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In little over a decade, the concept of justice reinvestment has captured the imagination of communities, the actors in the criminal justice system and legislatures alike in a range of Western countries. With its promise of reduced spending, decarceration and improved public safety, justice reinvestment emerged at a unique point in time as a reaction to mass incarceration. In the USA, and increasingly elsewhere, a combination of fiscal, political and societal conditions are favourable to the emergence of strategies of penal reduction, including justice reinvestment, to an extent not seen since the 1970s.

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 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.

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.

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.

It is well established that victims of crime are often measured against an idealised standard of victimhood, typically to the detriment of those who are seen to depart in significant ways from notions of the ideal. However, as Paul Rock noted (2002, p. 17), we need to give more attention to the ways in which various framing discourses are deployed and give shape to our understandings of victimisation. There is ‘interpretative work done at every level in bringing the categories victim and offender into play’ (Rock 2002, p. 21). Laws and legal practices are significant in how matters are framed and in constituting the subjects and objects of law. In this chapter we examine this further by reference to the multiple and competing conceptions of the victim of domestic violence that emerge in different domains of legal practice. We focus on victims of domestic violence who as mother are more likely to be subjected to particular scrutiny and to competing, and often conflicting, requirements and obligations (Douglas and Walsh 2010; Hester 2010; Jaffe et al. 2003; Kaye et al. 2003).

Introduction Since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody reported in 1991 (RCADIC, 1991), rates of incarceration of Indigenous women have grown substantially, to a greater extent than for Indigenous men. However, despite their substantial over-representation in prisons, Indigenous women too rarely feature as subjects of penal discourse or penal politics. RCADIC was of enormous significance in providing detailed analysis of the underlying factors that contributed to the over-representation of Indigenous people in custody and to deaths in custody (RCADIC, 1991). However, the official reports ‘lacked a gender-specific analysis’ (Marchetti, 2007: 8) and the experiences of Indigenous women were largely overlooked and subsumed in a generalised understanding of Indigenous experience, based on the experiences of men (Marchetti, 2008). The failure to examine the criminalisa- tion and incarceration of Indigenous women1 continues today in research, policy and criminal justice practices. References