In the tiny New South Wales town of Bourke, where crime was crippling, a bold experiment turned a community around and saved hundreds of young people from a lifetime of contact with the justice system.
Now a town thousands of kilometres north, with many of the same crime problems, wants its own solution, and some think it could lie in an emerging approach called "justice reinvestment".
In the United States, the project has resulted in the state of Texas shutting down a number of prisons in recent years, and in Bourke, NSW, the town saved more than $3 million in 2017.
"We've got really high rates of offending at the moment in Katherine, I don't think there'd be anyone who hasn't been personally impacted," said Siobhan Mackay, the chief executive of the Katherine Women's Information and Legal Service.
"Something really, really needs to change. So we're asking people to have a fundamental shift in their thinking about how we deal with crime.
"[And] how we stop it before it even starts."
Punishment costs
At its core, justice reinvestment is built around diverting money from the costly prison system to funding community-led programs that address the underlying causes of crime instead, Ms Mackay said.
Proponents of the project say evidence shows that it is cheaper to prevent crime than for governments to front up money for punishment and prisons.
Much of the offending in Katherine comes from youths, who often end up in the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre – where the acting children's commissioner projects it costs more than $4,500 a day to lock up a young person.
Ms Mackay is part of a tapestry of legal services, which includes the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency and Legal Aid, who co-signed a letter with police and the director of public prosecutions, calling on the federal government to fund the project.
More than $80 million was committed to community-led justice reinvestment initiatives across Australia in the Albanese government's first budget.
But a spokesman for Federal Attorney General Mark Dreyfus told the ABC on Thursday that while some of the money was heading to Alice Springs and Halls Creek, no other sites had been locked in.
Invitation to plan for the future
A community meeting led by legal professionals in Katherine on Thursday drew over 100 people and called on residents to join a committee to form a unique plan of action.
The Northern Territory's acting Children's Commissioner Nicole Hucks told the meeting she was concerned that if justice reinvestment was not supported, the trajectory was worrying.
"If a tough on crime approach worked, the Northern Territory would be the safest place in the country," Ms Hucks said.
"100 per cent of children in NT detention centres on any given day are Aboriginal children.
"Current data tells us that 77 per cent of those children who are in detention are likely to go on and reoffend.
"We have to acknowledge that current government policy and previous government policy has contributed to those concerning statistics."
In May 2020, 31 children were locked up in Don Dale. Just two years later in the same month of this year, that number had reached 100, Ms Husks said.
'Revolving door' must end
Issues raised during the meeting included the school system, the lack of appropriate housing and parent accountability.
A young Katherine resident who grew up in the town said there was no longer enough support to prevent youth from falling through the cracks.
"When I was 16, I was running amuck, but the amount of support I had in this community was amazing," Natalia Watego-Assan told the meeting.
"Why can't we do it for these other kids … we all need to get our heads together."
Dagoman-Wardaman elder May Rosas said it was imperative Aboriginal people were at the forefront of the shift.
"We know what to do, we have our culture that is very strong … it is very complex, but we know how to navigate around families, culture and kinship," she said.
"Our law is still alive … we need to be supported to bring our law in place to help change our culture for our children."
Support from the chief minister
At a press conference in Darwin this week, Chief Minister Natasha Fyles said she backed the justice reinvestment model.
"We cannot continue in the Northern Territory simply having a revolving door with our prisons," she said.
"People can enter for as short as a week, then be released with no meaningful impact to help them change their behaviour.
"When we see justice reinvestment, we see success."
