Too many prisons?

Sydney
4 November 2001

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Too many prisons?

The late Fr Terry McDonald was chaplain at Mulawa Detention Centre in 1992.

Locking people up is an expensive business. Yet the State Government is on a prison building spree. Chris Hook reports

Work is set to begin on a $42 million women’s prison in South Windsor, despite a State parliamentary committee’s reservations and yet to be tabled report.

The select committee has spent two years looking at the rapid growth in the number of inmates in NSW prison, a significant proportion of whom are women.

“The number of women in prison has risen substantially over the past 10 years and looks set to worsen,” says Sr Margaret Hinchey, a No New Women’s Prison campaigner.

The group plans to hold a vigil outside the site to draw the public’s attention to the huge social and financial costs of the project.

The group maintains that most women are imprisoned for non-violent offences, often related to drug addiction.

But NSW is on a prison building spree.

Tough talk on law and order characterised last month’s Auburn by-election and Premier Bob Carr announced plans for almost 2,000 new prison beds over the next four years.

Leaving aside the cost of the new women’s prison, short term capital costs for extensions and renovations to a number of existing prisons, the reopening of the 140-place Cooma prison, and preliminary planning for a new 350-place prison in the central west total $20.6 million.

The long term capital costs of the government’s plans sit at $162.5 million.

And that’s just to get the beds ready.

This need is driven by a 20 per cent increase in the NSW inmate population in just six years, with an estimated further increase of almost 16 per cent in the next four years.

“It is simple: if there are violent criminals in prison then our streets are safer. With that in mind, I make no apology for prison numbers rising sharply in NSW,” Mr Carr said.

Dr Eileen Baldry, of the University of NSW, a senior lecturer in social work, says: “It’s an extraordinary view when a senior politician boasts about putting more people in prison.”

Associate Professor Julie Stubbs, deputy director of Sydney University’s Institute of Criminology, says the debate about incarceration is too simplistic.

“The current government is about community expectation. The two things (prison) does best is short term incapacitation and retribution. We’re being unrealistic if we expect prison to do anything more,” she says.

“The whole debate has become highly politicised and grossly simplified. I think a much more honest debate would be one in which we face the choices we really have to make between schools and hospitals and prisons.”

Indeed, prison is a very expensive option.

The select committee found that a maximum-security prisoner costs $64,762 per year or $177.43 a day, to keep locked up, medium security prisoners cost $58,893 a year, and minimum security prisoners cost $47,118 per annum.

It all becomes a little more complicated for women, according to the No New Women’s Prison group, because almost half have dependent children, so further costs are incurred if the children are fostered out or made wards of the state.

But does it work?

“I think the best thing to say about prisons and crime is they don’t bear any relationship,” says Dr Baldry.

A 1995 study of recidivism in NSW found that those who served time for offences such as assault, robbery, fraud and property offences – crimes directly impacting on a victim – had medium to high re-offence rates.

Time inside was obviously no deterrent to re-offending, despite the streets being safer in the interim.

“For most people who go into jail, it means an upping of criminal activity and further alienation from friends and community,” Dr Baldry says.

It seems a punitive approach to law and order – no matter how expensive – is driven by political expediency.

“On the whole, Mr Carr is reacting to what he perceives to be community sentiment – the need to be harsher. But it is the role of political leaders to calm public spirit and represent moral approaches to things rather than stir up vengeful views when people are easily scared,” Dr Baldry agrees.

“Crime prevention is where it should all be at, as well as pre-court, pre-prison attention.”

Sr Margaret Hinchey says: “I think it’s time to become a little more enlightened as a community as to how we address crime.”

The No New Women’s Prison has alternative proposals to the costly exercise of locking women away, including bail hostels (about a quarter of the cost of the prison equivalent), drug supervision units (half the cost of imprisonment), intensive probation (an eighth of the cost).

And Dr Baldry points out that the current state government is behind several programs in disadvantaged areas in the outer west and the Hunter Valley to help build community and so stop crime before it even begins.

“But we won’t see the results for years,” she says.

Too far beyond short term political needs.