While the ACT’s Drug and Alcohol Sentencing List is not yet cost-effective, it is “achieving significant avoided costs and economic benefits to the ACT Government”, an independent evaluation by KPMG published this week finds.
The DASL was established in 2019 to reduce recidivism by focusing on therapeutic intervention, rehabilitation, and social reintegration for vulnerable individuals in the justice system.
The review, commissioned by the Justice and Community Safety Directorate, analysed the program from 2019 to 2023.
Costs outweigh benefits, the evaluation found: the program has a net present value of -$3.5 million, and a benefit-cost ratio of 0.87 from 2019 to 2023.
KPMG noted that this was not surprising, given the program has only run since 2019 and there were higher costs at the beginning to get it started.
However, the evaluation states that benefits are increasing year-on-year, suggesting the program may become cost-effective and sustainable as it matures and more people take part.
The program is estimated to have saved the ACT Government $22.7 million in custody costs, $10,000 in crime costs, and $600,000 in reduced recidivism.
The DASL program also delivers unquantified benefits, such as improved social and community engagement, health and wellbeing outcomes, and education and employment opportunities.
The report recommends improving the program’s monitoring and measurement capabilities, and expanding the program to include more participants, potentially through the Magistrates Court.
The report noted that many DASL participants found it hard to access secure housing, crucial for their recovery, rehabilitation, and reintegration into society.
The report noted several limitations, including reliance on proxy data from a comparable jurisdiction due to insufficient DASL data; the use of ROGS data to calculate avoided custody costs and reduced recidivism benefits, which likely overestimates custody costs; limited longitudinal data; difficulty collecting consistent and complete DASL data across all services, leading to missing data and low sample sizes, reducing the reliability of the data; variable and inconsistent qualitative data; and unvalidated data.
The DASL showed that a therapeutic approach for people in the justice system with a history of substance use – an important part of reducing recidivism by 25 per cent by 2025 – was effective in supporting community safety and better outcomes for the individual, Attorney-General Shane Rattenbury said.
“The Drug and Alcohol Sentencing List recognises drug use is a health issue, and provides people in the justice system with a response that supports their needs, helps them make safer choices, and ultimately have the best rehabilitative journey.”
However, while acknowledging that rehabilitation had more societal benefits than incarceration, Independents for Canberra candidate Inspector Mark Richardson reserved judgement on whether the DASL was effective or not.
The “massive cost” of the DASL, he noted, was being compared to cost savings for time in the Alexander Maconochie Centre.
“Don’t we have the highest cost per prisoner per day in the country? If that is the case, we are comparing costs against what is an extremely inefficient and expensive prison system. Either way, it’s not a great advertisement for the ACT justice system.”
An ANU report from 2022 showed that, out of 106 referrals to DASL between 2020 and March 2022, only 56 were sentenced to the program, and few reached advanced phases or graduation, Inspector Richardson noted.
He queried the need for the ACT Government to commission both reports in quick succession, given KPMG outlined poor data quality due to low volumes of reporting and difficulties in accessing data.
