NEWS: Just Reinvest NSW testifies at Senate inquiry on Australia’s youth justice and incarceration system
On Friday (10 April 2026) at a public hearing in Parramatta Just Reinvest NSW CEO Geoff Scott, Community Data Manager Ian Brown and Chairperson Blake Alan Cansdale provided testimony to the Australian Senate inquiry into Australia’s youth justice and incarceration.
Their call was clear – the Commonwealth Government must further support justice reinvestment as a process for improving the effectiveness of, reducing the cost of, and correcting the harms caused by Australia’s youth justice and incarceration system.
Justice reinvestment is a paradigm shift. It focuses on the causes of incarceration and requires systems change that is community-led, data informed and place-based. It looks at both how and why Aboriginal children and young people interact with the justice system, and the broader social determinants: poverty, housing, education, health, and the regional divide.
Let’s also call out one of, if not the biggest driver of incarceration that is not openly spoken about, which is penal populism – a form of governing that leans toward punitive responses to crime to win elections, because it makes people feel safe, while ignoring the evidence about what actually reduces incarceration and increases community safety.
Geoff Scott – CEO Just Reinvest NSW
For more than 30 years, governments particularly at State and Territory level, have promoted increasingly punitive responses. The result is a system that continues to spiral, with devastating impacts. In New South Wales today, around 60% of children in detention are Aboriginal, and 76% are on remand awaiting trial.
The NSW Government’s recent reinforcement of the Doli incapax principle at age 10 through legislation signals a continued reliance on criminalisation, rather than meaningful reform.
A key barrier to justice reinvestment is access to data. Government does not provide data at a place-based level, making it difficult for Aboriginal communities to make informed decisions. At the same time, communities face real challenges in building the capability needed to access and use data, including investment in skills, infrastructure, storage, security and accessibility.
There is also a fundamental disconnect between government systems and community knowledge. Justice reinvestment cannot be undertaken within short-term government cycles – it requires a long-term, systemic approach. Too often, government relies on administrative data to justify decisions, rather than the contextualised, lived data held by communities. “Knowing, doing and being”, the Aboriginal way does not always align with how government systems operate.
We know justice reinvestment works. In Bourke, it worked because authority was given to the community, enabling a new way of working across police and service systems to achieve a collaborative impact.
But to work at scale, justice reinvestment requires system-wide change – including a shift in investment from the carceral system to community-led, place-based services and programs, grounded in self-determination.
Current approaches remain limited. Governments continue to fund pilots to prove what we already know works, while few initiatives are supported to drive true systems change.
So, the question remains: how do we create funding mechanisms that allow this work to grow sustainably? Current funding models, built on historical and colonial constructs, place Aboriginal community-controlled organisations in an impossible position – expected to deliver services while also driving large-scale reform.
What we do know is this: community-led programs work when young people have a voice and can determine what will work for them, and that raises deeper questions about how governments engage with Aboriginal communities. We know that justice reinvestment works. The evidence is there. The challenge now is political will.