RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. In recent years, Australia has seen an acceleration in law and order style electioneering.

Archival tape -- Unidentified Speaker:

“The reality is people are too scared to go to restaurants at night time because they're followed home by these gangs…”

Archival tape -- Unidentified Speaker:

“This is the greatest commitment in police numbers we’ve ever seen in this state.”

Archival tape -- Unidentified Reporter:

“The LNP is taking its biggest gamble of the campaign.. betting its elective fortunes on a controversial hardline youth crime policy…”

RUBY:

At the same time, Australia’s incarceration rate has hit a record high.

Archival tape -- Unidentified Speaker:

“We now have the highest number of people in our prisons than ever before…”

RUBY:

Now, as a global conversation about justice reform continues, there are growing calls to change our approach. Today, national correspondent for The Saturday Paper, Mike Seccombe, on who gets jailed in Australia and what needs to change.

RUBY:

Mike, over the weekend in Queensland the Palaszczuk government was returned for a third term. But towards the end of that election campaign, there was a major policy announcement made by the Opposition leader, Deb Frecklington. Can you tell me about the youth curfew that she announced, and why she thought it would win her votes?

MIKE:

Well, yes, as you said, if elected, she promised that her government would impose a curfew on kids in Cairns and Townsville.

Archival tape -- Deb Frecklington:

“Today I can announce that the LNP will introduce a trial curfew for both Cairns and Townsville…”

MIKE:

Anyone under the age of 14 out past 8:00pm, anyone under the age of 18 out past 10:00pm unaccompanied and, quote, without good reason, unquote, could be detained by the police.

Archival tape -- Deb Frecklington:

“The youths are laughing in the face of the police officers. They are laughing in the face of the government because Labour are soft on crime.”

MIKE:

And furthermore, their parents could be fined $250 for the fact that the kids were out.

Archival tape -- Unidentified Reporter:

“Under Labour, there is no plan to get tough on crime. That is why we must elect an LNP government to save this community…”

MIKE:

So even by the usual standards of populist campaigning, this was stunningly unsubtle. But you know, the motivation was absolutely clear.

RUBY:

So what is going on in Townsville? Has there been a spike in crime involving young people?

MIKE:

Well, yes, there are crime issues in Townsville. There's no denying that. Mostly relatively minor things. Property, crime and suchlike, but these crime issues have been blown way out of proportion by the media up there.

Archival tape -- Unidentified Reporter:

“They call it ground zero. In the war against youth crime, right here is where the frontline is.”

MIKE:

The Murdoch owned Townsville Bulletin, along with, you know, tabloid television, have run a long campaign of wild exaggeration.

Archival tape -- Unidentified Reporter:

“They were all under the age of 15, not old enough to drive, should be in bed, instead, at 2:00 in the morning they’re scoping out cars, robbing homes without fear.”

MIKE:

The papers and local TV networks have just been full of stories.

Archival tape -- Unidentified Reporter:

“You see that there is no respect from any of these juveniles anymore. They just don't care.”

MIKE:

It has echoes, I think, of the African crime gangs coverage, which we saw in Melbourne and Victoria ahead of the last Victorian state election.

Archival tape -- Unidentified Reporter:

“A new wave of gang violence is terrorizing Melbourne. The Apex crime group is hellbent on its carjackings, armed robberies, and violent home invasions…”

MIKE:

You know, the subtext to all of this is that there should be simplistic punitive policies - such as Frecklington’s - to solve the problem, except of course we know that they don't actually solve the complex problem of criminal behaviour. But what they do is work to the commercial advantage of those populist and right-wing media outlets and also, of course, to the electoral advantage of right-wing politicians.

RUBY:

So you're saying that a youth curfew, it wouldn't solve criminal behaviour. Why is that? And what would the effect of it be?

MIKE:

Well, I spoke to Michael Cope, who's the president of the Queensland Council of Civil Liberties, about this, and he referred me to some comparative studies done overseas.

Archival tape -- Michael Cope:

“So basically what this study did, was to go through and look at whether or not the crime rates went up or increased in the counties that imposed curfews, and compared it with what happened in the other counties. So basically, it's a real life experiment.”

MIKE:

And what was found was that it made no difference whatsoever to crime rates.

Archival tape -- Michael Cope:

“The evidence would indicate that they don’t work, they don't achieve what they're supposed to do. And so they are as far as we’re concerned, they're just a cheap political stunt.”

MIKE:

So, you know, essentially curfews don't stop those whose intent it is to commit offences - they still go out and do it. But what it does do is make offenders of the innocent. It essentially criminalises people who are not really doing anything wrong except that they're out past the designated hour.

Archival tape -- Michael Cope:

“The first point is that it is a violation of fundamental rights. It is treating innocent and guilty people the same. We need to do the hard spadework of actually looking at what's going on in Townsville, analyzing what the causes of it are and addressing those causes, and not taking these measures which are just simply not going to work.”

MIKE:

So, you know, as Cope put it, this effectively would put everyone in those parts of Queensland under the age of 18 under house arrest. And on top of that would further entrench disadvantage.

RUBY:

How would that happen, Mike?

MIKE:

There's a pattern in Queensland. I think we can say on the evidence, and right across Australia, that police disproportionately target Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. Certainly a lot of the tabloid focus that's generated around this issue has played up this concern within communities. So, you know, there's a big element of dog whistle here.

And the other big worry here is with the threat that fines would be levied against the parents, given as Cope pointed out, one of the major reasons that the most disadvantaged people end up in jail is because they can't pay fines. So laws like this that by design target marginalised groups more than the rest of the community, they work to justify prejudice and they work to ensure an ever growing flow of people into prison. And they work so well that Australia now has one of the highest incarceration rates in the developed world.

RUBY:

Right. So how does our incarceration rate compare to other jurisdictions?

MIKE:

Well, here's a shocking statistic for you: there is now a higher proportion of people in Australian prisons than there has been at any point in over a century since the late 1800s. Since 2000, the year 2000, the number of Australians in jail has doubled. That dramatically outpaces the general rate of population growth. So, you know, we now rank third among comparable countries well ahead of all of Western Europe, ahead of Britain, Canada, just behind New Zealand, and of course, way behind the United States, in terms of imprisonment rates. Even more uncomfortable than the number actually in prison, more than a third of them haven't even been sentenced.

You know, they haven't been tried, they're on remand, they've been refused bail, and many of them will ultimately not be convicted or sentenced. And many of them stay in there for up to a year or more without necessarily having been proven guilty of anything. This is particularly evident, I would suggest, in the imprisonment rate for First Nations people. It's almost 12 times the rate of other Australians. So it's higher even than the rate amongst black Americans, which makes indigenous people in Australia probably the most imprisoned people in the world. And the growing prison population appears to not be correlated in a way to actual crime rates, you know, despite what the likes of Deb Frecklington might suggest.

RUBY:

We’ll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Mike, we’re talking about how even though the crime rate in Australia is declining, more people
are still being sent to jail. Why is that?

MIKE:

Well, the first point is that crime rates for most categories of crime have been going down for around 25 years, which is to say, long before the recent sort of startling increase in imprisonments.

Archival tape -- Nicholas Cowdery:

“So we have fewer crimes being committed, not an adjustment just in accordance with population growth, but a huge blow out of the prison population.”

MIKE:

I spoke to Nicholas Cowdery about this - he's the former director of Public Prosecutions in New South Wales, and he's now part of a newly established group called the Justice Reform Initiative, which aims to rectify this situation.

Archival tape -- Nicholas Cowdery:

“Governments are legislating to restrict the discretion of judges so that very often they have no legal alternative but to impose a sentence of imprisonment, even if one is not objectively indicated for that particular offense and that particular offender.”

MIKE:

He makes the point that the relationship between crime rates and imprisonment rates isn't really there. All the research has discovered, he said, only one cohort of criminals for whom locking up large numbers does a lot of good, and that's professional housebreakers - you know, ironically enough, their business isn't going well at the moment because everyone's working from home. Imprisonment rates aren't driven by crime rates at all. They're largely driven by fear amongst the politicians of appearing soft on crime.

Archival tape -- Nicholas Cowdery:

“There seems to be this hang up in the minds of a lot of politicians that they have to appear to their electors to be imposing swingeing punishments on people who commit even the most minor infractions against the law.”

MIKE:

And the direct consequence of this fear has been a succession of so-called reforms that encourage the justice system to show less leniency for minor offences and less inclination to employ diversionary processes.

RUBY:

How so?

MIKE:

Various jurisdictions have made bail and parole conditions more stringent. They've increased the number of offences for which imprisonment is available. They've increased the maximum terms for some offences and they've constrained judicial discretion when dealing with cases before them, think about mandatory sentencing, for example. Plus, of course, the tough on crime mindset encourages police to show less leniency and discretion in their handling of minor offences.

The tough on crime mindset has sort of taken over the country, I've got to say, over the past couple of decades, not just at vast cost to the people on the inside, but at vast cost to the general community because it now costs about 3.6 billion dollars a year to keep these people in jail. And that cost is rising all the time. Highest of all in Victoria, where it's $329 per prisoner per day, by far the most expensive prison system in the country. And this is particularly interesting because Victoria also has the highest proportion of inmates who are being held in privately run prisons.

RUBY:

Right. And so when we're talking about privately run jails, what issues arise there around accountability in terms of the way the prisons are run and the information that we can get and the way that prisoners are treated?

MIKE:

Well, a bit of history first: the privatisation of imprisonment began in this country, in Victoria, in the mid 1990s. Essentially, the argument was that everything ran more efficiently and better when it was run by the private sector. And this has not proven to be the case, at least in cost terms. I mean, as we can say, Victoria is still very expensive system-wide. Also, there is little evidence to suggest better outcomes when it comes to recidivism rates in Victoria compared with other jurisdictions. Nonetheless, we keep on spending more money on jails. I mean, in the 2019 budget, the Andrews government announced that it would spend another $1.8 billion - billion with a b - on new prisons to house an extra 1600 prisoners.

And elsewhere in the country private prisons have proven to be a failure. There was a damning report from the Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission a year or so back, following which that state decided that it would take back control of its two privately owned prisons. I mean, the Crime and Corruption Commission found there were higher levels of violence, both between inmates and between inmates and staff, there was more drug use, some of it being brought in by privately employed guards, etc.. I mean, it was really a very damning report. So, you know, the bottom line is the current model is failing and that's the case whether it's private or public.

RUBY:

So if that is the case, if the system is failing, is there much momentum then for change to look at crime and law and order in a different way?

MIKE:

Well, here and elsewhere around the world, there does seem to be a move in that direction. Joe Biden at this election is promising that no federal prisons will be privately run anymore - he will take those back into state operation. And even in this country, we've also seen some polling indicating that the public is quite supportive of alternative approaches, particularly for young offenders, particularly for drug related offences and non-violent crime in general. You know, in summary, more rehabilitation, less jail. So, you know, there's movement there, but I guess we won’t see really big changes until the political parties of the right come to see that it's not working for them electorally.

RUBY:

Mike, thank you so much for talking to me about this today.

MIKE:

My pleasure.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today…

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has won her third state election for Labor over the weekend. Labor was comfortably returned to government on Saturday following a campaign dominated by a focus on the pandemic and related border issues.

Australia recorded no locally acquired cases of COVID-19 on Sunday. The last time this figure was achieved was on June 9. The federal health minister Greg Hunt praised health care workers and the Australian public for the milestone.

And in the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has ordered a new national lockdown following a significant spike in coronavirus cases across the country.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See ya tomorrow.