Intensive case management

Intensive case management (ICM) is a targeted intervention program developed to reduce chronic juvenile offending.

ICM is about holding young people accountable for their anti-social behaviour while tackling the complex factors that can contribute to a path of reoffending.

Focusing on 10 to 17-year-olds, the program aims to enhance family and kinship connections, change offending behaviour, and promote engagement in educational and training initiatives through integrating a range of individual interventions and supports.

What does ICM involve

ICM works intensively with high and very high-risk young people and their families or carers to address the underlying issues that contribute to serious repeat offending. This is achieved by:

  • enhancing family functioning and wellbeing
  • addressing the issues that contribute to offending behaviour
  • tackling disengagement from school
  • reducing substance misuse
  • repairing the harms of childhood trauma and behavioural disorders
  • promoting pro-social community engagement
  • enhancing accommodation stability and reducing out of home placements.

The program is delivered on an individual basis over a 6 to 12-month period. Each young person can have up to 36 hours of service per week, depending on their level of risk and individual situation.

A holistic approach to ICM

The program aims to help young people build resilience, develop pro-social skills, and make positive choices to reduce their involvement in the criminal justice system and improve their overall wellbeing.

ICM coordinates a range of supports and services to help young people overcome the factors that contribute to their offending, support them to achieve their pro-social goals and reduce reoffending.

  • Each young person in the program is assigned a dedicated intensive case manager who works closely with them and their family to develop a tailored plan to address their specific needs. By working with a smaller number of young people, intensive case managers can dedicate more time to address the underlying issues that contribute to offending. The case manager provides ongoing support, coordination, and advocacy to ensure that the young person and family has access to appropriate services and interventions. A case manager also actively works with parents and carers to improve family relationships and wellbeing for safe and supportive family households.

    The program is delivered through intensive weekly contact sessions:

    • Every young person is paired with a trained ICM support worker to provide mentoring, support and assistance for up to 2 sessions per week.
    • Family sessions occur up to twice per week and are based on the Collaborative Family Work and Strengthening Families Protective Factors framework.
    • A minimum of 2 sessions per week occur with ICM case managers who utilise motivational interviewing and other cognitive behavioural techniques to provide individual therapeutic intervention that targets the offence cognitions with an emphasis on skill building and enhancing capacity.

  • ICM may connect young people and their families to non-government agencies to provide counselling and therapeutic support to address the underlying factors contributing to the young person's offending behaviour, such as mental health issues, trauma, or substance abuse. This can involve individual counselling, family therapy, group therapy, or other interventions.

  • ICM is based on the understanding that a young person has a better chance of not reoffending if they can draw on support from a functional family environment.

    Through weekly family sessions, the program works to:

    • support families to identify and achieve their goals
    • build positive familial relationships, trust, confidence, and leadership
    • build capacity and parental resilience to enhance support for their children
    • develop positive relationships with government and non-government agencies
    • increase family strengths, enhance child development and reduce the likelihood of family conflict.

  • As a result of being exposed to similar risk factors, siblings are often also involved with the court system, Youth Justice, or at risk of pursuing a similar offending trajectory. ICM enables positive outcomes for the young person and improved family functioning to better support the siblings in the form of early intervention.

  • The program may assist young people in accessing education, training, and employment opportunities to improve their long-term prospects and reduce their risk of reoffending. This can include support with school attendance, vocational training, job readiness skills and job placement assistance. ICM can also support parents to achieve their employment and vocational goals.

  • The program may connect young people and their families to other relevant support services, such as housing support, health services, drug and alcohol services, and legal support, to address their broader needs and reduce their risk of reoffending.

Cultural connectedness

ICM values cultural connectedness as a strong protective factor for young people and families. ICM partners with services that are culturally responsive, respectful, accessible and promote empowerment and self-determination, valuing the capacity and capabilities of family and community to know how to best respond to the needs of their young people.

Rehabilitation and repairing relationships

ICM is a relationship-centred model. The idea behind it is that young people with higher levels of offending require more intensive, family-focused and therapeutic approaches to support young people to change their behaviour.

ICM's framework is inspired by evidenced based practice approaches, including:

  • Multisystemic Therapy (MST)
    An intensive family and community-based program that combines aspects of cognitive, behavioural, and family therapies.
  • Good Lives Model (GLM)
    A strengths-based rehabilitation framework with the aim to have clients live a 'good' and meaningful life. It is premised on human action or behaviour being driven by attempts to achieve primary life goods across 11 key life domains.
  • Collaborative Family Work (CFW)
    Specifically developed for families involved in criminal justice and child protection systems. It prioritises building healthy family relationships, enhancing problem solving skills, building capacity to achieve goals and reducing behaviours of concern.
  • Strengthening Families Protective Factors (SFPF) Framework
    A framework that supports families to increase their strengths and enhance child development by building on key protective factors to support children to thrive and mitigate risk.
  • The Hub concept of case management
    A collaborative approach to case management in both the planning and delivery of interventions. It fosters positive support networks (protective factors) and disrupts the cycle of helplessness. Our multi-agency collaboration means we can connect young people and their families with various organisations and services providers throughout the state for meaningful support and to assist young people and their families to achieve their goals.

Benefits of ICM

ICM is proven to effectively reduce youth crime, but there are also many multi-layered benefits to the program.

  • A recent evaluation showed that the ICM program is more effective at reducing reoffending than any other alternative Youth Justice support options.

    From 6 months pre-program to 6 months post-program, ICM saw an average 51% reduction in the frequency of offending. The program also saw a 72% in the proportion of 'crimes against the person' which includes common assault, breaking and entering, theft and armed robbery.

    These offending outcomes were consistent across cohorts including age, gender, and First Nations status. This indicates that ICM can have a sustained positive impact on a young person's frequency and severity of offending and can also present an opportunity to reduce First Nations overrepresentation within youth justice.

  • The program helps young people and their families navigate government systems and services. Through an intensive and integrated support model, ICM enables case workers to strategically coordinate services to interact with young people and their families when appropriate.

  • Reducing the frequency and severity of offending behaviours is key for the ICM program. Studies show that when you work with the whole family, instead of just focusing on the young person, it increases positive behaviour and reduces offending. It also provides an opportunity for early intervention with siblings and can prevent siblings from getting into trouble and keep them away from the youth justice system.

  • The ICM program creates improvements in important protective factors such as family circumstances, education and employment. Results of the recent independent evaluation indicate that the improved reoffending outcomes through the ICM program y may be primarily achieved through changing risk factors such as family circumstances, education and employment into protective factors.

Read more about the benefits and ICM outcomes in the 2023 independent evaluation of the program.

Eligibility and accessing ICM

A young person may be eligible for the ICM program if they:

  • are aged 10 to 17 years old
  • have been assessed as a high or very high risk of reoffending.

ICM case managers conduct assessments of past and current offending behaviour to develop targeted intervention plans that address the key factors contributing to a young person's recidivism. This also involves an analysis of protective factors and the potential to mitigate risk.

Locations

ICM operates in multiple Youth Justice Service Centres across Queensland, including:

  • Brisbane North
  • Brisbane South
  • Cairns
  • Caboolture
  • Gold Coast
  • Hervey Bay
  • Ipswich
  • Logan
  • Mount Isa
  • Redcliffe
  • Rockhampton
  • Tablelands and Cassowary Coast
  • Toowoomba
  • Townsville North
  • Townsville South
  • Western Districts.

Contact us

For further information about the ICM program, contact: