Making Australian communities safer requires something more than the current policies on offer. The ever-increasing amount of money poured into prisons is not making us safer and could be put to much better use. Overlapping lessons drawn from place-based approaches to addressing disadvantage, justice reinvestment and social cohesion strategies reveal the ‘better use’ to which we could put that money.
In our paper – Flourishing Communities: Taking lessons from place-based approaches, justice reinvestment and social cohesion – we call for solutions that:
- are preventative
- are targeted at geographically-defined communities
- engage with and build capacity in local communities
- are long-term
- are data-driven
- facilitate multi-sector involvement
- build local social cohesion.