Australia's
jail population hits record high after 20-year surge -
The Guardian -
Joshua Robertson
- 11 Sep 2017
ABS figures show 41,200 people behind
bars and a jail population that has grown at more than four times the rate of
the overall population
The cost of running prisons in Australia is an estimated
$3bn a year.
Australia’s
jail population has hit a record high of more than 41,200 prisoners, as a
20-year surge in incarceration rates shows no sign of waning.
The daily average
of full-time prisoners in custody rose 7% to 41,204 over the year to the June
quarter, according to
figures from the Australian Bureau of
Statistics on Monday.
That represented a 133% leap in prisoner numbers since
the June quarter of 1997, meaning the
national jail population grew at more than four times the rate of the overall
population over the last two decades.
The cost of running prisons in Australia is
likely to have hit around $3bn a year, based on
Productivity Commission figures.
Inmates on
remand awaiting court sentences (11%) and women (10%) were the fastest-growing
groups of prisoners over the last year.
Indigenous
prisoner numbers rose 7% in line with the overall increase but they remain
grossly overrepresented in jail, making up 2% of the general population but 28%
of the prison population.
Keith
Hamburger, who formerly ran Queensland’s jail system as the state’s first
director general of corrective services, said prisons “basically around the
country at the moment are overcrowded”.
But “just
building more prison cells and stuffing people into them is not the answer”.
Most in jail were on short sentences and with a lack of
treatment programs to help stop reoffending. The system cried out for “a
different approach from our policymakers”, Hamburger said.
“We need
high-security prisons for dangerous long term offenders,” he told the Guardian.
“But we are building far too many prison cells for people who churn through,
spend weeks or a few months on remand, a few months in jail, then go out
again.”
Surging prison
numbers were one result of populist “tough on crime” lawmaking by state governments, including
mandatory sentencing and tougher hurdles for bail, Hamburger said.
Many people, especially women, were stuck in jail because
they could not access safe accommodation or drug treatment programs they needed
for otherwise willing magistrates to grant bail, Hamburger said.
“Now, if we had bail hostels with substance abuse programs
attached to them, we could take a lot of people out of remand prisons around
Australia tomorrow,” Hamburger said.
“We’re just
going about this the wrong way because it’s ridiculous when somebody gets a
bail order, particularly for women offenders, and they’ve got a substance abuse
problem and inappropriate or unsafe accommodation, and we slot them into jail
instead of looking for a more cost-effective option.
“If government
put a bit of effort into that in terms of times and resources, that’d be far more
cost-effective than jail.”
Hamburger said
the Indigenous imprisonment rate was “shocking and in terms of trying to do
something, I reckon that’s low-hanging fruit”.
He is a proponent of
Indigenous enterprises being given a bigger role in running “a lot of these hostels and healing and rehabilitation
facilities” to cut imprisonment rates.
One of the few
signs of any fall in jail statistics was the Indigenous imprisonment rate in
the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory, which both fell by
4% in the last year, according to the ABS.
Hamburger said
the rise in overall prison numbers demanded “meaningful” action on two main
fronts: rehabilitating offenders and getting them back to a “law-abiding
lifestyle” in their community, and “dealing with the drivers of social and
economic dislocation that a lot of communities are experiencing”.
“Most [offenders]
come from difficult socioeconomic backgrounds, have had problematic education
experiences and many come from abusive and neglectful families,” Hamburger
said. “Than we put them in prisons, which are
basically [overcrowded] around the country.
“There’s a lack
of treatment programs and the great majority of sentences are relatively short
sentences.
“So just
building more prison cells and stuffing people into them is not the answer.”