NCJ Number
231826
Date Published
August 2010
Length
8 pages
Annotation
This paper reports on approaches used internationally to measure justice system outcomes for Indigenous offenders, given the documented socioeconomic disadvantages of Indigenous people and the complexities involved in overcoming them; and an approach to measuring justice outcomes for Indigenous offenders in Australia and New Zealand is recommended.
Abstract
In providing advice on choosing suitable indicators for a justice policy toward Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Indigenous offenders in Australia and New Zealand, the paper notes a recommendation by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner. In his 2009 Social Justice report, he favored a "justice reinvestment" policy approach that originated in the United States. Justice reinvestment involves diverting funds that would otherwise have been used for imprisonment to crime prevention, crime reduction, and rehabilitation programs and services for local communities with high concentrations of offenders. The successful implementation of such an approach would require the use of indicators disaggregated to a local community level. They would measure whether the services delivered through reinvestment are producing genuine benefits for the targeted neighborhoods. New indicators must be valid, reliable, consistently repeatable, able to be disaggregated in the context of small sample sizes, and able to account for under-reporting of victimization. Indicators must measure constructs related to stressors and their impact on well-being, community-level impacts of justice services, and quality of service provided at all levels of the criminal justice system. 23 references