Page 3431 - Week 11 - Thursday, 11 November 2021
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In 2018-19, the ACT Government provided additional funding of $700,800 over four years to four women’s support services, including Toora, to better respond directly to the needs of women and children impacted by domestic and family violence.
Projects are underway to understand what children and young people themselves say they need, and to ensure appropriate integrated mental health and trauma supports.
Justice—justice reinvestment program
(Question No 412)
Mrs Kikkert asked the Attorney-General, upon notice, on 6 August 2021:
Can the Attorney-General provide a breakdown of each individual ongoing and trial justice reinvestment program and the funding provided to them since their inception.
Mr Rattenbury: The answer to the member’s question is as follows:
The ACT Government committed to developing a Justice Reinvestment strategy in 2014 to 2018.
The strategy developed involved using ‘a smarter, more cost-effective approach to improving criminal justice outcomes by reducing crime and diverting offenders, and those at risk of becoming offenders, from the criminal justice system’. The areas of focus identified were: improving justice accommodation options; responding to the impacts of drug and alcohol dependence; early support for people living with a mental illness or disability; pathways for safe and sustainable bail; community building capabilities and reducing the overrepresentation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the justice system.
By 2018, trial justice reinvestment programs and evaluations had commenced including in the areas of family support, bail support, housing support, restorative justice and specialist courts (for example, focussed on drug related offending or indigenous offenders). A number of the trial programs became established as ongoing programs, while others evolved.
The ACT Government’s justice reinvestment approach has underpinned both its Building Communities not Prisons initiative (Building Communities Not Prisons | Justice and Community Safety Directorate (act.gov.au)) and its Reducing Recidivism plan (Reducing Recidivism | Justice and Community Safety Directorate (act.gov.au)).
Some of programs trialled as the Justice Reinvestment Strategy was developed form part of the Building Communities Not Prisons initiative announced in 2018, (in particular, the Ngurrambai Bail Support Program and Yarrabi Barmirr). Similarly, some of the programs which form part of the Building Communities Not Prisons initiative and other established justice reinvestment programs, form part of the Reducing Recidivism Plan announced in 2020 (in particular the Ngurrambai Bail Support Program, Warrumbul Court, Yarrabi Bammir, the Justice Housing Program, the Drug and Alcohol Court, Strong Connected Neighbourhoods and Restorative Justice Conferencing).
While not all contemporaneously and explicitly identified as ‘justice reinvestment’ programs, key justice programs / initiatives which reflect the ACT Government’s justice reinvestment approach include:
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