Well thanks for joining me and today I have as my special guest, Victoria’s Ombudsman,
Deborah Glass.
Deborah, thanks for joining me.
My pleasure.
Well Deborah, you’ve just released a ground breaking report really, in relation to Victoria’s
prisons and you’ve come to what some might consider a fairly startling observation and
that is that building more and more prisons doesn’t make us safer as a community.
How did you come to that view?
Well when you look at the statistics, they are compelling.
Over the last, broadly the last 5 years, what we’ve seen is an increase in crime, an increase
in prisoner numbers, along with an increase in the cost of prisons, you know, over a billion
dollars a year, and alongside that the increase in recidivism.
So what we’re seeing is that more and more people are going into prison and coming back
there.
Now, that is not making us safer as a community.
And what did your report find about the type of people who are in our prison, behind our
prison walls at the moment?
Again, the numbers are compelling.
If you compare people inside prisons with the population as a whole, a highly disproportionate
number of people with drug and alcohol problems, with mental health problems, people of low
educational levels, and let’s just take that one, for example, 6% of male prisoners
have finished year 12.
Now that compares with nearly 90% in the population as a whole.
Well prisons are there, I suppose the community takes the view, to punish people, but also
to rehabilitate people, so they come out as worthwhile citizens in the community.
Are there appropriate rehabilitation programs taking place in our prisons at the moment?
Well broadly no, the programs do exist and what we’re seeing is also an example of
the system being overwhelmed by numbers.
So there are programs inside our prisons and some of them are good programs and they may
well be very effective if people were able to actually access them.
What we’ve seen as a result of prisoner numbers is that there is a considerable queue
for access to programs and programs cover a range of levels.
There are programs that are designed to address the causes of offending behaviour.
There’s a significant queue for those, they’re requirements of the parole board and what
we’re finding as a result of that is that more and more people are coming out of prison
on straight release without, because they either can’t get access to those programs
or they decide they can’t be bothered, now that’s again, not good for us as a community.
Well in your report you talk about something called justice reinvestment.
What is justice reinvestment and do you think it could work here in Australia, in Victoria?
Justice reinvestment is basically a term for the diverting of funds from one end of the
prison spectrum, which is prisons, you cycle through the justice system and you commit
crimes and you end up in prison, so diverting funds from that part of the justice system
to looking at the causes of crime and offending.
So for example you can identify there may be pockets of areas within the state, within
particular postcodes, within particular communities where there is a great deal of crime, what’s
causing that crime?
So you can actually take funds from one part of the system and invest it into say, drug
and alcohol rehabilitation programs, into diversion programs, into education, into whatever
the numbers are telling you is causing crime in the first place.
And is it cost effective?
Does it save us money as a community?
Fundamentally, it is incredibly cost effective and we’ve got international examples of
this, not least in Texas.
Not exactly famed for its soft on crime approach, you might say, where they have saved hundreds
of millions of dollars on building new prisons through diverting people out of the prison
system and into forms of rehabilitation.
VISUAL: Camera cuts to Rob Hulls, who is facing Deborah Glass off camera.
Ok, so, we have large numbers of people in our prisons, increasing numbers, rehabilitation
programs in prisons do exist but they’re not totally adequate.
What about when people come out of prisons and re-entering the community?
Are there appropriate transitions from prison to community programs in place?
VISUAL: Camera cuts to Deborah Glass, who is facing Rob Hulls off camera.
No and that’s one of the really striking things I think about what we’ve seen in
this investigation, which started out as an investigation into prisons, and what you learn
very quickly when you’re doing a piece of work like this is that you’ve got to look
at it in the context of the system as a whole.
So people are coming out prison into homelessness, into unemployment, into lack of family contact
and all of these things are contributing to re-offending.
So for example, we have one transitional centre in the state which houses 25 male prisoners,
it’s incredibly effective at reducing recidivism.
But that’s 25 people out of the thousands and thousands who are coming out of prison
every year.
So one of the things we need to do is look at the kind of services being offered there
that do improve the chances of people actually remaining crime free in the community and
see whether we can broaden that out.
Well Deborah, you’ve made a whole range of recommendations in your report and the
report has been presented to the parliament and the government is aware of your recommendations.
What are the consequences do you think to us as a community in not implementing your
recommendations?
I think it’s dire.
We are spending over a billion dollars a year already in our prison system.
The system is simply not sustainable.
If you look at Correction Victoria’s current projections, they are looking at yet further
increase in relation to the prison population and we simply can’t afford a system that
is spending more and more money on prisons without an increase in community safety.
We know that over 99% of prisoners are going to be released someday, so we need to ensure
that we’re getting value for money and at the moment we’re not.
We don’t want to make really hard choices between prison beds and hospital beds.
Well Deborah, thank you for your report and thank you for joining me today.
My pleasure.
If you want to hear more about our prison system and the people behind our prison walls
and alternatives to prison, come to the forum at RMIT University on the 24th of February.
Have a look at the Centre for Innovative Justice website, where you can get all the details.