Thread by @KirstiMiller30

The Second Convict Age has hit Australia the Return of Mass Imprisonment.

Australia now incarcerates a greater share of the adult population than at any point since the late 19th century.

https://twitter.com/kirstimiller30/status/1358347012949745665?s=21

Who are the 43,000 people locked up in our prisons in 🇦🇺? Australia's prisons are a transitory population. Over a third are serving a short sentence of less than 2 years. For females the average is just a few months. More than half of all prisoners are released into homelessness.

Disproportionately, they are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and people from the poorest communities in Australia. The majority have underlying illnesses and disabilities. Most are non-violent offenders and a third await sentencing.

Many are locked up for “crimes” we never used to imprison people for, like traffic violations and low-level drug offences. In the last decade, Australian states and territories have locked people up at a rate not seen since the 1890s.
andrewleigh.org/pdf/SecondConv…

These recors rates of incarceration has nothing to do with public safety and everything to do with winning votes by seeming “tough on crime”.

The 43,000 people in our prisons are part of our community. They were sent to prison to lose their freedom, not their lives. For the majority of prisoners who are not a danger to the community, coronavirus changed the nature of their punishment, making it manifestly unjust.

Imagine what social isolation would be like with no smartphone, no internet, no visitors and many of your fellow inmates falling desperately ill and dying. Victoria even has a cruel, unjustified ban on pen pals.
abc.net.au/news/2018-05-3…

If there’s one lesson to learn from coronavirus it’s that we truly are all in this together. Locking up vulnerable, non-violent people does not build a just or safe society for any of us it literally harms us all.

Australia cannot afford the social, health and economic costs of over-imprisonment. Strong healthy & connected communities are the most effective way to prevent crime & make communities safer.

Research has found a large portion of prisoners come from and return to a small number of inadequately resourced neighbourhoods and communities.

It is well known that prisons are filled with people who are disproportionately disadvantaged and who have unmet social, health and disability-related needs.

dote.org.au

Research has also shown that prison does not reduce crime. It actually perpetuates cycles of poverty, disadvantage and reoffending.

theconversation.com/the-evidence-i…

The solutions to reduce Indigenous imprisonment will never be found in any of the 5 prisons I managed or any other prison in Australia. The solutions need to be community-designed and driven, with government support.

Justice reinvestment offers a pathway to achieve this.
Justice reinvestment is a strategy for reducing the number of people in prison by investing funds drawn from the corrections budget into early intervention, ...

Evidence shows justice reinvestment is already working

justreinvest.org.au/maranguka-just…

The Maranguka Justice Reinvestment project in Bourke, New South Wales, is the most developed community-based trial. The Bourke Tribal Council, assisted by Just Reinvest NSW, directs and guides Maranguka.

The project is building a safer and stronger community. This has led to significant reductions in crime and reoffending. From 2016 to 2017 alone the Bourke community experienced a:

23% reduction in police-recorded incidents of domestic violence

14% reduction in bail breaches for adults
42% reduction in days spent in custody for adults
31% increase in year 12 student retention rates
38% reduction in charges across the top five juvenile offence categories.

A KPMG impact assessment found the Maranguka project achieved savings of A$3.1 million in 2017. Two-thirds of that relates to the criminal justice system and one-third is the broader economic impact in the region.

The financial impact of the project is about five times greater than its operational costs. If Bourke is able to sustain just half the 2017 results, an additional gross impact of A$7 million over the next five years could be achieved.

It costs almost A$300 a day to keep an adult in prison. The average cost of locking up a young person is almost five times that amount.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander over-incarceration cost the Australian economy A$7.9 billion in 2016.

These coosts to grew to A$9.7 billion in 2020 and it is expected to increase to A$19.8 billion by 2040, if we continue on the same trajectory.

The 2020 Closing the Gap final report card shows that after 12 years on only 2 out of 7 targets we're partially met. This failure to close a single gap now sees Australia First Nations People now hold the title of the most incarcerated indigenous community on Earth.

No jurisdiction in Australia - not even the ACT - jails black males at a rate less than the days of Apartheid South Africa.

We have had enquiry after enquiry, Royal Commission after Royal Commission and we end up in 2022 with the highest rate of imprisonment in Australia since the 1800’s. The prison population has more than doubled since 1985 around 140% increase.

Prisons have failed to meet almost all objectives of the criminal justice system. Their role as a correctional service has adversely affected the lives of prisoners, their families and the wider community.

Although there has been a reported decrease in crime rates, we have seen a massive increase in prison population was; highlighting the failure of imprisonment as an effective mechanism of social control.

Many of the solutions have already been found. Sadly those solutions never get acted upon such as the majority of the recommendations from the,
1. Nagle Royal Commission, 1978
2. NSW Women in Prison Task Force, 1985
3. Aboriginal Deaths in Custody Royal Commission, 1987-1991

4. The Combined Churches Report, 1994
5. Rand Corp on Mandatory Minimums, 1997
6. NSW Parliamentary Committee on Prisons, 2000
7. Pathways to Justice – Inquiry into the Incarceration Rate of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, 2017

”The past is still the present”
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