Savings from cutting prison population could put more police on the street

The number of people in Australian prisons has increased 40 per cent over the past 10 years.  In South Australia the prison population has increased by nearly 75 per cent over the same period.

Certainly a great many of these people deserve to be in prison.  But almost half the people serving prison sentences in SA were convicted of nonviolent offences.

Jailing nonviolent offenders is a waste of taxpayer funds, and can create serious unintended consequences that make the community less safe.

This is why there are good reasons to support the Weatherill Government's recently passed sentencing reforms, which allow courts the power to permit some nonviolent offenders to serve their sentences in home detention.

Under these measures, people can serve their sentences at home with a combination of supervision and satellite monitoring if the court is satisfied that they pose a low risk to the community.

The main purposes of criminal justice are to protect the community from offenders, to deter others who might be considering offending, to aid offenders' rehabilitation, and to give victims and the public a sense of retribution.

The first of these is non-negotiable:  where the safety of the community cannot be assured, prison for offenders must be the result.  It is not only proper but necessary to imprison those individuals who have demonstrated a propensity for criminal violence or a habit of criminality.

But prison is terrible at rehabilitation.  If the success of rehabilitation is measured by the frequency with which prisoners reoffend upon release, then the recent data shows that imprisonment is neither particularly effective nor becoming more effective.  The nationwide proportion of prisoners who have been imprisoned before has stayed steady at about 60 per cent for a decade.

If imprisonment is failing to fulfil its deterrent and rehabilitation functions, is it sufficient to say that jail is necessitated by outraged public sentiment and that, to mean anything, criminal punishment must include a custodial sentence?

To answer this, consider the circumstances of offenders in home detention.  They lose much of their liberty, must sustain themselves despite likely having lost their employment, and accrue the lifelong stigma of a conviction.

In many cases, they will have had to pay large fines and make restitution to their victims.  And rather than being a drain on the budget, their fines contribute towards reducing the cost of criminal justice.

Every prisoner costs the taxpayer almost $100,000 per year.  And with SA's prisons already at capacity, increasing the size of the prison population further would require building a new prison.  Even if alternative punishment is only equally effective to prison in deterring crime, it would constitute a large saving to the public purse.

Indeed, the only people who really stand to gain materially from an ever-burgeoning prison population are the people who run and staff prisons.  Unsurprisingly the Public Service Association is opposed to these reforms.  But we shouldn't allow union self-interest to prevent the realisation of better outcomes.

The savings from reducing the prison population could be redirected to putting more police on the street, targeting the worst offenders and known centres of crime.

Studies show that criminals respond more to the chance that they will be caught than to harsher consequences for being caught.

Rack, pack and stack doesn't work.  With an appropriate emphasis on safety, there is good reason to believe that alternatives to prison for nonviolent offenders can be just as effective in achieving the ends of criminal justice.

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