Australian imprisonment 2002–2016: Crime, policing and penal policy
| Date | 01 December 2018 |
| Published date | 01 December 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0004865818757585 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Australian & New Zealand
Australian imprisonment
Journal of Criminology
2018, Vol. 51(4) 537–559
!
2002–2016: Crime, policing
The Author(s) 2018
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and penal policy
DOI: 10.1177/0004865818757585
journals.sagepub.com/home/anj
Don Weatherburn
NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, Australia
Abstract
The period between 2002 and 2016 saw substantial reductions in a number of major cate-
gories of crime in Australia, including murder, robbery, break and enter, motor vehicle theft
and ‘other’ theft. One might expect the Australian imprisonment rate to have fallen too, but
it did not. Over the same period, the Australian imprisonment rate grew by 36%. Most
commentators assume the growth in imprisonment rates is due to the growth in punitive
penal policies. Little attention has been paid to the influence of crime and policing policy. In
this article I present evidence that much of the growth in imprisonment rates stems from
rising rates of drug use/drug trafficking and changes in policing policy vis-a`-vis family violence
and child sexual assault.
Keywords
Child sexual assault, family violence, illicit drugs, imprisonment rates, penal policy, policing
policy
Received 17 October 2017; accepted 15 January 2018
Introduction
Between 2002 and 2016 Australia experienced an unprecedented fall in crime. The
recorded murder rate in Australia fell by 33%, the recorded rate of kidnapping/abduc-
tion fell by 29%, the recorded robbery rate fell by 58%, the recorded rate of burglary/
break and enter fell by 55%, the recorded rate of motor vehicle theft fell by 54% and the
recorded rate of other theft fell by 26%. One might expect the Australian imprisonment
Corresponding author:
Don Weatherburn, NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, Level 1, Henry Deane Building, Sydney,
New South Wales 2000, Australia.
Email: Don.Weatherburn@justice.nsw.gov.au
538
Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology 51(4)
rate to have fallen too, but it did not. Over the same period, the Australian imprison-
ment rate grew by 36%, from 150 per 100,000 of population to 204 per 100,000 of
population. All States and Territories experienced an increase in their imprisonment
rates but the growth was particularly marked in South Australia (up 81%), the
Northern Territory (up 78%) and Western Australia (up 74%). Even Victoria, a state
with a traditionally low imprisonment rate, saw its imprisonment rate grow by 44%
(Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2016).
The rapid growth in prisoner numbers has produced serious problems of prison over-
crowding. In April 2015, the NSW Inspector of Custodial Services released a report
stating that ‘Corrective Services [NSW] is operating under a combination of conditions
which have the potential to create a dysfunctional, if not dangerous, custodial environ-
ment’ (Paget, 2015). In November 2015, the NSW Audit Office (2016) released a report
according to which overcrowding in NSW prisons was costing the State $200,000 a day.
In 2016 the Age newspaper reported that, in the first seven weeks of 2016, the Victorian
Corrections Department was so stretched for resources it failed to bring 455 prisoners to
their scheduled court appearances, prompting magistrates to start releasing offenders on
bail simply to ensure their appearance in court (Hall, 2016). The Adelaide Advertiser
claimed in 2011 that South Australian prisons would run out of beds in two years, despite
expansion; prompting warnings from prison officers of increased violence among inmates
(Stokes, 2011). In June 2015, ABC news in Queensland reported that ‘jails’ are ‘over-
crowded and becoming dangerous for staff and prisoners’ (Worthington, 2015).
In December 2016, the West Australian Office of the Inspector of Custodial Services
described the state’s prison system as ‘unsustainably stretched’, with prisoners being
held in cells that, in the opinion of the Inspector of Custodial Services in that State,
‘fall short of national and international standards’ (Wildie, 2016).
Many commentators blame harsher penal policies rather than rising crime or policing
policies for this state of affairs. The Australian Senate cited ‘tough on crime’ sentencing
and parole reforms as the cause of rising imprisonment rates (Legal and Constitutional
Affairs Committee, 2013, p. 19). In their analysis of Australian imprisonment rates,
Cunneen et al. (2013), Hall (2010) and Tubex, Brown, Freiberg, Gelb and Sarre
(2015) discuss sentencing policy at length but do not give much attention to the possi-
bility that rising crime or arrest rates might account for a large part of the growth in
imprisonment rates. Cunneen (2011, p. 10) attributed the growth in Indigenous impris-
onment to more frequent and longer periods of imprisonment between 2000 and 2011 on
the grounds that ‘increases in imprisonment rates have continued, while crime rates have
levelled or fallen, in many categories of crime from 2000’. In its 2013 report, the
Victorian Sentencing Advisory Council (2013, p. 8) acknowledged that rising crime
could have been a factor behind Victoria’s rising prison population but was initially
inclined to dismiss the possibility on the grounds that the available evidence on the
relationship between crime and imprisonment rates was, as they put it, ‘conflicting’.1
The tendency to assume that the growth in Australia’s imprisonment rate is the result
of more punitive penal policies is entirely understandable. Sentencing policy in Australia
since the mid-1980s has been characterised by what Roberts, Stalans, Indermaur, and
Hough (2003) rightly describe as ‘penal populism’. Examples of the growth in punitive
sentencing laws abound (Anderson, 2012; Freiberg, 2005; Freiberg & Ross, 1999;
Simpson & Griffith, 1999; Warner, 2002). As I show later, there is evidence that tougher
Weatherburn
539
sentencing policies have contributed to the rise in prisoner numbers. And yet, simply
enumerating instances of tougher penal policies is not enough on its own to establish the
claim that rising imprisonment rates are primarily due to harsher penal policies. For one
thing, courts have repeatedly shown themselves capable of ameliorating the effects of
legislative changes designed to impose harsher penalties (see, e.g. Freiberg, 2017;
MacKinnell, Spears, & Takach, 1993; Poletti, 2010). For another (and more important-
ly), the size of any prison population is not solely a function of the proportion of
offenders imprisoned and the length of stay. It is also affected by crime levels, arrest
rates, conviction rates, bail refusal rates and responses to fine default. If the claim is that
penal policy is responsible for imprisonment rate growth, it is necessary to show that
changes in penal policy, rather than changes in other factors that influence arrest rates
and time in custody, are responsible for the growth in prisoner numbers.
Although analyses of prison population growth have occasionally been undertaken in
particular jurisdictions (e.g. Ferrante, 2007; Freiberg & Ross, 1999; Weatherburn,
Corben, Ramsey, & Fitzgerald, 2016; Weatherburn, Wan, & Corben, 2014), no one
to date has made any systematic attempt to determine how much of Australia’s impris-
onment rate growth over the last 16 years is due to changes in the number of arrests or
people appearing in court, as opposed to changes in the proportion imprisoned or the
length of stay in prison. My purpose in this article is to remedy this state of affairs. The
focus of this article is on the relative contribution made by crime, policing policy and
penal policy to the growth in Australian imprisonment rates between 2001 and 2016. To
foreshadow my conclusion, I find evidence that much of the growth in rates of impris-
onment stems from policing policy rather than penal policy. Changes in penal policy
have contributed to the growth; however, the impact of penal policy on imprisonment
rates has been far less significant than has been widely assumed.
Three important points must be made before I begin. The first is that, although bail
law is an important aspect of penal policy and is discussed in this article, our ability to
capture its effects at a national level is constrained by the absence of national data on
the proportion of defendants refused bail and the length of time spent on remand.
Second, again because of a lack of suitable data, I am unable to examine the effect of
fine default on prison populations. The only consolation on this issue is that fine
defaulters generally constitute a small percentage of the prison population at any one
time. Finally, an undertaking of this sort ideally calls for separate analyses for each of
Australia’s States and Territories. A task of that magnitude is far too large for a journal
article. I therefore analyse general trends across Australia, acknowledging from the
outset that the relative importance of the factors I identify may vary from jurisdiction
to jurisdiction.
The dynamics of imprisonment
We begin with a brief description of the ways in which crime, policing policy and penal
policy can influence the rate of imprisonment in a jurisdiction. The natural starting
point for a discussion of any queuing system is Little’s law (1961), which states that,
under steady-state conditions, the average number of items in a queuing system equals
the average rate at which items arrive multiplied by the average time that an item spends
in the system. Letting L ¼ average number of items in the queuing system, W ¼ average
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Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology...
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