EVERY day James Moore meets police at a community centre for aboriginal people in Bourke. He and the officers swap reports of trouble during the previous 24 hours. A local aboriginal himself, Mr Moore says he wants to change the mindset of the town, which had a romantic past as a booming river port but became better known for its rampant crime, especially among aboriginals. The daily briefings are part of a novel experiment aimed at making the town safer.

“Back of Bourke” is Australian vernacular for the outback. The town faces the Darling River, about 800km north-west of Sydney in the state of New South Wales. About a third of its almost 3,000 people are aboriginals. Until recently, Bourke had one of the state’s highest imprisonment rates for aboriginals under 17. (Nationwide they are just over 2% of the population, but more than a quarter of prison inmates.)

In its late-19th-century heyday, people called Bourke Australia’s “Chicago of the west” because of its wealth from wool. But the white settlers who made it rich treated aboriginals with contempt, grabbing their land and trampling on their culture. Mr Moore blames the high crime rate among aboriginals on these historical abuses. But Australia’s state governments have responded to such problems mainly by stressing the need for punishment. New South Wales, the most populous state, last year said it would spend A$4bn ($2.8bn) on building more prisons. Its government proudly called it the “largest single prison expansion in the state’s history”.

More sensitive approaches to curbing crime among aboriginals are unusual in Australia. Frustrated by this, and by the government’s failure to reduce crime by jailing large numbers of people, aboriginals in Bourke decided to take matters into their own hands. About two years ago they started Australia’s first big trial of “justice reinvestment”, a scheme suggested by the Open Society Institute, a think-tank funded by George Soros, an American billionaire. It encourages governments to redirect some of the money earmarked for building more prisons towards projects that help people stay out of them.

On the Darling’s banks, the pilot seems to be working—albeit with funding from philanthropic outfits rather than prison budgets. The experiment was launched by Alistair Ferguson, a former civil servant of the Barkinji tribe, who said he was tired of “the constant revolving door of young people in handcuffs” at Bourke’s courthouse. Just Reinvest, a Sydney-based advocacy group, has been collaborating.

One of the project’s aims is to make young aboriginals feel more positive about their future. It offers them vocational training. Mr Moore takes groups of them into the outback to immerse them in age-old, long-lost cultural practices. His daily meetings with police help him to identify young people who need support to prevent them from turning to crime. He liaises with school heads and social workers to ensure they get the attention they need.

Importantly, it is the town’s aboriginal people who are running the project. Mr Ferguson set up two bodies for the purpose: Maranguka (“caring for others” in the language of Ngemba, a local tribe); and the Bourke Tribal Council. “This concept of allowing the community to be decision-makers has been here for thousands of years,” Mr Ferguson says. “It got lost when white settlement pushed traditional structures away.” The aboriginal leaders have overseen the creation of “Men of Bourke”, an informal group open to any aboriginal male who would like to talk to peers about problems relating to domestic violence and the abuse of drugs and alcohol that fuels it. Jonathon Knight, a member, says participants want to “focus on men so we can be role models”. The Sisters of Charity, a Catholic group, recently donated a plot of land shaded by gum trees for use by the group, called “Men’s Space”.

Local officials are pleased with the results. At a meeting of project leaders in July, police said domestic violence, as well as crimes committed by children, had fallen. School attendance has risen steadily; numbers suspended from classes have dropped. Greg Moore, the local police chief, says the project has been crucial to achieving this. In March the Australian Law Reform Commission, a federal agency, said it wanted a national body to be set up to promote similar efforts elsewhere. A report by KPMG, an auditor, says that the success of the Bourke experiment suggests that governments should pay.

Even the prison-loving government of New South Wales sounds keen. Brad Hazzard, its health minister, says Bourke has found “the most likely recipe for success”. But his government has yet to agree to put prison money into it.