No need for the justice reinvestment label to fight crime

There is no doubt we need strategies to tackle the high Indigenous crime rate but crime prevention initiatives shouldn’t be reliant on funding being diverted from the prison system — as the trial of ‘justice reinvestment’ in the New South Wales town of Bourke suggested in this week’s edition of ABC’s Four Corners.

While many of the initiatives implemented in Bourke under the umbrella of justice reinvestment make good practical sense you don’t need the banner of justice reinvestment to implement them. For instance, the program to teach young people to drive and get their licence, and the way police and Aboriginal leaders are now working together to reduce domestic violence in the town.

Justice reinvestment’s emphasis on better data collection and monitoring of programs is worthwhile, but government should already be doing this as a matter of course. We should not need to divert money from prisons to collect data and monitor what is happening to taxpayer’s money.

Labelling all these initiatives ‘justice reinvestment’ and having a time limit of three years is setting the town up for failure and disappointment. So much hype surrounds justice reinvestment that when it does not result in the closure of a prison, people will say it hasn’t worked — and it’s likely all the programs and initiatives it has funded will evaporate.

Tom Calma was right when he said “the time has come for a smarter approach”, but he was wrong when he called for a roll out of justice reinvestment initiatives across Australia.

You don’t need an expensive justice reinvestment pilot to implement change.

The narrow focus on keeping people out of prison is also wrong. What is needed is a complete overhaul of the whole service delivery system to Indigenous communities.

For too long governments have convinced themselves they are contributing to better Indigenous outcomes simply because they are spending money on Indigenous programs. But the government has acted as permissively as the parents of Bourke who let their children roam the streets at night.

Improvements will only occur when organisations are made to formally account for how they have spent program funding and provide credible evidence on the program’s effectiveness.