By Rafael Gerster, Kate Mullaly, Sana Ahmadzai and Gabriel Mills-Connolly
Australia’s Prisons
Australia has 115 correctional facilities that are managed by the state or territory were they are located.
As of June 2022 there are 40,627 persons in custody across the country. NSW having the most prisoners of any state with 12,453 people serving time and the ACT having the least amount of prisoners with only 383 people serving time.
The majority of people incarcerated are male at 93 percent while only 7 percent of all incarcerated people are women.
In Australia according to the ABS the most common offense committed by prisoners is “acts intended to cause injury”.
Norwegian Prisons
Australia has been experiencing significantly high numbers of prisoners in comparison with Norway.
According to World Prison Brief, Australia’s prison population rose from 29, 700 in 2010 to 41, 060 in 2020.
Contrastingly, the number of prisoners in Norway decreased from 3624 to 2932 during that ten-year period.
The decrease in Norway’s prison population has been attributed to the country’s rehabilitative services. A research report published in 2019 said Norway’s prison system has been able to discourage further criminal behavior through programs aimed at improving employability.
According to the report, there was a 34 percent increase in previously unemployed prisoners partaking in job training programs and a 40 percent increase in employment rates.
Fiona MacDonald, researcher in the sociology of education at Victoria University, said Australia’s rising prison numbers could be addressed if Norway’s rehabilitative prison system is used as a model.
But there are factors which are inhibiting Australia’s ability to rehabilitate prisoners. A key example is remand. A 2021 Productivity Commission report said the “uncertainty” associated with remand “limits access to available services such as education and training and rehabilitation programs”.
Remand has been on the rise in Australia. Data published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2021 showed the number of prisoners on remand had increased by more than eight thousand since 2010.
Allison Baker, lecturer in social pedagogy at Victoria University, said the increase in remand prisoners is concerning due to its adverse mental health implications.
In addition to remand, there has been a significant rise in the operating cost of prisons in Australia. Data published by Productivity Commission in 2021 showed the operating expenditure of prisons had increased by more than $1, 000, 000 since 2010. In contrast, the operating expenditure of community corrections had increased by less than $200, 000.
Ms Baker said Australia should stop investing in prisons and instead pay more attention to the main factors which are causing imprisonment.
American Prisons
The number of people being imprisoned in the US has gradually increased over the last 40 years to 2 million, shared The Sentencing Project. The increase of these numbers is largely dependent on the change of law and policy rather than crime rates.
Despite mounting evidence that mass incarceration is ineffective at achieving public safety, these trends have resulted in prison overcrowding and increased fiscal burdens on states to accommodate a rapidly expanding penal system. People incarcerated based on drug conviction make up most of the population of prisons in the US, said The Sentencing Project.
The Sentencing Project’s statistics show that the number of people incarcerated for drug related crimes in the 1980’s was 40,900. This number has drastically increased in recent years to 430,926 in 2019. According to The Sentencing Project, America’s mass imprisonment is largely a result of policies enacted by a dominant white culture that insists on the suppression of others.
The injustices Native Americans, African Americans and Latino’s face in America are no surprise to the world when looking at past cases of police brutality, such as George Floyd’s death. Many large scale protests were held not just in America but globally with crowds seen holding banners of Black Lives Matter making rounds in major cities.
The Black Lives Matter hashtag captured global attention in late May 2020 soon after Floyd’s death riling up many active social media users demanding peace and equality. While police were able to contain the protests in several cities, the BLM movement went viral across multiple social media platforms.
African Americans are also known to be held in custody a lot longer than white Americans. The underlying question is how many thousands more have been brutally oppressed in prisons away from the public eye?
Recidivism and Youth incarceration
The idea behind incarceration is to reduce crime, provide a disincentive for committing a crime and subsequently to reduce the prison population. To understand if a penal system is working one of the key figures to look at is the recidivism rate of each country.
Norway’s progressive prison system has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world, with only 20 percent of inmates re-offending within 5 years. Reforms on the justice system, in the 90s, focused on rehabilitation and restorative justice.
America, along with the largest prison population per capita, has one of the highest recidivism rates in the western world. According to the US Department of Justice of the prisoners released in 2012 46 percent of them re-offended.
The roots of high recidivism rates are intricate, but in the same study by the DoJ it found that 81 percent of prisoners aged 24 and under were arrested within 5 years, in comparison to 61 percent of 40 or older prisoners.
The federal minimum age of criminal responsibility for America is 11 and in 33 states there is no minimum age, as opposed to Norway’s minimum age which is 15 with reduced sentencing till 18. In Australia’s states the age of criminal responsibility begins at 10.
Lorelle Holland is Wandandanji woman who is a PHD candidate from the School of Health and associate lecture at University of Queensland has spent her academic career focusing on the mistreatment of indigenous children in the youth incarceration.
Lorelle is from Queensland and when Queensland went to an election in 2020 one of the political battlegrounds was crime. The LNP during the campaign proposed a law that would introduce a curfew for children under 17. The LNP lost the election but the Queensland government still needed to address the topic of Crime
America has shown that building more prisons is not the solution to reducing crime, but it is a way of moving the problem out of the view from the public. Australia has a sordid history with mistreatment young indigenous children in prisons.
The scenes at Don Dale are an extreme of the failure of the youth correctional system. One of the many recommendations that the royal commission made was to raise “the age of criminal responsibility to 12 and only allowing children under 14 years to be detained for serious crimes.”
First Nations people and the prison system
Australia’s First Nations people are the most incarcerated people on the planet according to the available data from The Conversations Fact Check . Aboriginal Australians are incarcerated a higher percentage than both African Americans and Native Americans.
Aboriginal Australians make up just 3 percent of the general population but make up 29 percent of the adult prison population. Young Aboriginal Australians make up 6 percent of general population but 48 percent of the youth prison population.
James Ogloff, professor and dean of school of health sciences is a co-author of the paper ‘Are Australian prisons meeting the needs of Indigenous offenders?’ which explored the mental health and wellbeing of Aboriginal Australians. The study found that when comparing Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal prisoners there are “significantly higher rates of mental illness” in Aboriginal Australian prisoners then in the non-Aboriginal prisoners and this was especially the case for women.
First Nations women are the fastest growing prison population in Australia and are 21 times more likely to be incarcerated then non-Aboriginal women. Aboriginal women in the prison system are also more likely to be mothers, have experienced domestic violence, have substance abuse issues and mental illness or cognitive disability then non-Aboriginal women.
Professor Ogloff said that each state varies in the way the they treat the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal Australians, but overall the key issues remain the same.
“There is such a high level of need and demand for these mental health services in the prison not only for Aboriginal Australians but all prisoners and there is a shortage of not just resources but also personnel.”
There was also a noticeable disconnect from country. Professor Ogloff stated that most Aboriginal Australians interviewed during the study didn’t speak any Aboriginal language and felt “confused about their own culture and identity”.
This article was originally produced on Shorthand. Click below for the original version.
