Australia's prisoner numbers at all-time high and changing bail laws playing a part

Australia Broadcast Center

a day ago

The number of people in Australian prisons is at an all-time high and almost half of them have not been sentenced.
That number has been steadily increasing for the past three years, with 40,330 people in custody in March 2022 and the figure now up to 46,081, according to new Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data.
Unsentenced prisoners, also known as people on remand, increased by 8 per cent (1,345 people) to 19,119 in the last quarter, accounting for 42 per cent of people in prison.
In the past few years, every state and territory has implemented, or is currently implementing, bail reform to make laws stricter, particularly for young offenders.
Thalia Anthony, from the University of Technology Sydney faculty of law, said in many states bail laws had changed to have a presumption against bail for certain crimes.
For example, in New South Wales, those charged with domestic violence offences must now "show cause" as to why they should not be detained.
"It used to be just very, very serious offences [had a presumption against bail] and now the range of offences [has] become much more moderate," Dr Anthony said.
She added a lack of community-based bail accommodation also led to more people being refused bail.
"Instead, they are being imprisoned because that's where the resources of government are going," she said.
"Not support in the community, but to ever-expanding prisons."
University of Newcastle's head of law and justice, John Anderson, said the changes to bail laws were in part due to societal pressure.
"Governments tend to also react to certain situations," he said.
"So if you get certain high-profile cases where there's been serious crime and someone's been on bail, that certainly is amplified.
"I think that does generate fear in the community if people are getting bail awaiting their trial, accused of a serious crime, and then particularly if they offend again while they're on bail or they don't comply with their bail conditions."
However, he said that pressure had an unfair flow-on effect on people who were unlikely to their breach bail conditions and would benefit from being in the community.
Law and justice professor Rick Sarre, from the University of Adelaide, said the new figures showed a "complete and utter abject failure of social and justice policy".
"[It's] a massive, massive overspend which is driving more and more people to the wall in terms of justice policy and social policy and costing taxpayers billions of dollars for no reward," he said.
He said another driver of imprisonment was increased maximum penalties.
For example, in Queensland, the maximum penalty for possession of a knife in public has increased to 18 months imprisonment for a first offence and two years for a repeat offence, from 12 months for both.
"So it's not a question of judges saying, 'Let's get tougher on crime,' because judges are now being given the parameters and those parameters have been increasing," Dr Sarre said.
However, Dr Anderson noted that the type of offences most people were being imprisoned for were serious.
In both Queensland and New South Wales, the largest number of prisoners have been sentenced for assaults or acts intended to cause injury.
It coincides with the ABS national offending data.
"So those sorts of offences being on the rise [does] mean that there'll be a more punitive response, so that results usually in increased incarceration," Dr Anderson said.
The rate of imprisonment has increased to 214 people per 100,000 adults, with men making up 92 per cent of all prisoners.
The imprisonment rate in the Northern Territory far exceeds the national average at 1,381.6 people per 100,000 adults.
However, the Indigenous community has the highest imprisonment rate at 2,559 people per 100,000 Indigenous adults.
The 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody found Indigenous Australians made up 14.3 per cent of the prison population. At the time, that figure was labelled a crisis of over-representation.
In the latest prison figures, that number has risen to 37 per cent.
"When you've got law and order and systemic racism, these things are kind of a tinderbox for First Nations incarceration to explode," Dr Anthony said.
"That's what's happening there. Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander people are shouldering the burden of law and order."
Despite the high number of prisoners, the offending rate is at its lowest since the ABS began recording data in 2008-09.
However, Dr Anthony pointed out that more than half of the people leaving prison would reoffend, meaning imprisonment was unlikely to decrease offending.
Dr Sarre also said high incarceration rates did not reduce crime and the opposite tended to be true.
In Finland in 2023, there were 91.23 criminal offences reported per 1,000 people. Their current incarceration rate is 52 per 100,000.
Similarly Japan, which has one of the lowest imprisonment rates in the world at 31 per 100,000 people, has a crime rate of 57 offences per 1,000 people.
"Anyone who suggests that somehow the best way of bringing crime down is to raise the imprisonment rate is a complete idiot," Dr Sarre.
"The United States, for example, has one of the highest imprisonment rates in the world. It also has one of the highest crime rates in the world."
According to World Prison Brief data, Australia has the seventh-highest rate of imprisonment of the G20 nations.
Dr Sarre said reducing the crime rate down came through "good, creative social policy".
"[People are reoffending] … because we're simply not spending enough money on those people who are released by making sure their support networks for them," Dr Sarre said.
He said a better way to better ways to reduce the crime rate was by ensuring young people had good support networks through education, housing, mental health safety nets and safety nets for dysfunctional families and intergenerational trauma.
"That makes a far, far better report card than simply putting people behind bars," he said.
"But you simply don't hear it from politicians. And that's disgraceful."
Nationally, corrective services cost taxpayers $6.52 billion in 2023-24, according to the Productivity Commission.
And if the rate of imprisonment remains the same, that number is expected to increase to $7 billion a year, a 2022 report by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia says.