00:00Surrounded by high wire fences, but this is not incarceration.
00:08This is their home, not our workplace.
00:11So they're human beings first and foremost, they're not a number.
00:14Here it's different because there are support workers but it's nothing like prison, you
00:19know, you get more of an opportunity to be yourself, free.
00:24Sharon was locked in a jail cell in central Australia just a few weeks ago, and it wasn't
00:29her first time.
00:31At just 23, she's already been in and out of the system.
00:35Violence is what led me here, a drug habit as well.
00:38I was on meth and a user for quite a while, and I've been down a rehabilitation centre
00:46before, the path of it, but I got out and I done the same things.
00:51The NT has the highest rates of recidivism in the country, with almost 60% of people
00:57released from prison returning shortly afterwards.
01:01But for the past four years, women in Alice Springs have had an alternative to custody,
01:06a six-month program that's proving locking people up might not be the best way to cut
01:12crime.
01:13If locking up people worked, we would be the safest place in the world, and we're not.
01:18Whereas 80% of the women who came through the alternative to custody during the evaluation
01:23period, 80% of those did not re-offend.
01:26The program is an optional alternative to serving a prison sentence, and a path Sharon
01:31chose so she could be with her son.
01:33I think it works because we look at a person's individual needs, the whole person, their
01:39housing, their employment, their trauma, their history, their family, their future, what
01:44goals they actually want to achieve.
01:46It's life skills for, you know, the outside.
01:49When you get out of these gates, it's what you want to make of yourself.
01:53Like other women who've graduated from the program with training and jobs, Sharon is
01:57considering becoming a support worker to help other women who've been through similar hardships.
02:03Despite the positive results here, the government plans to build two new women's prisons.
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