote speakers include: 

Professor Tom R. Tyler (Yale) 

Professor Susan Dennison (Transforming Corrections Centre)

Professor Kyllie Cripps (Monash Indigenous Studies)

Professor Stephane Shepherd (Deakin Forensic Psychology)

Professor Tamara Walsh (UQ Pro Bono Centre)

Dates: 21-22 July 2026

Location: Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre 

You can find out more about the conference here.

6th Australasian Youth Justice Conference 

The Australasian Youth Justice Administrators (AYJA) invite you to participate in the 6th Australasian Youth Justice conference.

Equitable and inclusive outcomes are achieved through understanding and responding to the unique strengths, challenges, and aspirations of diverse communities. This year’s theme recognises place-based, community-driven approaches and solutions to address overrepresentation and diversity in metropolitan, regional, and remote contexts that genuinely reflect lived experiences. This Conference will provide a platform to share what better outcomes look like for young people in the youth justice system, their families/whānau and communities wherever they are and whoever they may be.  

Two main sub-themes of this conference will be leading practice through culture and connection and weaving the voices of young people into evidence-informed practice.

Dates: 30th September - 2nd October 2026
Location: Murrundi - Murray River, SA.

You can register for the conference here.

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