ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the work of the Australian Justice Reinvestment Project (AJRP). The AJRP has examined the development of justice reinvestment particularly in the context of its alignment with broad social justice values. Justice reinvestment captured the imagination of communities, criminal justice system actors and legislators in a range of western countries. The uptake of justice reinvestment in the US and UK, and the high level of interest in it in Australia and elsewhere, is in large part a response to the fact that ever-increasing imprisonment rates are expensive at a time of fiscal stringency, and provide very little return in terms of high recidivism rates. Justice reinvestment emerged from the fact that the geographies of imprisonment intersect with the geographies of poverty and race. Justice reinvestment was originally conceptualized as a ‘place-based’ strategy focused on particular geographic communities.
