ALP plan to target rates of indigenous  jail time

Labor will today unveil $103 million in additional funding aimed at slashing the indigenous incarceration rate.

Opposition legal affairs spokesman Mark Dreyfus will this morning unveil a plan to spend $21.75m over four years establishing justice reinvestment projects. Picture: David Geraghty

Labor will today unveil $107 million in additional funding aimed at slashing the indigenous incarceration rate.

Labor’s plan would expand legal services, establish “justice targets” and back the spread of “justice reinvestment” — or the diversion of funding from prisons and the criminal justice system to ease the social causes of crime.

Labor’s embrace of justice reinvestment follows the success of a project in Bourke, NSW, which the managers say has reduced the juvenile arrest rate by 24 per cent and cut the number of youths in detention by 45 per cent.

Opposition legal affairs spokesman Mark Dreyfus will this morning unveil a plan to spend $21.75m over four years establishing justice reinvestment projects at trial sites in Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory.

With the co-operation of state and territory governments, Labor would establish projects in a major city, a regional town and a remote community with the aim of exploring the role of this concept in preventing crime and reducing incarceration.

Mr Dreyfus’s decision to endorse justice reinvestment comes soon after the Trump administration in the US put in place a series of measures to reduce the incarceration rate by educating prisoners, repealing mandatory sentencing for drug offences and restoring some judicial discretion for other non-violent offences.

Mr Dreyfus plans to take up a recommendation from the Australian Law Reform Commission and work through the Council of Australian Governments to establish a national body to co-ordinate the rollout of justice reinvestment.

In its 2017 report, the ALRC said this concept had been viewed as “particularly suitable for addressing the disproportionate incarceration rate” of indigenous people. The commission found that Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders made up 2 per cent of the national population but accounted for 27 per cent of the prison population. It also found that the incarceration rate for indigenous people had risen by 41 per cent in the decade to 2016.

Labor will also announce it would work with the states and territories to set indigenous “justice targets” under the Closing the Gap framework.

While criminal justice is primarily a state responsibility, Labor plans to use justice targets to highlight what it describes as the inequality of outcomes for indigenous people.

The biggest item on Labor’s indigenous agenda is an extra $40m over four years for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Services.

The ATSILS peak national body would receive a further $4m to build its capacity.