Andrew Leigh (Fenner, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I am sure it has escaped none of us in this chamber the irony of a Liberal member bringing forward a motion calling on the Victorian judiciary to be tougher at a time when no fewer than three ministers are facing charges before a Victorian court for scandalising contempt. But it is vital in this debate as in all debates that we begin from the facts.

Over the course of the last two decades, Australia's murder rate has fallen by a third, our armed robbery rate has fallen by a third, and car theft has fallen by two thirds. Yet, at the same time, our prison population is rising at an extraordinary rate. As of June 2016, 38,685 Australians were behind bars, and on the current trajectory the prison population will soon pass 40,000. If our jail population were a city it would be the 36th-largest city in Australia, larger than Albany, Bathurst or Devonport.

But what matters is incarceration as a share of the adult population. By my estimate, our incarceration rate now is around 207 prisoners per 100,000 adults. That gives us a higher incarceration rate than Canada, India, Germany, Indonesia or Britain. It also gives us a higher incarceration rate than we have had in some time. From looking back through historical archives to see just how long, my analysis suggests that it is not since 1901 that Australia's incarceration rate has been as high as it is now. If we are to reduce Indigenous incarceration and deal with the fact that a young Australian Indigenous man is now more likely to go to jail than to university, we need to recognise the challenge that incarceration poses to Australia. We know that for every prisoner, approximately, there is a child who has a parent behind bars. That now means 40,000 Australian children with a parent behind bars. Prison costs around $300 a day, or around $110,000 a year, which means that Australia is now spending more than $3 billion a year on our jails.

There is another approach to this. In the United States, where around one per cent of the adult population are behind bars, there has been a bipartisan movement to cut incarceration, epitomised in a joint opinion piece last year from Democrat economist Jason Furman and Republican Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who argued that the additional prisoners in the United States tend now to be nonviolent offenders whose imprisonment will have little impact on the crime rate. The two economists point out that, while a father is in jail, the chances of his family falling into poverty rise by 40 per cent and that prisoners develop criminal networks which cut their chance of holding a regular job upon release. That is why, over recent years, we have seen more than 20 states roll back mandatory sentences in the United States, including Michigan in 2003 for drug offences, New York for drug laws, and South Carolina for drugs and other categories.

It is ironic, given that the mover of the motion originally came from the Institute of Public Affairs, that it is the Institute of Public Affairs which is now arguing that Australia needs to learn these lessons from the United States. In a new report, Andrew Bushnell, a research fellow at the free market think tank—not a think tank I think I have quoted in this place before, but even a stopped clock is right twice a day—writes:

Violent criminals must be locked-up. But many nonviolent offenders currently being jailed can safely be punished with home detention, community service, fines and restitution orders.

He notes that the experience in the United States could well be taken note of in Australia as we look to reduce crime and incarceration.

Mark Kleiman, the author of When Brute Force Fails, spoke in this parliament in 2013, drawing out his distinction that this is a system which places, in his view, too much emphasis on severity and not enough on certainty and swiftness. A 10-year sentence costs the community 10 times as much as a one-year sentence, but rarely do people think that it achieves 10 times as much deterrence. In Kleiman's view, we ought to place much more emphasis on certainty and swiftness. That means, as the Law Council has suggested, that we need to beware of mandatory sentencing, which in the Law Council's view can potentially increase the likelihood of recidivism, because new prisoners are inappropriately placed in a learning environment for crime. (Time expired)

See this speech in context