THE ACT needs to be careful. Tacit assumptions that we have the best educated, most caring society and are best able to deal with social questions of any jurisdiction in Australia are under threat.
The ACT still has a very low imprisonment rate compared to other states or territories, but if present trends continue that will not last much longer. Recent statistics put out by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Australian Institute of Criminology reveal that the ACT is increasing its rate of jailing faster than all other jurisdictions and has among the worst jail rates for youth.
And, contrary to popular mythology, crime at rates are falling, not rising.
These figures come at a time when the ACT is proposing to build its own prison. Moreover, the Government’s preferred option, expressed as recently as last week, is for it to be run by the private sector. The plan is for up to 400 inmates. Compared to our population of 320,000, this would increase our jailing rate by 25 per cent unless we took a significant number of prisoners from NSW. On this sort of population base, Sydney would require more than 10 jails. The danger for the ACT will be that once we have a jail, there will be a tendency for the courts to fill it up.
The ACT is building a jail at a time when the experience in at the United States is telling us that jailing more and more people is not the way to go. Last month, the jail population in the US topped two million for the first time. The latest census puts the population of the US at 280 million. This gives it an imprisonment rate of 711 people per 100,000. It is nearly five times the rate of imprisonment in Australia, but that is no reason for complacency. The danger is not so much the raw rate of imprisonment but the trend. In Australia, the rate of imprisonment has gone steadily up over the past 10 years. And In the past five years it has gone up 15 per cent.
The ACT’s record is much worse. The rate of imprisonment more than doubled in the five years to 2000. The ACT is now jailing 100 people per 100,000 population. That’s It is a rate less than one-seventh of the US rate, but the increase in the jailing rate is in fact faster in the ACT than in the US. In the past two years, the ACT overtook Victoria’s imprisonment rate, losing its place as the jurisdiction of the least imprisonment.
Given the figures produced by the Australian Federal Police last week, there seems little need for the ACT to increase its imprisonment rate. The AFP has shown that the number of offences has fallen 12 per cent in the past four months. Car thefts were down 29 per cent, burglaries 21 per cent, armed robberies 12 per cent and serious sexual assaults down 30 per cent. And to date this year the ACT has had no murders reported. A lot of the reduction can be put down to better police work in that the police have targeted multiple offenders. And it there is always the statistical aberration of a small ACT sample and an imperfect correlation between actual crime, reportage of crime, charging people with crime and conviction for crime. None the less, the AFP trumpeting of a reduced crime rate should surely cause the community and politicians to rethink the incessant beating of the law-and-order drum. And the AFP itself should have a rethink. It cannot have it both ways 1/2 trumpeting success at causing lower crime rates and at the same time calling for more resources to battle an increasing crime wave.
Given the AFP figures, the judiciary, legislature and executive should be looking for a reversal of the increasing imprisonment rate that has dogged the ACT over the past five years. The trend is significant and noticeable. South Australia has had a decline in the imprisonment rate from 130 per 100,000 people in 1996 to 111 last year. Tasmania’s rate last year was 109, growing more slowly than the ACT’s rate. If this keeps up, in a couple of years the ACT will have a higher imprisonment rate than Tasmania and South Australia as well as Victoria. As with Year 12 retention rates, we will slip from best to mediocre.
There is no need for higher imprisonment rates, if it were not for political drum-beating, as a simple comparison between NSW and Victoria reveals. NSW and Victoria are fairly similar sorts of places. Each has a dominant city and each has very similar rates of employment, education and other socio-economic indicators. Yet NSW has double the imprisonment rate of Victoria. It is not because Victoria has less crime. It is not because Victoria has a lesser drug problem. Indeed, on recent figures Victoria had a worse heroin overdose death toll than NSW. Rather, the difference in imprisonment rate can be put down to only one factor: that is because NSW has had a political auction between the two major parties attempting to prove to the voters which is tougher on crime.
The ACT must avoid this auction. No-one is safer in their beds because of it. Indeed, the cost of imprisonment is such that other services, particularly education, are cut, thus breeding a greater propensity to crime, and imprisonment itself trains people for a life of crime. Higher imprisonment rates make communities less safe, not more safe.
The danger here is not so much between the two major parties but rather the capacity for Independents to take votes from the major parties by beating the law-and-order drum.
The ACT must not fall for the NSW-US approach of locking them up in response to the drug explosion. The experience in the US has been that the policy simply does not work. It is hellishly costly. It causes young people who enter the jail system to commit further crime when they leave it. And drug use and drug-related crime continue unabated. Indeed, drug use is increasing despite, or perhaps because of, the high jailing rate. Drugs cannot be kept out of the jails. Further, diseases like HIV and Hepatitis C spread in US jails and then out into the wider community.
Also in the US, the large number of private prisons and large number of people employed in them has created a large lobby group in favour of tougher law-and-order policies because they profit from it financially. It makes it harder for the US to grasp the political nettle and try solutions that might work.
Before we go down the private-prison path we should look more closely at what has happened in the US. True, we do not have the difficulty that the US has with a large black minority population. However, the lessons are there. Prisons in the US cost $A92 billion a year to run. The US spends on average $A14,000 a year to educate a youth and $A70,000 to lock up a youth. And drug use continues unabated. The correlation between low education and imprisonment is very high. The US locks up the poor, the uneducated, the mentally unstable and the addicted, whereas most European countries provide treatment for them. Australia 1/2 as is often the case 1/2 is halfway between the two. Let us go down the European path rather than the US one.
And as we discuss a jail for the ACT, we should question whether it is necessary at all and certainly what other treatment options are available, rather than concentrating on the selfish property concerns of a few people in the inner south of Canberra.