Legal expert says increase incarceration due to tough bail laws

ABC NEWS (Australia)

The number of people incarcerated in Australian prisons is at an all-time high, and almost half of them have not been sentenced to a crime. New data from the abs also show Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners make up a disproportionately large share of the incarcerated population. Law academic Thalia Anthony says the increase in inmates can be attributed in part to tougher bail laws.

Transcript

00:00We can see that there's been an upward trajectory since the 1990s in prison rates.

00:08A lot of that growth is attributed to increasing numbers of people on remand.

00:13So they've been refused bail, have not yet been necessarily proven guilty or sentenced to prison.

00:19So over the last decade in particular, there's been a number of flashpoints where bail laws have become tougher,

00:28along with laws relating to policing, sentencing, parole.

00:33All of these policy settings have shifted to become more punitive.

00:38And this is largely attributed to, I would say, a frenzy around a particular number of crimes.

00:45We saw Bourke Street killings in 2014, the Lint Siege in 2017,

00:51and then just incrementally media honing in on particular incidents that have, I think,

00:58very much culminated in a frenzy to toughen laws.

01:01I mean, recently in Melbourne we saw radio personalities run an online petition calling for tougher bail.

01:08So there's really a moral panic in the community that doesn't necessarily reflect crime rates.

01:14Certainly crime is very steady.

01:16Crime rates haven't really changed since the 1990s, despite prison rates skyrocketing.

01:24We do know that people who go to prison tend to be re-imprisoned.

01:28So there certainly isn't a rehabilitative effect.

01:31And arguably there's a criminogenic effect, meaning that if you go to prison,

01:37you're more likely to continue on that cycle of imprisonment.

01:41We have now got the highest proportion in history of Indigenous people in prison, 37%.

01:48So more than a third.

01:50There's particularly skyrocketing rates for First Nations women.

01:55And what we see, especially because the rates of remand have been climbing,

02:01is that almost half of them will not even be sentenced to prison.

02:06So again, they're being imprisoned without that necessarily being correlated to a conviction.

02:14And yet it has detrimental effects on their families, on their capacity to connect to community,

02:21on homelessness rates, on unemployment.

02:23So huge social fallout without any particular reduction in crime or improvement in community safety.

02:31We're spending almost $7 billion on prisons each year.

02:36And I think those beds should be found in social and community housing, not in prisons.

02:42Certainly we know that when people go to prison, about a quarter of them are homeless.

02:46So we're dealing with, I think, chronic social problems with a punitive and prison response.

02:52And I think those resources would be much better directed towards supports in the community.

02:57Because we know the societies that have the lowest crime rates also have the lowest prison rates.

03:03And they have a huge social infrastructure to support people, especially people who are marginalised,

03:09people with mental health issues.

03:11And groups such as Indigenous people and racially oppressed people,

03:16who otherwise are not given the support necessary and not able to exercise self-determination.

Category

Transcript

Recommended