Rehabilitation and Beyond in Settler Colonial Australia: Current and Future Directions in Policy and Practice

Who does Australia Lock Up? The Social Determinants of Justice

“…Despite such evidence of the structural drivers of who goes to prison, in Australian criminal legal systems, as elsewhere, risk management and use of risk measurement instruments such as the Level of Service Inventory -Revised (commonly known as the LSI-R), which focuses on individual behaviour changes, continues to dominate (Hannah-Moffatt 2016;Russell et al 2022). Critiques of risk management have pointed out that these instruments are designed to ascertain a person's likelihood of reoffending and individualise certain factors in offending behaviour as risks rather than needs (Hannah-Moffatt 2016); scholars and practitioners have pointed out the particular inappropriateness of such measures for Indigenous and other groups systemically vulnerable to criminal legal harms (Day et al 2018;Hannah-Moffatt 2016;Russell et al 2022). This is why short-term, diversionary programs that do not provide, for example, housing, disability or drug and alcohol support for those who need them cannot create genuine pathways out of criminal legal systems for the majority of people who end up in custody; there are no structural arrangements to ensure these are accessible (Sotiri et al 2021).…”

“…The risk-need-responsivity model (RNR) (Andrews and Bonta 2007), which focuses on assessing individual criminogenic risks of offending and reoffending, has become the dominant assessment tool for correctional services across North America, the United Kingdom, Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia (Hannah-Moffatt 2005, Russell et al 2022. Despite the massive investment in this approach, Australia's Productivity Commission recently noted that recidivism had not been reduced and that nearly 60% of people currently incarcerated had been in prison before (Productivity Commission 2021).…”