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Pre-sentence reports (PSRs) provide important information about an individual's background and circumstances to assist judicial officers in the sentencing process. The present study analyzed PSRs for 63 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people sentenced by either an Indigenous sentencing court or a mainstream court in the Australian State of Victoria. Using natural language processing techniques, our analyses revealed few differences between PSRs conducted for each court. However, PSRs were found to predominantly feature key words that are risk-based, with mainstream court PSRs more negatively worded than the Indigenous sentencing court's PSRs. This may have been due to the inclusion of results from a risk and need assessment tool. Pro-social factors did comprise more than one third of extracted keywords, although the number of strength-based culture-related keywords, in particular, was low across PSRs in both courts. It is possible that courts may not be receiving all the information needed to promote individualized justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mainstream sentencing courts do little to change the behavior of partner violence offenders, let alone members of more socially marginal groups. Indigenous offenders face a court system that has little relevance to the complexity of their relations and lived experiences. Assisted by respected Elders and Community Representatives, Australian Indigenous sentencing courts seek to create a more meaningful sentencing process that has a deeper impact on Indigenous offenders’ attitudes and, ultimately, their behavior. Drawing from interviews with 30 Indigenous offenders, we explore the ways in which the courts can motivate Indigenous partner violence offenders on pathways to desistence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous-focused criminal justice programs are usually evaluated and studied without an adherence to, or acknowledgement of, Indigenous epistemologies, axiologies and ontologies. Indeed, many of the evaluations conducted of Australian Indigenous sentencing courts have relied on quantitative analyses of reoffending, finding little or no impact on recidivism, despite there being some evidence, derived mainly from qualitative analyses, that they have had an impact on strengthening informal social controls within Indigenous communities. This article uses published evaluations and impact studies of Indigenous sentencing courts as a case study to gain a better understanding of how these courts have been evaluated and researched, and how the methodological approaches used to study the courts may not properly capture the Indigenous-focused and community-building aims and goals of the programs. Employing a meta-review approach, the article examines why research that evaluates Indigenous-focused criminal justice programs should rethink how evaluations are framed and conducted when trying to determine 'what works'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Indigenous sentencing courts are now an established form of innovative justice practice in most Australian jurisdictions. Whether such processes, which involve the participation of local community elders or representatives in sentencing an offender, provide a "better" form of justice is still up for debate. Recidivism analyses have yet to find that these courts are more likely to reduce reoffending than their mainstream counterparts. Some scholars argue that this is not the sole purpose of the courts and that other measures of "success" should be utilised when evaluating their performance. This article uses interviews with judicial officers, elders, community representatives, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous court workers to explore what the courts are seeking to achieve and how that translates into a different form of doing justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]