Such is life: reflections on the death of Ned Kelly

Should the police, the courts and the prisons have to deal not only with criminality, but untreated mental illness, addiction and the complex needs of many indigenous Australians and other ethnic communities disproportionately incarcerated in our prisons?

Governments around Australia face a critical challenge in seeking to shape a more effective criminal justice policy. It is particularly relevant this month in the State of Victoria, as we approach a state election.

Since March of this year, it became clear that the State Opposition wished to make "law and order" concerns central to their election strategy. This has involved commitments to substantially increase police numbers and the placement of security guards on trains and railway stations. The Victorian Opposition also promised to completely ban suspended sentences, and in doing so in practice has committed a future government to the construction of a major new prison to deal with the increased prison population. The Brumby Government has responded largely by attempting to match the Opposition’s promises.

Such measures represent an incredible increase in expenditure to law and order and confirmed many of the worst fears of those in the community sector who know how ineffective such measures would be.

A good example of an alternative approach is presented in the "Smart Justice" campaign, made up of a wide consortium of criminal justice reform organisations, including VCOSS and the Federal of Community Legal Services. The Smart Justice campaign seeks to hold both major Victorian political parties more accountable to the electorate by focusing on a factual analysis of the criminal justice system and the misuse of criminal sanctions and the overuse of imprisonment.

More than 30 years experience in monitoring criminal justice policy has told me that there is little to be gained from a bidding war on who could be tougher on law and order, other than pure political advantage. Good social policy can never evolve in this way. The essential goal in this process is to find a way to hold power or, if in Opposition, a way to obtain political power.

Meanwhile the present New South Wales government struggles to meet the costs of a State prison population about to reach the 10,000 mark. At the current rate of increase of the State’s prison population, New South Wales needs to construct a new prison every year. For more than five decades now, New South Wales has had an imprisonment rate approximately double that of Victoria, but their crime rate has not significantly changed and it remains largely comparable to that of Victoria.

A recent Australian Bureau of Statistics report indicated that from 1994 to 2007 Australia’s prison population had increased at an annual rate of 3.7%, while the number of prisoners with prior imprisonment increased at 3.2% per year on average. These are rates much higher than the national population increase, measured at about 1.3% per year on average during the same period. Clearly the construction and operation of the new prisons required to house such a dramatic increase in prison numbers takes limited financial resources from such critical areas as health, education, housing and transport.

My reflections over recent years have led me to consider what it could be that leads political representatives to such desperate measures… measures that by any objective analysis have been shown to have failed in a spectacular fashion over many, many years?

Do we as a nation seriously believe that the increased incarceration of young adult males from the most disadvantaged communities in Australia will result in anything more than a hardened criminal subculture in those neighbourhoods?

How to address such entrenched long term disadvantage does not rest with the criminal justice system. It is the criminal justice system that is left to pick up the casualties when our other social systems have failed us.

Instead, what is necessary to produce lasting change are carefully planned, collaborative, long term, multi-disciplinary interventions in the most disadvantaged communities that seek to bring about real participation and empowerment. Within Australia, similar analyses and recommendations have been made for many years.