Melanie Schwartz

The Promise of Justice Reinvestment

This article examines the notion and practice of Justice Reinvestment (‘JR’), an emerging approach addressing the high social and economic costs of soaring incarceration rates. JR invests in public safety by reallocating dollars from corrections budgets to finance education, housing, healthcare, and jobs in high-crime communities. Key distinguishing features of JR (including justice and asset mapping, budgetary devolution and localism, and the desirability of bipartisanship) are briefly outlined, followed by discussion of its recent emergence and application in the United States, and to a lesser extent in the United Kingdom. The prospects for the adoption of JR approaches in Australia are then considered, with particular reference to the high imprisonment rates of Indigenous people. If JR is to be promoted in the Australian context it is important that it be subject to critical scrutiny and therefore some of the key problems are briefly outlined, before a conclusion which emphasizes the potential benefits of JR.

How Has Justice Reinvestment Worked in the USA

As more US states have taken up justice reinvestment to deal with ballooning corrections populations and the budgetary realities that go with them, justice reinvestment has taken a range of shapes. Cumulatively, these strategies have contributed to a change in the political climate whereby lowering imprisonment rates can be seriously entertained by public officials (Austin et al., 2013: 1). Moreover, according to Gary Dennis of the BJA, JRI initiatives have led to improvements in levels of professionalism within the not-for-profit sector and faith-based organisations as their work gets drawn into a framework involving stronger oversight and evaluation.

How Does Justice Reinvestment Travel? Criminal Justice Policy Transfer and the Importance of Context: Policy, Politics and Populism

The previous two chapters raised a series of challenges to some of the often taken for granted claims made on behalf of justice reinvestment policies. Chapter 3 looked behind the claims of locality and community and in particular interrogated how they may or may not work for over-represented and vulnerable groups, including people with mental illness and/or cognitive disability, women, and Indigenous and other racialised peoples. Chapter 4 examined some of the problematic features behind the methodological and measurement claims of justice reinvestment as ‘data-driven’ and ‘evidence-based’, asking what is counted and what counts, and drawing out tensions between ‘evidence-based practice’ and social justice concerns. This chapter addresses the issue of the portability of justice reinvestment as a form of ‘policy transfer’, an investigation which places the issue of context centre stage. It looks briefly at the issue of criminal justice policy transfer more generally and through some specific examples in the UK and Australia, before examining some of the key pre-conditions for and barriers to, the successful adoption of justice reinvestment policies in Australia. This is followed by a discussion of various dangers and misconceptions in processes of policy formation, including what we call the ‘rationalist fallacy’ which is exemplified in the common ‘roll out’ metaphor and the susceptibility of criminal justice policy to populist backlash.

Justice Reinvestment, Evidence-based Policy and Practice: In Search of Social Justice

Justice reinvestment is avowedly data-driven and evidence-based, features that stand in contrast to common approaches to criminal justice policy-making in many jurisdictions. The added impetus towards evidence-based approaches generated by justice reinvestment largely has been welcomed (Clear, 2010). However, what is measured and what counts as evidence are important considerations with significant implications. These are more than simply technical matters. This chapter examines the way in which evidence-based policy and practice (EBP) has been conceptualised and given effect through the methodologies and measures commonly used in justice reinvestment, and how this, in turn, has influenced the direction of justice reinvestment. The chapter also notes some other possible conceptions of evidence and forms of measurement that may be more congruent with the aspirations towards a justice reinvestment that is social justice-oriented.

The Politics of Locality and Community

As we have identified in earlier chapters, the origins of justice reinvestment situated it within a place-based approach to public policy. In the words of Tucker and Cadora (2003: 2, 4), ‘justice reinvestment seeks community level solutions to community level problems … solutions are required that are locally tailored and locally determined’. Place-based approaches are usually conceived as initiatives specific to a particular geographic location, rather than those that operate at a state-wide or federal level. In this chapter we explore the meaning and implications of place-based approaches to justice reinvestment. We do this through a critical analysis of locality, place and community and consider whether place-based approaches can respond to social groups who have been particularly impacted through rising incarceration rates.