Dr.
Weatherburn, the director of the NSW Bureau of Crime
Statistics and Research, called for a complete rethink of the way crime is
dealt with in the face of an exploding prison population and a political
obsession with being "tough on crime".
Despite crime rates falling sharply since 2001, the
prison population has increased, largely due to more people –
·being refused bail,
·receiving prison terms for
minor crimes; and
·staying in for longer.
Australia has about 36,000 prisoners and is
spending more than $2.6 billion a year keeping them there. It is the most
expensive and least effective form of reducing crime.
To reverse the
trend, Dr Weatherburn floated a five-point plan that
included locking up fewer offenders for minor assaults scrapping suspended
sentences and "toning down the political rhetoric".
With the prison
population in NSW hitting new records each month – it rose 12 per cent last
year to reach 12,121 in January – so too has the number of men and women
getting stuck in the revolving door of incarceration.
"Mr Forrest said the jobs that would be
offered to prisoners would all be in the
mining industry, but could range from
hospitality to heavy vehicle
maintenance.
He said he wanted to see the private
sector engage with State governments
across Australia to help stop the "revolving
doors" in Australia's jails."
"For Eileen Baldry, a leading
criminologist and University of New South Wales deputy vice-chancellor,
it’s a hard-headed approach, one that sucks up billions of dollars that
could
otherwise go towards
addressing the root causes of criminality
through early intervention,
diversion, prevention or rehabilitation programs.
"Former NSW director of public prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdrey, is
one of those championing justice reinvestment. He is lobbying the NSW
government to invest in the program in the 2018-19 budget.
He agrees the overcrowding problem is a failure of political leadership,
and an inability to see past short-term electoral cycles.
“Sensible policy, especially in this area, takes more than three or
four years to bear fruit and politicians prefer to stick with the
tried and tested approach of ‘tough on crime,’” Cowdrey said.
“There doesn’t seem to be much room for ‘smart on crime’. The
community bears the cost and the consequences of such tunnel-visioned
policy.”
"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”.
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.”
Championed originally in the US in response to huge
overcrowding in prisons, justice reinvestment involves the redirection of
corrections budgets to community priorities. Instead of spending money on
keeping people in prison, it invests in prevention: in health, education,
housing, employment – whatever helps.
The Aboriginal barrister and academic Prof Mick Dodson
says few people realise that it costs $400,000 a year to keep a young person
locked up in juvenile detention in NSW.
“If Cowra’s got 10 of them
locked up, you do the maths,” he says. “That’s $4m. Why not spend that money in
the community doing good things that keep those kids out of trouble?”
He hastens to say that justice reinvestment is not a
silver bullet or a free-for-all: “We’re not talking about keeping everyone out
of prison because some people who commit offences that are horrendous are a
danger to society and have to be locked up. But we’re talking about people who
can’t pay their fines, doing low-level crime.”
Australia is now spending $4bn a year on prisons: “That’s
a lot of money and it’s unsustainable.”
But although a
Senate investigation recommended a justice reinvestment
approach three years ago, Australian governments have been slow on the uptake.
The Maranguka justice reinvestment projectin Bourke is
the only major scheme in the country. South Australia has committed to two
trials, and the Australian Capital Territory has an official policybut no active program.
Cowra is a community
of about 12,000 people, with a “strong and proud” Aboriginal community who make
up 7% of the population, compared with 2% nationally. During many consultations
over the three years, the research team, led by Guthrie, met with
representatives from education, employment, health, community service, police,
judiciary and business sectors, as well as young people, parents, grandparents
and carers.
Kendal Street,
Cowra’s main road. The town’s Aboriginal population is
‘strong and proud’.
“Often communities
are asked to spend a bucket of money in a certain amount of time and this was
the opposite of that,” Guthrie says. “There was no bucket of money, no promise
of funds at the end.”
In the end,
Guthrie says, the project’s approach freed people up to think more broadly, “to
not think within the constraints of a certain amount of money”.
The research team calculated that the cost of
incarcerating Cowra citizens over the past 10 years had amounted to $42m.
Community representatives then worked through the crime categories behind that
cost, and selected which crimes they believed could or should be dealt with by
non-custodial sentences. They came up with eight categories:
1. Traffic offences 2. Public order offences 3. Justice procedure offences 4. Property damage
5. Drug offences 6. Fraud and deception 7. Theft 8. Unlawful entry with intent/burglary, break and enter
Those
categories, dubbed as “JR-amenable”, equated to about 50% of crimes committed,
offering a justice reinvestment “saving” and potential funding pool of $23m
over 10 years.
What to spend the ‘saved’ money on?
Priorities for
reinvestment in Cowra included: service mapping (noting the difference between
availability and access to services); keeping young people engaged in education
at all costs, through after-school, suspension, homework and mentoring
programs; employment and skills development; personal safety with an emphasis
on housing (emergency, halfway houses, hostels); and community transport.
Guthrie says
the research has built a model for other communities to explore and is hopeful
it will result in a scheme in Cowra. “I think we’d find it quite painful to
have to break the relationship now,” she says. “We’ve built the trust both
ways.”
West, the
mayor, says he has been pleasantly surprised by the support in the community.
He says: “We have young people out there who deserve to be looked after. You
don’t have to be young to make mistakes and get it wrong, so it’s nice to be a
caring and compassionate and civilised community, to
give people a fair go.”
But he says the
state government’s response to Cowra’s work has been
“frustratingly slow”.
The federal
opposition leader, Bill Shorten, highlighted Cowra’s
work in his response last week to the latest
Closing the Gap report card on Indigenous disadvantage, and the local state
Nationals MP, Katrina Hodgkinson, has championed the town’s plan within the NSW
government.
But that
political support is yet to translate into funding. “I’m personally
disappointed the progress has been very slow to date,” West says, adding that
Cowra’s proposal is exciting, innovative and backed by
broad community support and in-depth research. “The government has nothing to
lose and everything to gain.”
Why wouldn’t
they be absolutely grabbing it with two hands?
The community
wants about $750,000 over three years to appoint a program coordinator and fund
early groundwork and evaluation, including liaison with the more established
justice reinvestment program in Bourke.
The NSW
attorney general’s department says it “has received the application and will
arrange a meeting with the Cowra Justice Reinvestment project team to discuss
the proposal”.
Hodgkinson is
more inclined to blame the “slow wheels” of bureaucracy than government
inaction but also admits she is frustrated by the pace of progress. She says a
detailed proposal for funding was submitted to the then attorney general,
Gabrielle Upton, last October, but she has been making strong representations
for nearly a year.
“Why would they
be wanting to delay something that’s going to have great community acceptance
[and] be a positive for the New South Wales budget overall?” she asked. “I don’t
understand. Why wouldn’t they be absolutely grabbing it with two hands and
saying ‘let’s get on with it, let’s just do it’?”
The report, by conservative think
tank the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), said despite spending an estimated
$16 billion a year on our criminal justice system, Australians felt less safe
than the citizens of many comparable countries.
Author Andrew Bushnell said Australia's
$4 billion prison system had created a "class of persistent
criminals" because it was failing to reform inmates.
The report — Australia's Criminal
Justice Costs: An International Comparison — said Australian prisons were the
fifth most expensive among 29 countries in the Organisation
for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
The report advocates evidence-based
reforms, including locking up only the most dangerous criminals and dealing
with non-violent, low-risk offenders by way of home detention, community
service, fines, and restitution orders.
Mr Bushnell said police resources
should be concentrated in postcodes where crime was most prevalent and more
money should be spent on preparing prisoners for the workforce.
"No-one doubts that prisons and
police are vital government expenditures. But we are entitled to value for
money and we're not getting it," he said.
When you consider
Australia has a high level of reoffending, with more than half of released
prisoners returning to corrections within two years, it is clear that our
increased criminal justice spending is not yielding the results we might
rightly expect.
Addressing this
underperformance should begin with punishment reform for non-violent, low-risk
offenders. Violent criminals must be imprisoned to keep the community safe. But
for other offenders, measures like home detention and community service —
properly supervised of course — can achieve both retribution and better
rehabilitation outcomes.
Reducing reoffending is
the best way to reduce incarceration spending and crime. Unemployment is a
known correlate of crime, and the ample resources of our prisons should be directed
towards job training and literacy and numeracy. Policing has also been shown to
be effective in reducing crime, but merely increasing police numbers is not
enough. Police resources must be carefully targeted to known sources of crime.
Sarah Hopkins, a managing
solicitor for the Aboriginal Legal Service and chair of Just Reinvest
NSW, said workers in the justice system had reached "an all-time
high level of frustration".
"We have this entrenched public conversation around ... the need to
punish and the power of punishment to deter crime. When you look at the
evidence, it simply isn't true. Harsh punishment does not deter people
from committing crime," she said.
Just Reinvest, a pilot project in Bourke, re-aligns money that would
have been spent on the criminal justice system towards education,
treatment and other services to tackle the causes of crime.
"With rates of incarceration of indigenous people, it's such an urgent
problem and it would be such a development if people could just start
embracing a commonsense approach," she said."
She said there was a myth that victims of crime want harsher punishment.
"Everybody would agree what victims of crime want is that the crime
doesn't happen at all."
The Productivity Commission found 44.3 per cent of adult prisoners
released in 2012-13 returned to prison within two years, an increase
from 39.9 per cent in 2010-11. In NSW, the average cost per inmate, per
day, is $237.34.
A spokeswoman for the NSW government said they would consider the
contents of Dr Weatherburn's paper. "Community safety is the
government's number one priority and this requires an efficient and
effective justice system," she said.
In
NSW, it’s approximately $250. By contrast, the
work of Community Restorative Centre ("CRC") was
costing an estimated $70 per day. Governments
continue to spend much more on locking people up
than on the cheaper options that prevent people
returning to jail.
Lou
Schetzer, from the Public Interest Advocacy
Centre, says: ‘It's dumb public policy. It's
dumb economics. It's costing the taxpayer an
enormous amount for these people to be
continually re-offending and re-incarcerated.
And we really need to look at a better way of
investing the public dollar that encourages that
reintegration into society so that people who
are released from prison can make that valuable
contribution to society.’
The Department of Corrective Services says
that under the new system, it will be spending
twice as much as it is currently on transition
programs. But there are concerns about the
efficacy of the new three month programs,
whether the pay rates can attract the degree of
skilled staff needed for complex clients, and
about case loads.
Professor Eileen Baldry from the University of
NSW, researches prison populations. Up to half
of prisoners have a mental health disorder, and
a significant minority—up to 15 per cent—have a
cognitive impairment. Professor Baldry has found
that there’s significant overlap of those and
other issues.
‘Post-release,’ she says, ‘you really need
skilled workers, you need a range of
connections to the range of service
provisions that that person will need, and
you need time.’
‘This is not something which is going to be
addressed in three months or six months.
It’s something that’s going to take a long
time.’
There’s a dearth of research in Australia on
what works in post-release programs. However,
Professor Baldry says overseas research makes
clear what model is necessary.
‘[What] we know works is, some people call
it “wrap around”, some people call it
holistic, some people call it a “fully
supported housing project”. That’s the kind
of program that is most useful. Because what
it does, it addresses either sequentially or
at the same time, a lot of those issues.’
‘Work, particularly in the United Kingdom,
some in Canada and a bit in the United
States, shows very clearly that the
recidivism rates from those kinds of
programs are very low.’
Don
Weatherburn, the director of the Bureau of Crime
Statistics and Research, says governments should
be focusing on recidivism above all else.
‘Well it's hugely important,’ he says. ‘We
tend to preoccupy ourselves with creating
alternatives to prison, forgetting that most
people going to prison this year, or last
year, are actually going back to prison.’
There’s more leverage, he says, in reducing the
prison population by reducing the rate of return
to prison, rather than reducing the number of
people who go there in the first instance.
Tackling recidivism is not politically popular,
however. The last NSW politician who tried was
the recently dumped Attorney-General, Greg
Smith.
His
former media advisor, legal journalist Michael
Pelly, says Mr Smith’s interest in keeping
people out of jail, where possible, was popular
for a while—including with the new Premier, Mike
Baird, who was then the treasurer. Prison
numbers came down, and jails were closed.
‘The treasurer thought this was tremendous,’
says Mr Pelly. ‘Less money: $70,000 a year
for an adult, $250,000 a year for a
juvenile.’
‘That adds up to a lot of hospital beds you
can provide. And a lot of deficit and
infrastructure you can build. And that was
all going very well until the pressure went
on, and the whole notion that anybody would
be seen as soft on crime.’
According to Mr Pelly, the pressure came largely
from one source: 2GB’s Ray Hadley.
‘Ray has very solid links to the police and
has a very particular view about law and
order policy, and his voice is extremely
influential.’
‘Each parliamentary office up at Parliament
has a radio selection. And I can assure you
that from 9 o clock to 12 o'clock, I'd say
80 per cent of parliamentarians had Ray
Hadley on the radio and had Ray Hadley
telling them for a good four months that
Greg Smith is soft on crime, was a raving
lunatic, that Barry [O’Farrell] should sack
him.’
Gradually, Mr Smith lost the support of his
colleagues. Mr Pelly says he was frustrated that
amid the noise of the law and order rhetoric,
the fact that the Attorney-General was aiming
for a safer community was lost.
‘This is the whole folly of the exercise.
That it doesn't allow for a nuanced
approach.’
‘Don't forget we were a penal colony,
founded on the idea that people could get a
fresh start. Macquarie emancipated the
convicts, made them productive members of
society.’
"But looking squarely at the bitter reality of our crime
statistics, considering
alternatives to jail for more offences,
spending on correcting
instead of warehousing
and trusting that our police are keeping
us safe are big steps towards a fairer, safer and more just
community."