This paper is a collaboration between JRNSW and three academic researchers prominent in the Australian justice reinvestment space, which seeks to advance the process of designing a justice reinvestment policy mechanism in NSW. It briefly explores the history of justice reinvestment and raises key questions that will need to be addressed by stakeholders during this process. It is designed to be an input into ongoing work into developing a policy mechanism that reinvests resources from the criminal justice system and into community-led preventative approaches.

This paper will present the costs involved when Aboriginal people move through the justice system, covering police contact, remand, court appearances and incarceration costs. These costs are examined for both adults and young people, and are used to calculate the Aboriginal criminal justice cost gap in NSW.

This paper will examine the resources required by the NSW criminal justice system, and what would be needed to reduce them. The report will assemble basic information about the carceral system, to identify possible policy or demand-driven changes that would effectively result in savings and/or avoided costs.

This paper will estimate the economic opportunity cost of imprisonment, in terms of labour, to understand how it could be recaptured and returned to the economy as a benefit. This paper will examine prison labour and allowances to compare with non-prison labour and income, as well as tax revenue. This paper will be used to support Just Reinvest NSW’s proposal for justice reinvestment policies, which focuses on Aboriginal community empowerment.

What is the minimum required legislative change needed to see changes in incarceration levels? This paper will examine the structural and systemic elements that drive Aboriginal contact with the criminal justice system and determine which need to be urgently addressed to see changes in the rates of incarceration and recidivism.

This paper will examine trends in international data to determine a reasonable timeframe for lowering incarceration and recidivism rates in NSW. It will use quantitative data and case studies to analyse where such reductions have been achieved, how they were achieved, and over what timeframe. This project will proceed in two parts: one addressing incarceration rates and the other addressing recidivism rates.