Even as crime rates fall, jails all over the country are experiencing significant overcrowding – at vast costs to taxpayers

Prisons at breaking point but Australia is still addicted to incarceration

Last winter, for the first time in years, there was a stirring behind the towering sandstone walls of the old Berrima jail in New South Wales.



The 178-year-old, heritage-listed prison in the sleepy southern highlands village was being brought out of retirement, not long after it officially closed in 2011.

The building had already seen more than its fill of history. It was used to hold 329 German prisoners during the first world war and, before that, detained some of Australia’s most notorious bushrangers, including the infamous “Captain Thunderbolt” and the serial killer John Lynch, who was hanged there in 1842.

Now, it was an emergency, of sorts, which required use of the prison’s 75 beds yet again.

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The ballooning incarceration rate has filled the state’s prison system to breaking point. The average occupancy of NSW jails was 122% of the system’s official capacity in 2015-16. The number was 112% the year before that.



Nationally, prisoner numbers have also continued to break records, rising 40% in the five years from 2012. The incarceration rate climbed from 187.2 prisoners for every 100,000 Australian adults in 2014 to 216.2 in the third quarter of 2017.

Australia, like our US and British cousins, is fond of locking people up.

This has led to a perplexing problem. Even as general crime rates trend ever downwards, prisons all over the country are experiencing significant overcrowding.

With this comes vast costs to taxpayers. It makes it harder for corrective services to meet basic human needs of healthcare, food and suitable accommodation, according to Penal Reform International, a global non-governmental organisation focused on justice reform.

Overcrowding threatens the effectiveness of rehabilitation, vocational and educational programs, and is associated with higher rates of violence and mental health problems.

With some exceptions, Australian governments have responded to overcrowding by building more prisons.

Western Australia, Queensland, South Australia, the Australian Capital Territory, and Victoria have all embarked on prison building or expansion programs.

In NSW, along with the reopening of the 75-bed Berrima facility, the government has announced a $3.8bn program of new prisons and expansions, designed to add almost 3,000 beds to the system’s capacity.

In many states, the rush for new prisons has benefited private operators, including the multinational Serco, which will help build and run Australia’s biggest correctional facility in Grafton, NSW.

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For Eileen Baldry, a leading criminologist and University of New South Wales deputy vice-chancellor, it’s a hard-headed approach, one that sucks up billions of dollars that could otherwise go towards addressing the root causes of criminality through early intervention, diversion, prevention or rehabilitation programs.

Baldry says prison overcrowding is a product of failed political leadership, and shows governments are unable to withstand the populist compulsion to incarcerate and appear tough on crime.

“I think it’s also a failure of intellectual or evidence-based leadership,” Baldry says. “I have talked to a number of treasurers over decades in NSW, for example, and laid out in front of them the cost of doing this.



“In many ways, many people in the public service understand this and do put these kinds of arguments forward. But, you know, treasurers and other ministers, when I talk to them, and this is both sides of politics, they say, ‘Look, I know that, I understand that, but it will just not fly with the public. It just will not fly with the cabinet.’”

Berrima’s jail is a literal stone’s throw from the village pub. One can sit, beer in hand, admiring the golden wash of its sandstone walls, wondering what those on the other side must make of the sounds of the hotel’s drunken revelry.

Most locals here welcomed the decision to reopen it, according to the Berrima residents association president, Eric Savage. The inmates work in the community and the continued usage protects and preserves the historic building.

“If it wasn’t a prison, it may be open to development,” Savage explains. “Now Berrima is a very important historic place … so development pressures are something we’re very worried about.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A prison van patrols outside a fence at a Brisbane correctional centre. Photograph: Dave Hunt/AAP

To experts like Baldry, the reopening of old prisons like Berrima is a sign that Australian governments are continuing down a well-trodden road of failure in criminal justice.

Even in 1937, a short history of Berrima’s prison described it as a “grim relic of the past”. Much of its history had involved the cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners, beginning with the convict labour used to quarry sandstone in the 1830s.

The workers were shackled by their ankles as they worked under British guard. William Ullathorne, a Catholic bishop from England, gave a graphic description of their condition.



“They are fettered with heavy chains, harassed with heavy work, and fed on salt meat and coarse bread,” he said. “Their faces are awful to behold, and their existence one of desperation.”

In 1843, a man thought to be mad was detained in Berrima on accusations he had murdered a Bungendore police constable.



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To test his sanity, prison authorities flogged him, starved him and kept him in a dark cell, before stretching his naked body in a spreadeagled position using ring bolts. He was kept in the position for two days.

The man later confessed to a murder. It was the wrong one. He said he’d killed Napoleon Bonaparte. The man was declared insane and sent to an asylum.

It’s ancient history now.

But some experts believe this obsession with punishment, regardless of its efficacy in preventing offending and reoffending, has not left the Australian approach to criminal justice.

“Virtually all of our governments are kind of punishment-oriented, or lock-them-up oriented,” Baldry said. “They seem to be driven by the belief that the general population requires them to lock everybody up. That it gives people in the population a sense of safety.



“This is nothing new, this has been going on for decades. And of course the reality is that this is not the case.”

The current approach is simply not working to prevent the same people from committing more crime.

The recidivism rate in Australia has continued to increase, as we lock more and more people up. In 2015-16, 44.6% of all Australian prisoners returned to jail within two years of release. That is up from 39.5% in 2011-12, according to the Productivity Commission.

Attempts to find alternatives to imprisonment have met with early success. In NSW, a policy of justice reinvestment has been trialled in the small town of Bourke, the first major trial of its kind in the country.

It’s aim is to address the strong correlation between disadvantage and the high rates of young people in the criminal justice system, particularly young Indigenous Australians.

The program, run by the independent not-for-profit Just Reinvest NSW, redirects prison spending to fund community services and support. The money is used, for example, to build trust between community and the police, and to help young people avoid breaching bail.

Former NSW director of public prosecutions, Nicholas Cowdrey, is one of those championing justice reinvestment. He is lobbying the NSW government to invest in the program in the 2018-19 budget.

He agrees the overcrowding problem is a failure of political leadership, and an inability to see past short-term electoral cycles.

“Sensible policy, especially in this area, takes more than three or four years to bear fruit and politicians prefer to stick with the tried and tested approach of ‘tough on crime,’” Cowdrey said.

“There doesn’t seem to be much room for ‘smart on crime’. The community bears the cost and the consequences of such tunnel-visioned policy.”

Prison has long been considered an option of last resort in the criminal justice system.

But Cowdrey believes it is no longer being applied in that way. The rising incarceration rate, he said, is largely a product of increases to maximum sentences and tougher restrictions on bail.



“Despite the lip service paid to the requirement that imprisonment be the punishment of last resort, it is not so used,” he said.



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Quite aside from the cost, judges and magistrates understand the impact imprisonment can have on an individual’s prospects for rehabilitation.

Repeated studies, including one on NSW offenders, have suggested the crimogenic tendencies of prisons. In other words, sending someone to prison can increase their chance of reoffending. It can connect them with more hardened criminals, isolate them from their friends and family, and end their employment prospects.

This becomes particularly problematic when one considers the impact of holding prisoners on remand. The latest data shows 33% of Australia’s prison population, or 13,182 people, is unsentenced.



The number of people on remand has grown exponentially in recent years, a sign that more people are being refused bail or are being kept inside longer owing to court delays.

The rates are particularly bad for Indigenous prisoners. In 2014 the rate of unsentenced Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander prisoners was 568.5 for every 100,000 people. That jumped to 773 prisoners for every 100,000 people by the third quarter of 2017.

In some cases, the consequences of prison overcrowding can be disastrous. It can force the mixing of prisoner classifications, including the mixing of sentenced and unsentenced prisoners.



Steven Freeman, 25, was an Indigenous man who was taken into custody in the ACT, which has just one prison for all classification types, aside from juveniles.



The overcrowding crisis at the ACT’s jail was reaching its crescendo when Freeman was denied bail when charged with a string of crimes in April 2015. Freeman, like many others on remand, was placed with sentenced prisoners. He was beaten within four hours of arriving. The attack was so severe that he was placed in an induced coma for a week.

His family begged the courts not to send him back to prison. They feared he would not leave the place alive. Their fears appear to have been well-founded. Roughly a year later, Freeman would die while in custody owing to a methadone overdose.