The current state of law and order in Australia: not as simple as it seems

On the International Crime Victimisation survey conducted by the Australian Institute of Criminology, Australia ranks poorly against similar wealthy countries. We topped burglary and assault, came second in motor vehicle theft, and third in personal theft. Australian homicide figures are relatively low, the rate being the same as it was 100 years ago. Sexual assault is a difficult type of crime to compare internationally, as Australians are more likely to report incidents than victims in most countries.

What lessons are there for crime control?

There have been documented instances of and inquiries into corruption in Australian police forces. Queensland was the first state to have a Royal Commission into the issue, followed by New South Wales, and Western Australia is currently conducting its own. However, occasional concerns about corruption in policing notwithstanding, Australia has been quite fortunate in this regard when compared with most other countries.

Clearly, having more police won't necessarily reduce crime, but more good police can have an impact. Of course, the criminal justice system is much more than just the police. A lot depends on what happens to people who break the law, and how the general public reacts.

Over the past century the criminal justice system has become much more complex. In 1900, people confronting the system faced one of four types of sanctions: absolute or conditional discharges, fines, imprisonment, or execution. At the beginning of the twentieth century, executions took place in our prisons (there were 55 executions in the first decade alone). The last execution in Australia was in 1967. Today there is a multiplicity of sentence types and diversion processes, which causes some people consternation; not everybody is happy with the range of options. One interesting option is the whole process of restorative justice and conferencing. (Kathy Daly of Griffith University, Queensland contributed an excellent chapter on this to the Cambridge Handbook of Australian Criminology.) Further innovations of this type are still being developed and trialled in various places.

So what advice may be drawn out of all this for policy makers?

First, it seems important to stick to the evidence of crime reduction. Better data are needed than those currently available. Data-driven policy puts Ministers on the front foot. There is a substantial body of evidence from criminologists around the world - rigorously developed, and often replicable - about what measures have and have not proved effective. Part of the task ahead for Australian law and order is the systematic gathering and evaluation of this kind of evidence. We would, however, be extremely naïve to believe that political decisions are made on the basis of scientific evidence alone. Having the good sense to see where science is tempered by political realities is part of the policy package in crime reduction. It is equally important to acknowledge local variations and idiosyncrasies in the crime situation. Innovations that have worked in Balmain, Birmingham or Barcelona will not necessarily work in Brisbane.

Second, I would remind policy makers of the wisdom in the old saying, "if a piece of string has one end, then it has another end". As individuals, we too often focus only on one end, and those with whom we interact focus on the other end. Sometimes the bit in the middle gets a bit frayed, and sometimes there are impossible knots. To tie this metaphor back to the question of crime prevention, it must be understood that the work of the criminal justice system alone will not achieve all the results we desire. Co-operative thinking is required so as to produce policies and programs in this area that harmonise with those in health, housing, education, employment, and so on. Those with a stake in the issue should all be involved: communities, professionals, voluntary agencies, social groups, victims, and others. In thinking about the string we have to think about inter-agency activities, partnerships, and the boundaries that challenge us all. An important insight to make is that criminal justice agencies are not the best or only agencies to prevent crime - crime prevention is an important by-product of many activities in education, health, and urban planning, for example, although it is not the core activity of these policy and program areas.

Third, we need conceptual clarity on the type of crime we wish to see reduced. There are activities that offend people, and there are activities that hurt people, and then there are crimes that actually change the way people live. A bundle of different reduction strategies is available for each of these, and there are also some common crime-prevention strategies. It is the activities that offend that typically cause a lot of difficulties in respect of when and how much to intervene. A group of boys on a street corner making suggestive comments to the girls walking by; a group of kids smoking a joint behind a tree; the public use of disrespectful and obscene language; family altercations, and that sort of thing. The key here is having sense of when this sort of behaviour might get out of hand, and it is part of a broader challenge faced by the state to develop a public commitment to civility - and to try to make this spill over into private behaviour - while not intruding unduly into private behaviour. Crime prevention, when too zealously pursued, nudges a society towards the sort of ominous thought policing that Orwell warned us about.

However, crime prevention is not a challenge for governments to face alone. We all can contribute to building the partnerships to meet the emerging challenges. The safest communities are not those with the most police and prisons but those with the strongest community structures, including socialising institutions, families, and economic opportunities. Those opportunities exist and can be moulded to socially productive ends. Crime prevention is something that requires good conceptual thinking and a vision way beyond police, courts and prisons - a multi-faceted policy and practice approach, in which all of us have a role to play as citizens, as parents, as consumers, and as thinkers.