Australia’s prison population could be reduced by one-third with little risk to community safety, according to research conducted for the Institute of Public Affairs.
The research paper by Prof Mirko Bagaric, the dean of law at the Swinburne University of Technology, recommends law reform to prevent imprisonment of non-violent offenders.
It adds to calls from Labor’s assistant treasury minister, Andrew Leigh, and the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia to tackle Australia’s rising incarceration rates, particularly among women and Indigenous women.
Bagaric cites Australian Bureau of Statistics figures that show Australia’s incarceration rate now sits at 214 prisoners per 100,000 adult population, a near-record high.
Since a low in 1984, Australia’s incarceration rate has increased by over 4% a year, three times faster than the growth in the general population.
Bagaric’s research for the rightwing thinktank projects that on current trends, Australia’s incarceration rate could reach 300 prisoners per 100,000 adults by 2030, which would place it inside the top five for OECD nations.
In 2020-21, Australia’s spent about $4bn on prisons, at a cost to a taxpayer of each prisoner a year of $375 a day or $136,875 a year, the paper said.
Bagaric noted that 42% of prisoners have not committed a violent or sexual offence. He calculated a reduction in the prison population of about one-third would be possible even if the 10% of offenders who have committed serious property crime or serious drug offences remained in prison.
“In revenue terms, this would result in an annual taxpayers saving of approximately $1.25bn,” the report said.
“Moreover, it would mean that there would be approximately 14,000 additional Australians in the community each year on average.”
Bagaric, an expert in punishment, reviewed academic literature on the principles of sentencing, concluding there was “no basis” for thinking harsh sentences could deter specific offenders.
“There remains considerable uncertainty on the capacity of the sentencing system to rehabilitate offenders,” he said, citing rising rates of reoffending.
He proposed abandoning the pursuit of “unattainable sentencing aims” and instead aim for more proportional sentences, that is, that “the punishment should be matched by the harm caused by offence”.
In October Leigh told the Australian Institute of Criminology that taxpayers are each forking out $140 more a year for prisons than would be needed if Australia maintained its 1985 rates of incarceration.
Labor’s national platform states that incarceration “fails to reduce recidivism, provide effective outcomes for victims of crime or to make our communities safe”, promising federal Labor will work with states and territories to pursue “evidence-based criminal justice policies … which rely less on high cost and harmful prisons”.
In Australian states, which are responsible for most criminal law, both major parties typically make a virtue of tougher sentencing.
The US has recently experienced declines in the prison population, with some of the biggest declines in liberal states in the north-east.
Both the IPA and Leigh also cited Texas as another success, where Leigh said there is “a bipartisan recognition by Republicans and Democrats that higher incarceration means higher taxes”.
Bargaric said “the experience in the US of the past decade shows that incarceration numbers can be reduced without compromising community safety, and in a way which delivers savings to the government budget bottom line and gets more people into work.”
