The ACT has recorded the largest fall of people in custody over the past four years of any state or territory, prompting the ACT shadow attorney-general to say people are walking the street who in the states would be put away.
The 40 per cent fall was recorded in a survey by the Australian Institute of Criminology, details of which were published yesterday.
The fall prompted the ACT shadow Attorney-General, Gary Humphries, to say it was a mixed blessing.
“”It is of concern to me that people are walking the city that in the states would have been put away,” he said, “”We may be either more enlightened, or more naive.”
The Attorney-General, Terry Connolly, however, said that community-service orders were very effective in the ACT and were attractive options for the judiciary.
The survey showed all states and territories, except NSW, had a fall with an Australian average fall of 10.2 per cent. The falls were: Tasmania 34.1; Victoria 31.0; Northern territory 19.9; Western Australia 9.2; South Australia 1.4; Queensland 0.6. The rise in NSW was 0.6.
Mr Humphries said the ACT made savings because people were not in jail, but the lack of ACT correctional facility meant judges had less flexible armoury. Lower number of custody cases could be a result of that. He suspected judges did not send people to jail because it would mean sending them to NSW where they had no control over them.
“”The lower custody rate may be at a higher price,” he said. “”The last two years saw a rapid rise in the crime rate.”
The rates of increase for many types of crime in the ACT were among the highest in Australia. The overall picture would not become clear until the recession was over. If, however, the ACT rate stayed up, it would show that non-custodial sentences might be a factor in increased crime.
He pointed to comments by Justice Gallop that non-custodial sentences could be an incentive to commit crime.
Mr Connolly disagreed. He said the rate of breaches of community-service orders was very low. The community benefited because a lot of work, especially manual work, around community and charitable facilities was done, which would otherwise go undone. This was better than paying the five-star rates that it cost to send prisoners to NSW.
The ACT had the lowest imprisonment in Australia, according to his figures. That was because jail was a last resort. People who committed serious crimes had to go to jail to protect the community, but no-one could seriously suggest the NSW prison system produced model citizens.
“”If we build a jail in the ACT, there will be a tendency to fill it up,” he said.
There might be a medium-term priority to build some sort of work-release or periodic-detention facility so ACT prisoners did not go straight from NSW jails on to the street.
The ACT chief magistrate, Ron Cahill, has disagreed with the proposition that the ACT Bench would fill up an ACT jail. He has called for an ACT correctional facility ÿ(subs: do not change correction facility to jail; i know it is a crappy phrase but they mean different things) to widen the range of sentencing options.