Description

For many years high Indigenous incarceration rates in Australia have called for numerous ?solutions?, yet the percentage of Aboriginal people in custody has continued to rise, nearly doubling from 14% of the prison population in 1991 to 27% in 2012. The latest ?solution? under investigation is Justice Reinvestment, a school of thought from the United States that proposes redirecting money spent on prisons into programs that address the underlying causes of offending in communities with high levels of incarceration. The Australian Senate is conducting an inquiry into the value of a Justice Reinvestment approach to criminal justice in Australia, with a particular focus on the over-representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia?s prisons. Justice Reinvestment involves: gathering data on offending and the criminal justice system; using the data to create justice maps (areas with the greatest concentration of offenders); and redirecting funds from corrective services to implement programs in ?targeted? locations to reduce offending and evaluating the effectiveness of the programs. While there have been some success stories from overseas, important differences between the criminal justice systems in the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK), and Australia suggest that the application of Justice Reinvestment strategies in Australia may not be appropriate. In the US, three-quarters of offenders are given custodial sentences, whereas only one-fifth of the sentences imposed in Australia are custodial. A key feature of Justice Reinvestment in the US is the devolution of power from state to local authorities. In Australia, criminal justice is already the responsibility of state and territory governments, and is highly unlikely to be handed to local government authorities. Advocates of Justice Reinvestment claim it saves money, but in all the states in the US where Justice Reinvestment strategies have been applied, prisons may have closed but correctional service budgets have continued to grow. In the UK, Justice Reinvestment approaches seem to be accompanied by a parallel rise in the prison population. Justice Reinvestment appears to recycle ?preventive? and community-based programs. The localised, community-focused approach characteristic of Justice Reinvestment is already a feature of Aboriginal Community Justice Groups in NSW, Queensland and the Northern Territory. It is questionable whether the approach will be an improvement on existing community-based justice programs. Since 1991 crime prevention polices have applied ?culturally appropriate? approaches to reduce Indigenous incarceration, introducing initiatives such as Circle Sentencing and the Koori and Murri courts, where Aboriginal offenders are brought before their community elders for sanctioning, but still such initiatives have not addressed the underlying causes of offending. In the fight against Indigenous disadvantage and incarceration, Justice Reinvestment threatens to become a distraction from focusing on the fundamentals such as education and employment that will lead to change. Evidence shows that education and employment play a critical role in the high Indigenous incarceration rate. Improving educational outcomes should not be reliant on the diversion of funds from prison services but a basic right that states and territories should be covering in their education budgets. (Summary, edited)