Prisoner welfare group will close without continued Government assistance

Kirrin McKechnie | 730 Queensland | 18 May 2012

Sister Inside confirms Townsville programme forced to shut down.

Watch the video here

JESSICA van VONDEREN: Last year, the prisoners support service Sisters Inside set up an outreach programme at the Townsville jail, with the help of a 120-thousand dollar grant from the then Bligh Government. Already this year, that service has helped 188 female prisoners break the cycle of crime. But now, the Newman Government has withdrawn the funding. The Communities Minister says Sisters Inside can try to reapply for money under the proper processes. But the group's founder says the cut will be catastrophic for the mainly indigenous prisoners who benefited from the service, and for the wider community. Kirrin McKechnie reports.

RENEE, FORMER PRISONER: I just went straight from the pot to the heroin. I didn't touch anything else. And then that's why I went downhill. I didn't want to rely on anyone, didn't want to rob anyone, so that's why I became a prostitute.

KIRRIN McKECHNIE: It's been a tough, rough road for this 33-year-old mother of two. But she's starting afresh: moving into a new home, and looking forward to what lies ahead for the first time in a long time.

RENEE: Once I got the job and saw what a happy life everyone was leading, I went on a boat for the first time. I remember. And I just had so much fun. And going to the beach and just doing normal things that I'd never done before. And it was wonderful.

KIRRIN McKECHNIE: Renee doesn't want to give her last name, because she's afraid her dark past could catch up with her. Yet despite her fears, she wants to speak out to help the support service that she says saved her life.

RENEE: I cannot think of a better way to give back than by doing this. So, they helped me I'll help them.

KIRRIN McKECHNIE: Renee was on her second of three stretches in jail for drugs and prostitution related crimes when she was contacted by Sisters Inside, a support service for women in prison. It was their constant contact and support that made her determined to get off heroin and get off the game.

RENEE: A nice lady called Jackie, she came up to see me every week, spoke to me every week. And then she picked me up from the jail and we went and got a bond loan and I got a house and I got a job and I've been clean ever since.

KIRRIN McKECHNIE: Renee's story is by no means unique. Every year Sisters Inside helps hundreds of women like her break the cycle of crime and poverty. But now, its Townsville outreach service is under threat, with the Newman Government pulling its $120,000 funding.

DEBBIE KILROY, SISTERS INSIDE: I'll have to travel to Townsville and tell those women that it's over. We can't provide the services anymore and I find that distressing and I'm sorry. Cause I have to say I don't know how I'm going to walk away from the women. My life passion is about walking with and assisting women to move forward and do well and not go back to prison not commit crimes, not use drugs anymore raise their children, be healthy functioning families so they're ok. But I'm going to have to go up there and say sorry we can't do anything anymore.

Prevention the only hope for young offenders, because cure is failing

Gino Vumbaca | SMH | May 02, 2012

In the aftermath of the Kings Cross police shooting of Aboriginal teenagers driving a stolen vehicle, the Herald has published an investigation into juvenile justice and how we deal with children that get into serious trouble.

It's sometimes too easy to look for someone to blame for youth crime - be it parents, government departments or others. What is harder to find are effective solutions, especially when they challenge the prevailing political and media orthodoxy.

Tonight, however, in what may be the start of some long overdue reform in NSW, the Governor, Marie Bashir, will launch a campaign to reduce the staggeringly high rate of young indigenous people in detention centres. It is led by the Aboriginal Legal Service and includes Michael Kirby, Mick Dodson, Bob Debus, Adam Goodes, Mick Gooda, Marcia Ella Duncan, Naomi Mayers, Nick Cowdery and other prominent Australians who want to make ''justice reinvestment'' the new norm.

If the current trajectory continues we are in real danger of losing a generation of young indigenous people. In NSW, they make up more than half of the detention population yet just 2.2 per cent of the general population. An Aboriginal youth facing the court system is 28 times more likely to be placed in juvenile detention than their non-indigenous counterparts. This is a shameful indictment of our current approach, which routinely consigns young Aboriginal people to detention. It cries out for a new approach that includes early intervention, prevention and diversion with incarceration as a last resort only - in short, what is becoming known around the world as ''justice reinvestment''.

Justice reinvestment is not about spending more of our taxes; it is about redirecting the current ineffective investments we are making in the justice system into areas and programs that can provide better, safer and healthier communities. It also reduces the extraordinary costs each time we put a juvenile in a detention centre or an adult in prison.

In NSW, the Auditor-General has revealed that the average annual cost of supervising and caring for juvenile offenders last year was $237,980 a person - a quarter of a million dollars a year for each young person locked up, and what do we get in return? The Australian Institute of Criminology has estimated that more than 30 per cent of adult prisoners were actually first incarcerated within the juvenile detention system. Given there are about 30,000 adult prisoners in the country and fewer than 1,000 juveniles in detention in any given year, that is a lot of juveniles going from detention to adult prison. It is also a system in which just under 60 per cent of NSW prisoners have previously served a sentence. In effect, our juvenile detention centres have become the learning centres for a cycle of offending and imprisonment.

The choices facing NSW today as the jurisdiction with the largest prison and juvenile detainee population are quite stark. We can continue on what is called the tough-on-crime path and replicate what is now known as the American disease. The US is home to 5 per cent of the world's people and 25 per cent of the world's prisoners. The prominent New York-based public health physician Ernie Drucker's recent book describes in epidemiological terms how this prisons ''plague'' has led to more than 2 million people being incarcerated, 800,000 on parole, and more than 4 million on probation. The ancillary effect of this type of justice means millions of children and family members of those incarcerated also come into regular and potentially damaging contact with the justice system.

The US, Russia and China lead the world in imprisonment. They show us the inevitable outcome of such tough policies. Enormous resources are being sucked out of other budget priorities, such as education and health, and they have high re-offending rates as people are churned through a brutal penal system and returned to the community.

NSW has not reached this point but finds itself on a similar path. I am not sure when developing policy based on evidence became synonymous with being soft rather than smart, but I think we should ask the next journalist, commentator or politician who portrays options other than prison as being ''soft'' what their view would be if their family member were facing incarceration. I would bet London to the proverbial brick they would stop at nothing to have them spared. This is because deep down they know, as does anyone who works or has been in prison, that it is an intimidating and violent system, and the last place where we can expect rehabilitation.

In contrast, justice reinvestment is about prevention rather than cure - about creating alternative pathways for young people who may otherwise be destined to lifelong offending, drug and alcohol misuse and suicide. When young people offend, there are likely to be other issues at play that are contributing. Justice reinvestment is our best option to target these causes and factors.

A think tank called Australia 21 recently called for a rethink on drug policy based on a review of the evidence and current approaches. One can only wonder how we can keep ignoring the evidence of our law and order policies. Just as a war on drugs can descend into a war against its citizens, a tough on crime approach can degenerate into a war against its most disadvantaged.

Gino Vumbaca is the executive director of the Australian National Council on Drugs and a member of the Campaign Committee. www.justicereinvestmentnow.net.au

Justice Reinvestment Approach Increases Public Safety, Cuts Millions in Spending

Robert Coombs, Council of State Governments Justice Center | Capitol Ideas | Nov - Dec 2011

Using Data and Expert Assistance, North Carolina and Ohio Enact Bipartisan Legislation

In June, state leaders from across the political spectrum in both North Carolina and Ohio came together in their respective states to enact comprehensive, data-driven legislation using a justice reinvestment approach. Both states received intensive technical assistance from The Council of State Governments Justice Center, in partnership with the Pew Center on the States and the Bureau of Justice Assistance.

The bills in both states will increase public safety and reduce crime by making probation more effective, increasing sentence lengths for certain high-risk property offenders or the most serious and violent offenders, and expanding sentencing options for nonviolent and first-time felony offenders.

Ohio

Ohio’s criminal justice system faced population pressures that outstripped resources. The state’s prisons were 33 percent over capacity and projected to add another 2,800 people by 2015. Nearly half of prison admissions consisted of property and drug offenders who received short sentences followed by no supervision.

Outside the prison walls, Ohio’s probation system—a patchwork of 187 independent agencies—lacked consistent policies and minimum standards. No statewide data existed, making it difficult to know how many were on probation. Research showed some programs were increasing recidivism rates because they used no criteria to filter out participants who would not benefit from the intensive programs.

Over 18 months, a bipartisan, inter-branch working group reviewed exhaustive analyses prepared by the CSG Justice Center, and, drawing on that information, designed a 13-point policy framework to accomplish three core goals:

Require first-time property and drug offenders to serve probation terms and attend treatment;

Establish statewide criteria for community correction programs, prioritizing placement of people who would benefit most from community supervision and treatment; and

Establish statewide standards for probation to ensure consistency from county to county.
Sen. Bill Seitz sponsored the framework introduced as House Bill 86. The Ohio General Assembly passed the legislation with sweeping bipartisan majorities and on June 29, Gov. John Kasich signed the bill into law.

The new law is expected to avert all projected growth in Ohio’s prison population through 2015, helping the state avoid an estimated half-billion dollars in spending. In addition, the new statute eases prison crowding as the population gradually declines to levels last seen in 2007, generating $78 million in savings by 2015.

Moreover, the adoption of statewide risk assessment instruments means community supervision and treatment resources will be consistently targeted toward offenders who need them the most. The state will reinvest $20 million over four years to improve felony probation supervision, providing incentive funding for agencies that reduce recidivism.

North Carolina

With an increasing number of probation revocations and various sentence enhancements, North Carolina’s prison population was projected to grow 10 percent by 2020. Detailed analyses conducted by the CSG Justice Center showed that only 15 percent of people leaving prison received supervision and many high-risk offenders returned to the community unwatched. Furthermore, community-based treatment programs were poorly targeted, minimizing their impact on public safety.

With guidance from an inter-branch working group established by the governor and state leaders, CSG Justice Center staff developed policy options that included a new habitual breaking and entering offense and required post-release supervision for everyone convicted of a felony. One recommendation was that the state prioritize supervision resources for high-risk individuals and empower probation officers to implement swift and certain sanctions. By focusing existing treatment resources on people who would benefit the most from them, the law concentrated on reducing recidivism.

Rep. W. David Guice introduced the policies as House Bill 642, The Justice Reinvestment Act, which passed with near unanimous bipartisan support and was signed by Gov. Bev Perdue on June 23.
Since then, the state has shuttered two prisons and expects to save more than 3,600 beds by the 2017 fiscal year. The reduction in the population translates into more than $560 million saved over six years, including $267 million in avoided costs and $293 million in savings from reduced costs. These savings position the state to reinvest more than $4 million annually to expand community-based treatment programs for people on supervision.

Looking Ahead

The CSG Justice Center continues to work with Oklahoma and Hawaii as Justice Reinvestment states. Like North Carolina, many offenders in Oklahoma go without supervision and the prison population seems poised to climb. Hawaii has set the goal of managing its prison population in order to move all of the state’s offenders out of mainland prisons and back to in-state facilities.

The CSG Justice Center’s Justice Reinvestment Initiative is a partnership with the Public Safety Performance Project of the Pew Center on the States and the Bureau of Justice Assistance, U.S. Department of Justice. The CSG Justice Center has provided data-driven analyses and policy options to state leaders in 14 states.

Repeat felons to receive less prison time

Alex Freedman | Eyewitness 9 News, Greenville North Carolina | November 30, 2011 

Oddly, Texas can teach the UK a thing or two on criminal justice

Ian Birrell | The Guardian | 20 November 2011 

Conservative Texas prides itself on being tough, but it has learned that locking people up is a costly failure


The entrance to a block in Wandsworth prison, one of the largest in the UK. Photograph: Antonio Olmos

Hang 'em high Texas is not the first place you might look for lessons in criminal justice. The lone star state prides itself on its toughness, with more executions and fewer bleeding hearts than elsewhere in the US. Texas locks up more miscreants than anywhere else in the world. But it is the unlikely centre of a revolution in prison reform sweeping the US, overthrowing decades of failed polices and sterile debate driven by politicians scared of being seen as soft. The state has cut crime, costs and the numbers in jail to such an extent it has just shut a high-security prison for the first time in history.

What makes this prison revolt even more unexpected is that it is led by some of the most conservative figures in politics. They have decided – correctly – that an expensive prison system repeatedly locking up the same people is a sign of failure. As a result, they have endorsed policies traditionally seen as liberal to keep people out of jail.

The right in Britain should take note as our prison population hits record highs. Just as in this country, politicians in Texas were desperate to be seen as being tough on crime. There was reckless rhetoric and endless headline-grabbing legislation, including the ludicrous three-strikes law that led to life sentences for a third offence – even when that was stealing a slice of pizza.

Inevitably, prison populations and spending soared. The costs of incarceration rose fourfold in two decades. America now accounts for a quarter of all prisoners on the planet – and two-thirds of new inmates are recidivists.

Then Texas decided enough was enough. Four years ago, it was told to spend another $2bn on 17,332 new prison places. Instead, the state opted to invest in halfway houses to help those leaving prison and schemes to aid addicted and mentally ill offenders. Since then, taxpayers have saved a billion dollars, violent crime has fallen to its lowest level for three decades, and the right has seen the light on criminal justice. More than a dozen states have made similar moves, with some of the most doughty bastions of conservatism softening sentencing policies and shifting emphasis to treatment, training, early release and community-based punishments. A campaign called Right On Crime has been launched to promote the idea, supported by conservative standard-bearers such as Jeb Bush and Newt Gingrich.

The driving force was financial. But it makes perfect sense for the right. As the group's website says, turning law-breakers into law-abiding citizens should be a conservative priority because it advances public safety and the rule of law. The cause unites libertarians wanting to scale back the state, fiscal conservatives seeking to reduce spending, social conservatives concerned by family breakdown, and a religious right that believes in redemption.

Is it too much to hope for a similar outbreak of common sense in Britain? Among the biggest disappointments of the Blair and Brown governments was their pandering to the right on crime, with 28 criminal justice bills. The coalition has tried to adopt a more evidence-based approach, with an emphasis on rehabilitation and payment by results, but is wobbling in the face of fury on the backbenches and in the media.

Such is the hysteria that the sensible abandonment of cruel indeterminate sentencing had to be smuggled out last month under cover of tougher sentences for knife crimes. There was relief in Downing Street at the strategy's success – but they are still kicking around a keynote speech on crime by the prime minister already postponed for a year.

It is clear from several countries, notably Finland, that imprisonment has no impact on crime rates. Putting fewer people in prison means more money can be spent on more effective community-based punishments, which are often tougher than lying around stoned all day in prison. In the Netherlands this approach has been so successful prisons built in expectation of rising crime are being rented to Belgium.

Locking people up and throwing away the key is a costly failure. The alternatives are smart, not soft.

Jailing fathers increases problems in Indigenous communities

Richard Fletcher | The Conversation | 13 October 2011

There are hopeful signs from a number of sources that the “get tough on crime” approach is working, with politicians promising the era of more prisons and longer sentences has had its day. Movements such as Justice Reinvestment – redirecting money earmarked for prisons to address disadvantage in communities…

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

Richard Fletcher receives funding from government and non government organizations. His research team developed the Brothers Inside program.



Measures are needed to reduce the number of fathers going into jail as well as the number not coming back. Casey Serin

There are hopeful signs from a number of sources that the “get tough on crime” approach is working, with politicians promising the era of more prisons and longer sentences has had its day.

Movements such as Justice Reinvestment – redirecting money earmarked for prisons to address disadvantage in communities prisoners come from – is one manifestation of a more rational and humane approach to crime.

For Aboriginal communities, where imprisonment has reached epidemic proportions, this shift is long overdue.

And the research community has a responsibility to make the costs more transparent, not just to the taxpayer but to Aboriginal communities, prisoners and prisoner families as well.

Deaths remove fathers completely

We were reminded of one aspect of these costs when marking 20 years since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

In the time since that report highlighted the unacceptable, and often brutal, deaths of Aboriginal men in custody, 269 more Indigenous men have died in similar circumstances.

Most of the Aboriginal men who die in custody are fathers, as are most of those who remain in custody. And in Indigenous communities, both fathers and men who are not fathers have important roles to play children’s growth and well-being.

So, when Aboriginal men are removed from the community, the social and family relationships that might steer young people away from crime break down and the nurturing these men might provide is lost.

Women behaving badly

The Economist | 29 October 2010 

Calls to reform the sentencing of women are growing louder

AFTER a bad beginning, Fiona Flaherty has done well. Convicted of assaulting her partner in 2005, she was sent to Downview, a women’s prison in Surrey. There she studied for a BTEC in digital media, organised by a not-for-profit outfit, Media for Development (MfD), and helped run Britain’s first prison-based television station. In 2006 she was allowed out each day to work at MfD’s Inside Job Productions, which makes films. Released in 2007, Ms Flaherty found a job in the private sector, though her heart was in her mouth when she told her prospective boss, as she was legally bound to, that she had done time. Today, after having two daughters, she works for her husband as a software tester.

Ms Flaherty was lucky. For all the efforts of groups such as MfD, not to mention those of prison and probation staff, just 13% of women found employment on their release from prison in 2009. And that is only one of the problems they face. A third will have lost their homes; most will have been separated from children and may struggle to regain custody; many are still dealing with the drug habit or mental-health problems that about three-quarters went into clink with, or picked up inside. Women account for 5% of people in prison, but for 43% of the self-harming that happens behind bars.

Juliet Lyon of the Prison Reform Trust, a campaigning charity, scathingly points out that although at least six big inquiries over the past decade have made a strong case for reducing the imprisonment of women and finding alternatives to custody, the basic situation hasn’t changed. It is not that all the 4,200 women in English and Welsh prisons are angels or victims. But as a group women are different from the 95% of the prison population that penal policy is designed to hold securely.

Three-quarters of women are sentenced for non-violent offences (for men, the figure is lower); a big chunk are inside on remand, of whom most do not go on to receive a custodial sentence; perhaps three-quarters have been subjected to sexual or domestic violence. Most importantly, 60% of women in prison have children, only 5% of whom are able to stay in their homes when their mothers are put away.

There have been some improvements since an influential government-sponsored report in 2007. One is the growth of women’s community centres, part-funded (until next year at least) by central government, which offer sentencing alternatives, access to drug treatment and rehabilitation courses and try to divert women at risk of offending. But the number of women in prison has not dropped.

That could be set to change now, thanks in part to a sharper focus on the finances of locking people up. It costs over £55,000 a year to incarcerate a woman. As two-thirds of them are serving sentences of six months or less—too short a time to tackle addictions or mental-health problems—and two-thirds of these short-stayers will be reconvicted within a year, it seems money ill spent when intensive community sentences can be had for £10,000-15,000. New assessments of women’s centres suggest that many of them work. For example only 3% of women referred to the Anawim centre in Birmingham reoffend; only 7% breach their community sentences.

For some, the government’s new criminal-justice bill, to be debated by MPs from October 31st, offers a chance for reform. Jenny Chapman, Labour’s shadow minister for prisons, intends to introduce an amendment requiring the government to appoint someone to champion women in the criminal-justice system, and to report annually to Parliament. Others of her 2010 parliamentary intake who are interested in the matter include Claire Perry, a fast-rising Conservative MP, and Caroline Lucas, Parliament’s sole elected Green.

For both Ms Chapman and Ms Perry, payment by results (PBR) may be the key to success. The government has embraced PBR as a way to cut costs while improving outcomes: two such programmes, which reward private and third-sector outfits for reducing male reoffending rates, are running at Peterborough and Doncaster prisons. The justice ministry is interested in PBR schemes for women too, it says; some reformers would like to see them designed to encourage non-custodial sentences.

Wider pressure for some sort of change is growing. On October 18th the National Council of Women called on members to lobby their MPs. On October 25th the Howard League, a charity that advocates penal reform, launched an inquiry into how to keep vulnerable girls on the straight and narrow. With more immediate practical effect, perhaps, Pret a Manger, a fast-food chain, is now giving women offenders apprenticeships that lead to fully paid employment.

Breaking the prison cycle

Mike Steketee | The Australian | 15 October 2011

IN Canberra, a hung parliament has given a Labor Party too scared to take action on climate change before the last election the courage of its convictions.

In NSW, a very different parliament in which the government has a lopsided majority may have a similar effect on law and order policy. An opposition as weakened as that in NSW may not be ideal for democracy but it does allow the government to focus more on policy than populism. And in no area has the auction for votes been more unseemly or come at a greater cost to sensible policy.

As NSW shadow attorney-general, Greg Smith called a halt to the law and order auction. While strongly conservative, he saw during his previous life as a crown prosecutor the failings of the lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key approach - namely that, despite costing a packet, it does little to reduce crime and in some circumstances increases it. One pointer to that is the 43 per cent of prisoners who are back in jail within two years in NSW, compared with 34 per cent in Victoria, where there has been less emphasis on the punitive approach and there have been more resources for rehabilitation and other services for prisoners before and after they are released.

Now he is Attorney-General, Smith is saying much the same things and is starting to act on them. In parliament in May he claimed the previous government regarded the prison population reaching 10,000 as a badge of honour. "I thought it was a disgrace," he said. "This government does not believe success on law and order issues can alone be judged by how many people are locked up. We believe in policies that break the cycle of re-offending. Every prisoner should have an opportunity for rehabilitation and that is in the interests of the whole community."

Smith has commissioned a review of the bail act, particularly because of concern that too many juveniles are remanded in custody and are introduced to what he calls "the university of crime". He has asked the NSW Law Reform Commission to look at sentencing legislation to, among other things, give courts greater discretion. He has announced extra funding for education programs in prison, drug and alcohol rehabilitation services and a second drug court with detoxification facilities, drug testing and treatment.

It is early days and it remains to be seen where these measures lead and whether the O'Farrell government succumbs to a "soft on crime" campaign. Nor is the law and order traffic all one way: the government has legislated for mandatory life sentences for killing police officers.

But this is an issue which has come to defy political pigeon-holing. Bob Carr in NSW took the same attitude as Tony Blair in Britain: that a populist, punitive approach to law and order would protect his political flanks from right-wing attack. Pity about the merits of the policy. Now the coalition government in Britain is changing tack, as has the O'Farrell government. Yet its Liberal-National counterpart in Victoria is headed at least partly in the opposite direction, with moves for mandatory minimum sentences for some juvenile offences, despite the evidence of Victoria's superior performance with its emphasis on alternatives to prison.

The change in thinking was perhaps best captured by another conservative politician, New Zealand's deputy prime minister Bill English, who in May described prisons as "a fiscal and moral failure". No Kiwi, he confidently asserted, wanted to see more large-scale prison building.

Modern prescription for mental illness: go directly to jail

Richard Ackland | SMH | July 29, 2011

"Most are ill people locked in a system that can't provide proper treatment."

A comfortably-off, middle-class woman from a nice suburb suddenly finds herself at the Silverwater metropolitan remand and reception centre. She's been charged with a serious driving offence and is awaiting trial.

The reception centre is a madhouse. It's so crowded people are swinging off the rafters. There are three or four people to a small cell. Our middle-class inmate shares with two others.

There's an Aboriginal woman clearly suffering a dreadful mental trauma, who spends the entire night screaming and bashing her head against the wall. There is blood everywhere.

The lady on the driving charge repeatedly calls the guard for something to be done, only to be told when someone in authority finally gets around to sticking their head in (twice in 12 hours), ''don't worry about it''.

The guards would have seen this sort of scene innumerable times. Someone might die, but the resources can't cope and the system is choked with mentally ill prisoners.

A group of us who attended the most recent forum of the Crime and Justice Reform Committee heard this story from Kat Armstrong, an articulate former prisoner who nowadays works for the Women in Prison Advocacy Network.

Former District Court judge Chris Geraghty, who chaired the lunchtime session of the CJRC, said he quite frequently had to sentence mentally damaged people to jail who said their heads were filled with voices. Sending these people to prison is unlikely to improve their capacity to function. It also compounds the difficulties of daily life for other prisoners and prison officers.

Call for radical intervention on juvenile justice

Sarah Dingle | ABC Online | 25 May 2011

The head of the St Vincent de Paul Society in New South Wales says it must be recognised that juvenile justice in Australia is an Aboriginal problem and that it needs to be dealt with accordingly.

He was one of the participants at a forum in Sydney last night which heard each young Australian offender costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to keep in detention, and that it is far cheaper to deal with them in the community.

A national report on young people in detention soon to be released calls on the Federal Government to adopt a radical preventative approach. St Vincent de Paul spokesman Graham West told the forum juvenile offenders needed more radical intervention than their adult counterparts.

"About half the population in juvenile justice is Aboriginal. This is an Aboriginal issue. The other issue that pops up immediately [is that] around 35 per cent have an IQ below 79," he said.

Mr West says it is time for a national rethink. Instead of dealing with the crime, he says, treat the symptoms.

"Justice reinvestment is about looking at what's causing people to end up there in the first place," he said.

"So rather than just we have a crime, we have people held responsible for it, and it goes back out, what's leading people in?

"We know Aboriginal communities are well and truly over represented around the nation and in knowing what communities they come from because we have that information, we can design interventions in those areas."

He says it is hard to define justice reinvestment, as every area is different. One successful pilot study in Newcastle reduced reoffending to a minimum. It involved an intensive supervision program for young offenders, where a worker was available 24 hours a day, could come around to their house and teach skills to their family. Mr West says programs which are family focused deliver some of the best returns.

"It's a whole approach premised on the fact that if we invest that money now, we don't have to invest $200,000 per year to keep someone in custody," he said.

"We can reduce those figures and that's where the reinvestment comes in."

Peter Murphy, one of the authors of an upcoming national report on young offenders and juvenile detention, warns justice reinvestment is a tough political commitment because at least at the start, it requires extra money.

"We need to continue with the current spend that we have around detention and community type programs, but concurrent with that, we actually need to start investing in communities where there is high rates of criminal behaviour," he said.

Mr Murphy says from a purely economical point of view, with an ageing population and a skills shortage, each Australian child is even more valuable than before.

"The Prime Minister has indicated we need every child to be succeeding in education and then joining the workforce, so we can't afford not to do it," he said.

Mr Murphy says political parties need to be in for the long haul. He estimates justice reinvestment will take about 10 years to deliver results.