A federal Labor MP and economist will make the financial case to reduce the country’s growing prison rates, a trend he says has more to do with stricter policing and sentencing than crime rates and is costing taxpayers billions of dollars each year.
In a speech to the Australian Institute of Criminology on Monday, Assistant Minister for Treasury, Dr Andrew Leigh, will say the incarceration rate has more than doubled since the mid-1980s while most crimes have fallen, in what he’s previously dubbed the ‘second convict age’.
Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury, Dr Andrew Leigh, will make an economic case for reducing prison rates.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
In 1985, the incarceration rate in Australia was 96 prisoners per 100,000 adults. In 2022, the incarceration rate is 202 prisoners per 100,000 adults.
Rather than the crime rate, Leigh will say the “issue has instead been with how we have chosen to handle complex social challenges”.
“Stricter policing, tougher sentencing and more stringent bail laws appear to be the main drivers behind Australia’s growing prison population,” Leigh will say. “There are good ethical reasons for reducing the rate of incarceration in Australia. But there are good fiscal reasons too.”
In 2020 research, Leigh – a former economics professor – estimated recurrent spending on prisons totalled $4.7 billion annually, or $240 for every Australian adult. He will say in his speech if the incarceration rate remained at its 1985 level, Australia would save $2.6 billion annually.
University of South Australia emeritus professor of law and criminal justice Rick Sarre said Leigh was smart to frame the argument as an economic one, adding there were “thousands of things you could do” with the money states poured into incarceration.
“If you pump [the funds] into welfare services, child protection, Indigenous mentoring, mental health support, supplementing income for families in crisis, then you’re going to get far better bang for your buck than waiting for people to screw up and putting them behind bars, which is probably the most inefficient way of stopping crime,” Sarre said.
Leigh will say excessive incarceration particularly affects Indigenous Australians, among whom “the incarceration rate has risen from 1 per cent in 1990 to 2.3 per cent today,” and note that is now more than twice as high as when the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody report was delivered.
“Based on the available data, incarceration rates for Indigenous Australians are higher than for African-Americans in the United States. They are also higher than for Indigenous people in Canada, New Zealand and the United States.”
Australia’s attorneys-general last year tentatively agreed the age of criminal responsibility should be increased from 10 to 12 years old, however, Change the Record, an Aboriginal-led coalition of legal and health experts, has said it should be 14.
The government of the ACT, where Leigh’s federal seat of Fenner is situated, has promised to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14.
Sarre said while law and order was mostly the jurisdiction of states and territories, the federal government held the purse strings on Indigenous issues, health, welfare, and education and could steer state and territory responsibilities on those fronts with incarceration in mind.
Thalia Anthony, a University of Technology Sydney law lecturer who specialises in Indigenous legal issues, said it was interesting that Leigh was concerned with prison rates “because no economists are”.
“What’s been interesting, and obviously it’s a really short period the ALP’s been in government, but they haven’t made justice a priority. It’s clear that it hasn’t been on the agenda,” she said.
University of Sydney criminologist Murray Lee said Leigh’s comments could help shift political and public discussion around Australia’s reliance on punitivism.
“It’s actually really exciting to have a federal minister raising those issues and putting this on the agenda because, in some ways, it’s a hidden issue,” Lee said.
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