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Indigenous crime action a failure, says justice leader

REFORMS introduced after the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody have not worked, the outgoing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Tom Calma, has said reports Malcolm Brown in the Sydney Morning Herald of 23 January 2010.

Mr Calma, who presented his final reports yesterday after a five-year term, said a new approach was urgently needed to release indigenous people from ''the cycle of crime and escalating imprisonment rates''.

Presenting his Social Justice and Native Title reports, Mr Calma said the overrepresentation of Aborigines in the criminal justice system was one of the most serious, unresolved issues.

There was also the threatened extinction of the 100 indigenous languages that still existed within 10 to 30 years, and the issue of resourcing ''homeland communities''.

Mr Calma said nationally, indigenous adults were 13 times more likely to be imprisoned than their non-indigenous counterparts and indigenous juveniles were 28 times more likely to be put in detention.

During his term, there had been two ''devastating'' examples of what could happen to an indigenous person in custody, one being the death of Mulrunji Doomadgee at Palm Island in Queensland, the other the death of an Aboriginal man in a West Australian prison van.

He said the new policy he was proposing was ''justice reinvestment'', which was diversion of a portion of funds spent in imprisonment to local communities with a high concentration of offenders.

''The monies that would have been spent on imprisonment are reinvested in programs and services in communities where these issues are more acute in order to address the underlying causes of crime,'' he said.

''Here in Australia, increasing amounts of public monies are spent on imprisonment, for minimum positive long-term return. Internationally, where justice reinvestment is being implemented, particularly in the the United Kingdom and United States, imprisonment rates are dropping.

''For example, in Oregon in the United States, money was reinvested in well-resources restorative justice and community service programs for juvenile offenders. This resulted in a

72 per cent drop in juvenile incarceration rates.''

He said an individual could, at present, be put through the best-resourced, most effective rehabilitation program, and go back to an under-resourced community, which would undo what he or she might have gained.

The justice reinvestment model retained prison as an ultimate measure but there was a shift of resources to the community, which could work on stopping the offences occurring.

If a figure of $200,000 a year to keep a youth in the juvenile justice system was correct, it did not take much to work out the savings and potential funds for investment in preventing incarceration, he said.

''We need to identify the communities that are in most need and address issues such as lack of activity for youth and making sure the school system is appropriate and a whole lot of really educative programs,'' Mr Calma said.

The communities most in need had to be identified and an integrated program developed, not the piecemeal approach adopted by some policy officers with ''a bucket of money'' picking and choosing where they spent it.

Source: www.smh.com.au/national/indigenous-crime-action-a-failure-says-justice-leader-20100122-mqor.html