Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tonight, I would like to speak about prisons, particularly the situation facing prisoners as well as education in prisons. In the last day or so, I have mentioned a few times how reports, which can be on completely different topics, often come down with findings that are not terribly different from those of reports done some time ago on a similar issue. It is worth reflecting upon one such report done by the former Senate Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training. It was the very final inquiry produced by the Senate before the change of government back in 1996. This report, which was tabled by former Liberal New South Wales senator John Tierney, examined the issue of education and training in correctional facilities. It produced 32 recommendations that were all unanimous. In reading and examining it and the government response, I suspect that were the same inquiry done now, you would find that there had been some changes and some improvements but that the same core problems were still there. When Senator Tierney was talking to the report in 1996, he said that there had been improvements and that the situation was ‘just disgraceful’ whereas before it was ‘just appalling’. That was the way we were measuring the improvement. Whether or not the situation now has moved beyond disgraceful is perhaps a matter of opinion, but it is far less than satisfactory—to put it politely.

It is worth noting a few statistics here. As at 30 June last year, there were 20,209 sentenced prisoners in Australian prisons, Indigenous Australians comprised 24 per cent of those prisoners and the median or mid-point age for all prisoners was 33 years. A particularly stark statistic is that 57 per cent of those prisoners in custody had served a sentence in adult prisons prior to their current episode and that 63 per cent of those prisoners were serving aggregate sentences of fewer than five years. So the majority of prisoners were repeat offenders but an even higher percentage of them were serving fewer than five years. This means that over 10,000 of those prisoners will be coming back into the community in the not-too-distant future.

It is a simple fact that it is in the community’s self-interest—let alone in the individual prisoner’s self-interest—for prisoners to have the maximum opportunity to go straight, as it were, and to get back on the rails and become productive members of the community again. It is so self-evident that it barely needs to be said that it benefits all of us. It saves us a lot of potential cost down the track if these people are assisted as much as possible to not reoffend. This does not just involve the immense cost in keeping people in prison and all of the institutional frameworks around that; it also involves all the social costs that go hand in hand with the crime that is committed.

It is appropriate to acknowledge that we should not forget about the individual rights of the prisoner. It is totally unpopular and politically incorrect to talk about the rights of prisoners and how we have an obligation to those who are incarcerated to give them the best possible chance to start a new life and to become productive members of the community. As a politician, if you want to talk about people’s rights and who we should be helping, probably one of the last groups you would be advocating for would be prisoners because there is a very low level of community sympathy and support for people who have been imprisoned for serious offences. That is completely understandable.

Coming back to our wider self-interest, we should be able to recognise that diminishing people who are in prison and dismissing them as people who have no rights or as people whom we should not have any regard for will make it much more likely that they will reoffend when they get out. As I said, the vast majority of prisoners will and should get out, no matter what crime they have committed. The majority of these crimes are not of such seriousness that the community would think that prisoners should be locked up for life. So, if they are not going to be locked up for life, they are going to be back out in the community at some stage.

It is important to, in some respects, revisit that situation that that Senate committee reported on over 11 years ago and to recognise that the performance in regard to education and training in correctional institutions is not adequate. We have a greater realisation now that too many people in our prisons have a mental illness and that prisons are being used as de facto institutions to house the mentally ill. By their nature, these institutions are exacerbating that mental illness in many cases. Some moves have been made to start to address that, but not enough. On top of that, I do not think anywhere near enough resources are being put into educational and training opportunities.

I am not saying that no efforts have been made. In my own state of Queensland, the annual report from the last financial year of the department of corrective services stated that it had delivered to prisoners 25,600 hours of teaching of nationally accredited vocational education and training and nearly 15,000 teaching hours of literacy and numeracy education—a total expenditure of just under $60 million on correctional intervention. As far as I can ascertain, very little funding from the federal level is being contributed in the education arena for prisoner rehabilitation and support. There are some discretionary grants for support and rehabilitation of Indigenous Australians and some individual funding for community based organisations, but it is not much and it is rather piecemeal.

We have a federal government that now wants to intervene in all sorts of areas. It is the most centralised interventionist government in Australian history by a long shot, and education is one of the many areas where the federal government is very keen to intervene and tell the states what to do. If the federal government want to intervene, add resources or demand some action, I would encourage them to look at this area, because it is an area that needs more action, resources and attention. It is a good test for the federal government because, as I said before, it is not politically popular, but it is certainly smart. It is certainly intelligent policy to invest more in this key area, because we still have those very serious recidivism statistics and that is a major cost to the community.

By putting even relatively small amounts of money into proper education and training that plug into qualifications out in the wider community, we would significantly increase the opportunities for prisoners to get on the straight and narrow once they get out. That includes of course proper assistance with health issues, whether mental health issues or dependency issues or other matters, and, indeed, literacy and numeracy training and support and skilling.

If there is ever a time when we needed to do this and when investment of resources would be likely to bear fruit it is at a time when we do have quite low unemployment, more job opportunities and skill shortages in areas of trades and training. As any of us who have met people who have got in trouble with the law, ended up in jail and then managed to get their life back on course will know, these people can be just as effective contributors to society and the economy as anybody else. In some ways, by virtue of having got through what, by any stretch of the imagination, is a pretty hard experience and got back on the straight and narrow, they can often have extra insights and can make extra contributions.

I want to urge resourcing into this area from the federal level as well as state level. I am concerned that the Beattie government in Queensland is putting enormous amounts of extra resources into building more jails and bigger jails at the moment. Inevitably, if you build more jails and bigger jails you will find ways to fill them all up. You just get a bigger prison population and more likely than not one trained in some of the ways of a life of crime, and there will be a bigger pool of recidivist ex-prisoners more likely to reoffend. If we can put more resources into the training and education and less into bigger jails, then I think our efforts would actually bear much more fruit. It might not suit the law and order shock jock approach to the law and order debate, but I think that if you are just looking at what is best for the community across the board then that is the smart way to go. I would really urge more attention and focus on this area from the federal level as well as the state.