Decades of ’tough on crime’ policy have expanded prisons while narrowing reform. Restorative justice has been repeatedly constrained not for lack of evidence, but because it redistributes authority away from the state.

Australia’s prison crisis is not accidental. It has been the foreseen result of decades of policy choices that have expanded punishment while narrowing reform capacity. Prison has become less a response to harm and more a mechanism for managing individual and structural causes of social failure.

From the early 1990s, governments have reduced investment in social provision while intensifying ’tough on crime’ approaches. Structural problems, namely, unemployment, housing insecurity, untreated mental illness, addiction and inter-generational trauma, have been re-framed as individual moral failings.

Prison has become the endpoint for those who are poor, traumatised, frequently Aboriginal, and socially marginalised. Longer sentences and restricted parole have been promoted as essential for public protection. Yet these political directions have produced a costly and overcrowded system that fosters exclusion rather than delivers durable community safety.

The effects of punitive expansion are not merely confined to filling prisons; it restructures authority. As sentencing hardens and justice administration centralises, decision-making power concentrates within state institutions. Justice becomes something done solely by the state, to individuals, in the name of public order.

This monopoly of punitive justice has a further consequence in crowding out other ways of thinking about justice as notably exemplified in restorative justice.

Restorative justice shifts the focus from rule-breaking to harm, from punishment to accountability, and from state ownership of conflict to community participation. Progressive applications of restorative justice additionally consider the interaction of individual and societal factors that co-produce crime.

This justice approach challenges assumptions that underpin adversarial, control-based systems and persistent structural inequalities. In redistributing authority outwards to communities, victims and those responsible for harm, it unsettles systems built on centralised control. That is why restorative justice is politically uncomfortable.

Western Australia illustrates this dynamic clearly. Since the 1990s, restorative initiatives have been introduced, evaluated and then constrained. Youth justice conferencing has been weakened by mandatory sentencing and punitive policing. Court-based adult restorative models offering stronger forms of offender accountability have been sidelined in favour of departmentally controlled problem-solving courts. Victim–offender mediation remained peripheral.

In Aboriginal contexts, community-led initiatives such as the Roebourne Restorative Project and Aboriginal Community Courts were discontinued despite supportive qualitative evidence.

The pattern is not accidental. Political populism, coupled with risk-averse managerialism in justice departments, favours tightly administered punitive models.

Where restorative justice emerged from communities – that is, where authority was shared – it encountered resistance. Where it was absorbed into departmental structures, it was proceduralised and narrowed. The mechanism is clear: punitive systems suppress restorative justice not because it fails, but because it diffuses control.

Today, police shortages, congested courts and overcrowded prisons expose the limits of punitive expansion. Governments are again expressing interest in restorative justice.

Nevertheless, the risk remains that renewed attention will repeat old patterns. Governments that retain punitive priorities, and justice departments whose dominant culture is guarded by net-widening surveillance and risk assessment, will inevitably reshape restorative practices to fit managerial templates.

When restorative justice is reduced to performance indicators and administrative ownership, it loses depth. Relational processes are compressed into procedural steps. Community roots are weakened. Structural causes of harm are sidelined. What remains may resemble restorative justice in form, but not in substance.

If restorative justice is to survive the gravitational pull of punishment politics, it must be structured differently.

The Canadian experience offers a useful contrast. In Nova Scotia, Alberta and Saskatchewan, restorative justice has expanded not because governments withdrew, but because they entered structured partnerships with community organisations and justice system actors.

Alberta’s model explicitly rests on a three-part ecosystem of community, justice system and government working in tandem. Saskatchewan’s long-running Alternative Measures framework similarly depends on referral pathways from police and prosecutors into community-based programs. Nova Scotia’s province-wide rollout demonstrates what happens when restorative justice is not treated as a boutique add-on but as an organised, system-level response.

In these provinces the critical distinction is this: restorative justice scaled through partnership rather than suppression through absorption. Legislative support, stable funding and formal referral structures enables community-led processes to operate with institutional backing while preserving their integrity.

At the same time, research into these provinces’ experience also highlights a structural hazard. As government involvement becomes increasingly directive, restorative justice is re-calibrated to serve administrative imperatives of efficiency, measurability and the reassertion of political control. The result is a model that retains procedural form but is stripped of its transformative edge.

Saskatchewan practitioners warn of its “McDonaldisation”: routinised, standardised and vulnerable to shifting political winds. Alberta’s structured funding shows both the benefits of investment and the fragility of programs dependent on annual appropriations.

As for Aboriginal justice, across all three provinces, these initiatives operate alongside restorative justice but are not subsumed by it. This arrangement underscores a critical principle: genuine collaboration requires respect for community authority, cultural integrity and local governance.

The lesson for Australia is therefore not that government should retreat, nor that communities should shoulder the burden alone. A different architecture is required. Governments must provide stable funding, legislative space and data transparency. Justice agencies must establish consistent referral pathways and procedural safeguards. Communities must retain leadership in design, facilitation and cultural legitimacy.

Properly structured, restorative justice becomes more than a diversion mechanism. It becomes a shared infrastructure for addressing personal harm, structural inequity and social inequality. These are the very conditions that punitive systems have long managed but never resolved.

The suppression of restorative justice has never been about evidence; it has been about control. Punitive systems centralise authority in the state; restorative systems redistribute it toward communities, victims and those responsible for harm. If governments are serious about community safety, they must decide whether justice remains a mechanism of control or becomes a shared practice of repair.