Justice reinvestment, human rights, interagency partnership, and decarceration : the future of corrections?

Indigenous overrepresentation in Australia is a pervasive social injustice problem, which sees this once proud group of people fail to meet minimum standards across education, employment, health, criminal justice, and socioeconomic status. Currently, Indigenous people account for 3.3 percent of the Australian population but account for 28 percent of the national imprisonment rate and, at any given time, Indigenous youth account for 53 percent of the overnight prison population. To address this systemic social injustice issue, an investigation into how penal policy, criminal justice and human rights coincide with decision-making processes was undertaken. Within this chapter, the authors propose that the way forward is through an interagency partnership with a strong obligation to upholding human rights for all. To operationalize human rights obligations for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia, a case study based on the existing micro-level project called the Maranguka Justice Reinvestment project was used. The authors adopted a human rights framework which has six fundamental principles which found that when both formal institutions and individuals’ who are impacted by decision-making policies work in partnership, meaningful change occurs. While prisons neither deter nor rehabilitate offenders, working together with all marginalized voices represented is the way forward.