Page 1317 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 3 April 2019
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That is something that I am pleased to have been working on with my justice and corrections portfolio responsibilities. I recently announced the government’s justice reinvestment program, building communities not prisons. In the context of crime rates in Canberra, we know that crime rates have been decreasing, while our prison population has been increasing. In 2016–17 there were 2,762 offenders proceeded against by police in the ACT, a decrease of four per cent, or 102 offenders, since 2015-16. However, during this time our prison population has also gone up.
The purpose of the building communities not prisons program is to make our community safer. It recognises that people who are in prison will ultimately come back out into our community—some sooner rather than later, and others after a much longer period of time. The government wants to use some of the funds from the criminal justice system that might otherwise be used to expand the highly secure capacity at the AMC to build community resilience, to invest in the programs that will actually break the recidivism cycle and ultimately make our community safer.
This is a wise investment. It is a smart way to spend our money. It means police can focus on particular matters and that they will not spend their time simply rearresting the same people they have arrested many times before. When you look at the profile of many of the offenders in the ACT, they do have long criminal histories. Certainly, by the time they end up in custody, it is usually not their first interaction with the justice system—in fact, almost certainly, except in the most heinous of cases.
When we are reflecting on how to make our community safe, we need to look at the whole picture here. It is not simply a question of police numbers. Even when it comes to police resources, it is not merely about police numbers; it is about the operating principles of the police and a range of other matters, including the technology that is available to them.
Justice reinvestment aims to implement targeted, evidence-based interventions to achieve cost savings as well as a safer community. Those cost savings can be reinvested in delivering further improvements in social and criminal justice outcomes. Building communities not prisons will progress a number of intersecting and overlapping initiatives that address key opportunities across the human services system to reduce reoffending, reduce the prison detainee population and improve the lives of those individuals and their families. That is an important part of the story as well. With those individuals who are known to the system, if we can stop them being involved then we are targeting those people who are responsible for ongoing crime in the territory.
Let me touch on a few examples of what is being funded in this program. The high-density housing project has had quite some media coverage. Mark, who runs the program, has become a minor criminal justice celebrity in his own right. This is a place-based example of justice reinvestment. It is a multi-agency initiative targeted at reducing crime and building community at the public housing sites along Ainslie Avenue. This has been a very successful program for the money invested in it. It has significantly reduced the number of police call-outs to those sites that have been
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