Plantations, Prisons and Profits

Charles M. Blow | The New York Times | May 25, 2012

“Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly triple Iran’s, seven times China’s and 10 times Germany’s.”

That paragraph opens a devastating eight-part series published this month by The Times-Picayune of New Orleans about how the state’s largely private prison system profits from high incarceration rates and tough sentencing, and how many with the power to curtail the system actually have a financial incentive to perpetuate it.

The picture that emerges is one of convicts as chattel and a legal system essentially based on human commodification.

First, some facts from the series:

• One in 86 Louisiana adults is in the prison system, which is nearly double the national average.

• More than 50 percent of Louisiana’s inmates are in local prisons, which is more than any other state. The next highest state is Kentucky at 33 percent. The national average is 5 percent.

• Louisiana leads the nation in the percentage of its prisoners serving life without parole.

• Louisiana spends less on local inmates than any other state.

• Nearly two-thirds of Louisiana’s prisoners are nonviolent offenders. The national average is less than half.

In the early 1990s, the state was under a federal court order to reduce overcrowding, but instead of releasing prisoners or loosening sentencing guidelines, the state incentivized the building of private prisons. But, in what the newspaper called “a uniquely Louisiana twist,” most of the prison entrepreneurs were actually rural sheriffs. They saw a way to make a profit and did.

It also was a chance to employ local people, especially failed farmers forced into bankruptcy court by a severe drop in the crop prices.

But in order for the local prisons to remain profitable, the beds, which one prison operator in the series distastefully refers to as “honey holes,” must remain full. That means that on almost a daily basis, local prison officials are on the phones bartering for prisoners with overcrowded jails in the big cities.

It also means that criminal sentences must remain stiff, which the sheriff’s association has supported. This has meant that Louisiana has some of the stiffest sentencing guidelines in the country. Writing bad checks in Louisiana can earn you up to 10 years in prison. In California, by comparison, jail time would be no more than a year.

There is another problem with this unsavory system: prisoners who wind up in these local for-profit jails, where many of the inmates are short-timers, get fewer rehabilitative services than those in state institutions, where many of the prisoners are lifers. That is because the per-diem per prisoner in local prisons is half that of state prisons.

In short, the system is completely backward.

Lifers at state prisons can learn to be welders, plumbers or auto mechanics — trades many will never practice as free men — while prisoners housed in local prisons, and are certain to be released, gain no skills and leave jail with nothing more than “$10 and a bus ticket.”

These ex-convicts, with almost no rehabilitation and little prospect for supporting themselves, return to the already-struggling communities that were rendered that way in part because so many men are being extracted on such a massive scale. There the cycle of crime often begins again, with innocent people caught in the middle and impressionable young eyes looking on.

According to The Times-Picayune: “In five years, about half of the state’s ex-convicts end up behind bars again.”

This suits the prison operators just fine. They need them to come back to the “honey holes.”

Furthermore, the more money the state spends on incarceration, the less it can spend on preventive measures like education. (According to Education Week’s State Report Cards, Louisiana was one of three states and the District of Columbia to receive an F for K-12 achievement in 2012, and, this year, the state, over all, is facing a $220 million deficit in its $25 billion budget.)

Louisiana is the starkest, most glaring example of how our prison policies have failed. It showcases how private prisons do not serve the public interest and how the mass incarceration as a form of job creation is an abomination of justice and civility and creates a long-term crisis by trying to create a short-term solution.

As the paper put it: “A prison system that leased its convicts as plantation labor in the 1800s has come full circle and is again a nexus for profit.”

Prisoner welfare group will close without continued Government assistance

Kirrin McKechnie | 730 Queensland | 18 May 2012

Sister Inside confirms Townsville programme forced to shut down.

Watch the video here

JESSICA van VONDEREN: Last year, the prisoners support service Sisters Inside set up an outreach programme at the Townsville jail, with the help of a 120-thousand dollar grant from the then Bligh Government. Already this year, that service has helped 188 female prisoners break the cycle of crime. But now, the Newman Government has withdrawn the funding. The Communities Minister says Sisters Inside can try to reapply for money under the proper processes. But the group's founder says the cut will be catastrophic for the mainly indigenous prisoners who benefited from the service, and for the wider community. Kirrin McKechnie reports.

RENEE, FORMER PRISONER: I just went straight from the pot to the heroin. I didn't touch anything else. And then that's why I went downhill. I didn't want to rely on anyone, didn't want to rob anyone, so that's why I became a prostitute.

KIRRIN McKECHNIE: It's been a tough, rough road for this 33-year-old mother of two. But she's starting afresh: moving into a new home, and looking forward to what lies ahead for the first time in a long time.

RENEE: Once I got the job and saw what a happy life everyone was leading, I went on a boat for the first time. I remember. And I just had so much fun. And going to the beach and just doing normal things that I'd never done before. And it was wonderful.

KIRRIN McKECHNIE: Renee doesn't want to give her last name, because she's afraid her dark past could catch up with her. Yet despite her fears, she wants to speak out to help the support service that she says saved her life.

RENEE: I cannot think of a better way to give back than by doing this. So, they helped me I'll help them.

KIRRIN McKECHNIE: Renee was on her second of three stretches in jail for drugs and prostitution related crimes when she was contacted by Sisters Inside, a support service for women in prison. It was their constant contact and support that made her determined to get off heroin and get off the game.

RENEE: A nice lady called Jackie, she came up to see me every week, spoke to me every week. And then she picked me up from the jail and we went and got a bond loan and I got a house and I got a job and I've been clean ever since.

KIRRIN McKECHNIE: Renee's story is by no means unique. Every year Sisters Inside helps hundreds of women like her break the cycle of crime and poverty. But now, its Townsville outreach service is under threat, with the Newman Government pulling its $120,000 funding.

DEBBIE KILROY, SISTERS INSIDE: I'll have to travel to Townsville and tell those women that it's over. We can't provide the services anymore and I find that distressing and I'm sorry. Cause I have to say I don't know how I'm going to walk away from the women. My life passion is about walking with and assisting women to move forward and do well and not go back to prison not commit crimes, not use drugs anymore raise their children, be healthy functioning families so they're ok. But I'm going to have to go up there and say sorry we can't do anything anymore.

'Rotten' Ron Woodham turns up the screws

Matthew Moore and Malcolm Knox | SMH | December 6, 2008

Hard time ... Ron Woodham faces the press after an escape from Long Bay jail in 1996.
Photo: Sam Rutherford

RON WOODHAM has never shied away from a fight and, despite his age and his failing health, he showed in his stoush with Bassam Hamzy this week he is not about to change.

Hamzy, a convicted murderer, is suing Woodham for putting him in isolation in Lithgow Jail for allegedly planning an escape attempt from Goulburn Jail. So when police and prison staff suspected Hamzy was using a mobile phone allegedly to run a multi-million dollar drug ring from his cell in Lithgow, the Commissioner of NSW Corrective Services could not resist the chance to swipe back.

"I've got a message for this particular individual," he said after his staff released video footage of a mobile phone apparently being slipped into a cell. "If he thinks he has been isolated before and complained about it, wait till he sees what he's got tomorrow."

It is vintage Woodham. For decades he has been attacked by all sides of politics, criticised by staff and by those attempting reform in prisons. He has been investigated repeatedly by the Independent Commission Against Corruption and always cleared. Yet his grip on the top job in the country's biggest prison system has rarely looked more secure.

For decades he has worn the name of "rotten", but it is his mud-repelling Teflon skin that better characterises his reign. The only NSW prison officer ever to make it to the top job, Woodham joined Corrective Services in 1965 and in the 43 years since he has honed skills acquired in an environment where survival is prized above all.

No other public servant has successfully weathered such a steady stream of allegations over such a long period. The fact Woodham is still there is because he knows running jails is different from running trains or hospitals where clients complain when services fall short. His clients seldom complain and, if they do, he knows how to fight back.

He builds networks that have helped ensure his survival.

As he told John Hatzistergos at a farewell dinner he threw in 2005 when the prisons minister ended his first stint in the portfolio: "My job was to protect your back."

Hatzistergos had an almost identical recollection of how their relationship works. "I do recall the first day Ron Woodham came into my office. He said to me, 'My job is to see that at the end of your term you are bruised, not battered'."

Unlike many of his limping cabinet colleagues, Hatzistergos finished his stint as minister for jails with barely a mark on him, a marked contrast to the pounding predecessors have suffered over the years when riots and bashings and escapes dominated headlines.

He is 20 months into his second stint in the portfolio, and it is proving to be even more of a walk in the park, with barely an issue he has been compelled to address.

Hatzistergos knows the quiet life he enjoys is thanks to the all-powerful man at the top.

"Anyone can run Corrective Services when Ron Woodham is in charge," he said.

Ending Sydney’s law-and-order auction

Robert Milliken | Inside Story | 3 April 2012 

The NSW attorney-general has taken the politically risky step of trying to reduce the prison population, writes Robert Milliken


NSW attorney-general Greg Smith (above, right) and security manager Patrick Aboud viewing the 300-bed drug treatment facility for prisoners at the state’s John Morony Correctional Complex.
Photo: Kate Geraghty/ Fairfax

WHEN Sydney’s southwest suburbs suffered a wave of drive-by shootings early this year, the city’s tabloid press and notorious radio shock jocks went into overdrive. Their target was Greg Smith, who is about to complete his first year as attorney-general in Barry O’Farrell’s state government. In most respects, Smith is a classic conservative Liberal: a barrister, and former public prosecutor, who represents the leafy electorate of Epping. His Sydney north shore constituency is a world away from the streets on the other side of town where rival gangs of young men shot up each other’s homes in an intimidating display of turf warfare.

In one regard, though, Smith is something of a radical. After sixteen years of state Labor governments, he came to power promising to reform the state’s prison system. Instead of locking more people up, Smith has pledged to find formulas to allow many minor offenders and young criminals to be rehabilitated and then let go.

Sydney’s Daily Telegraph has waged an unrelenting campaign against Smith. It calls him “Marshmallow Smith,” and accuses him of going “soft on crime.” In one extraordinary front page splash in early February, the paper claimed: “Exclusive: Gays, Minorities Get Bail but the Rest… Go Straight to Jail.” The piece claimed to be based on a draft report by the NSW Law Reform Commission, which Smith had not seen. Media hype of this sort threatens to unsettle the government, in a political climate in which law-and-order auctions are the name of the game: both sides compete in proving to voters that they are the toughest on crime.

Smith claims to be unmoved. “The whole hardline approach against crime has been a failure in many places,” he tells me. “This attempt to make me look softer misrepresents what I am trying to do. I am trying to turn people away from crime. It’s not soft, it’s being more pragmatic.”

The challenge Smith faces in testing his pragmatic approach is daunting. Australia spends $11.5 billion a year on law and order, about $511 a year per person. The dubious honour for the biggest spending goes to New South Wales. In evidence late last year to a parliamentary estimates committee, and in a speech to a solicitors’ conference in Sydney, Smith painted a chilling picture.

Within two years of their release, 43 per cent of NSW prisoners reoffend, compared with just under 37 per cent in Victoria, for example, and less than 30 per cent in Tasmania. (The Australian Capital Territory will start reporting on recidivism from 2011–12.) This high recidivism rate accompanies another grim profile: of 15,000 people taken into custody in New South Wales in 2007–08, almost two-thirds were affected by drugs or alcohol when they committed their most serious offences.

Smith’s state also has the highest number of prisoners on remand in Australia. Over the ten years to October 2011, the number of adults held on remand rose by 86 per cent. More worryingly, more than four-fifths of the juveniles held on remand were eventually set free with non-custodial sentences. Locking these young people up, when their crimes are finally found not to deserve such punishment, simply creates more problems, says Smith: “They spend a long time being exposed to a university of crime among prisoners.”

AG Greg Smith's speech to Public Defender's Conference

Speech by Greg Smith SC MP, Attorney General and Minister for Justice to 

open the Public Defender’s Conference, Saturday 24 March 2012 at Taronga 

Park Zoo Conference Centre. 

This Monday marks the first anniversary of the election of the O'Farrell Government.  

For the past week we have had the pleasure of getting up at 5.30 and going out to 

railway stations handing out  little cards telling people what good things we’ve done 

and they are saying: what’s up?, Is there an election on? But we have had a very 

good reception. 

I am pleased to say the firm agenda I set in opposition – with the backing of the 

Coalition –which was that there would be no law and order auction at the last 

election, has been honoured by us. And I think Labor was becoming weary of it. 

They didn’t try to counter with a one sided auction – no grid sentencing, or more 

maximum life sentences, no extra aggravated offences, no standard non parole 

periods – which had coloured the previous 20 years of elections. 

Unlike previous governments, our State plan does not demand a certain number of 

arrests or prisoners. Take section 22A of the Bail Act; it allowed only one application 

for bail and had a particular impact on young people - especially for those who 

breached curfews. There are now are 150 people a week in juvenile detention 

centres who will never receive a custodial sentence. 

I promised we would open a second metropolitan drug court – I expect that will up 

and running in May – and the first intensive drug treatment facility in a NSW jail. We 

have done that at the John Morony complex at Windsor. In late February the first 62 

prisoners started and within two years I hope we have 300 prisoners – 250 men, 50 

women - undergoing treatment that will last for about six months. They will be linking 

up with the non-government organisations after their release so they can continue 

their treatment. 

Drug addiction can be a lifelong struggle and my hope is that this program will help a 

lot of people to turn their lives around and make a positive contribution to the 

community. If they can get off the drugs, get a job, get somewhere to live and help – 

 rather than just being thrown into jail and let out with the same problems – it will be 

better for the community. We will have more citizens who might have been 

permanent criminals going straight and the community will be safer. And hopefully 

the perceptions of safety will increase because that is one of our big problems. 

Fanned by publicity and sensation, there is a perception out in the suburbs of 

Sydney that it’s dangerous out there, in the night, even in the day.   

When it comes to crime, harsher punishment doesn't pay

Anna Patty | SMH | March 14, 2012

LENGTHENING prison terms will do nothing to reduce crime in NSW, one of the most comprehensive reports on the criminal justice system conducted in Australia shows.

The study by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research found that increasing the risk of arrest and imprisonment were much more effective.

Another major reason for falls in crime in the past decade was an improved economy and employment levels, which provided strong disincentives to crime. A 10 per cent increase in household income was estimated to produce an 18.9 per cent reduction in property crime and a 14.6 per cent reduction in violent crime.

The bureau's director, Don Weatherburn, said the study suggested governments should focus more on strategies to increase the risk of arrest and less on increasing the severity of punishments.

The study looked at whether Australian taxpayers were getting value for the $11.5 billion they spend each year on law and order.

It reviewed changes in the risk of arrest, the likelihood of prison and the average prison term on trends in property and violent crime across all 153 local government areas in NSW between 1996 and 2008.

''Increasing the risk of arrest and the likelihood of going to prison produces modest reductions in property and violent crime,'' Dr Weatherburn said. ''But increasing the length of prison sentences exerts no effect at all.''

The Prisoner as a Human Being

Jon Stanhope | Right Now | 16 February 2012



This article is part of our February theme, which focuses on one of the great silences in the human rights conversation in Australia: Prisoners’ Rights. Read our Editorial for more on this theme.

In 2004 the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) Legislative Assembly enacted the Human Rights Act, the first Bill of Rights to be passed into law in Australia. In passing the Act, the ACT Government made an overt and very public commitment to the universality and inalienability of human rights.

In essence the Act provides that no one may be treated or punished in a cruel, inhumane or degrading way: that even the worst among us have human rights that should be respected even if we have been convicted of the most heinous crimes.

In 2009 the Alexander Maconochie Centre, the ACT’s first prison, became operational. The Government was motivated, when taking the decision to build the prison, by the opportunity to learn from the experience of other prisons in operation in Australia and to avoid the temptation, as politically enticing as it is, to employ the practice and language of retribution, punishment and demonisation.

The prison was the first in Australia to be built and operated in accordance with human rights legislation and principles. The fact it is named in honour of Alexander Maconochie, superintendent of the Norfolk Island penal colony from 1840 to 1844, a prison reformer unmatched in Australia before or since, was to be a constant reminder of the prison’s aims as a reforming institution, one which reflects a commitment to human rights and a belief in the possibility of rehabilitation and redemption.

The most recent Productivity Commission Report on Government Services, released on 31 January 2012 gives a first glimpse of some of the outcomes of the operational approach employed at the Alexander Maconochie Centre (AMC).

It reveals that the percentage of eligible prisoners employed at the AMC was 92.3 percent against a national average of 76.1 percent; the number of AMC prisoners enrolled in education and training is 92.0 percent as opposed to 34.8 percent nationally; and AMC prisoners spend an average of 14.1 hours out of cells while nationally prisoners are out of cells for 11.4 hours a day. Prisoners at AMC may also receive visitors six days a week including up until 8 pm and the crude imprisonment rate in the ACT is 68 per 100,000 while nationally it is 169 per 100,000. It is not surprising that the cost per prisoner of providing corrective services in the ACT is also the highest in Australia.

Prisoners are perhaps the last discrete group of human beings who are, in a general way, publically vilified, dehumanised and demonised within Australia without fear of censure.

Australia moves to strengthen oversight and accountability of places of detention

Human Rights Law Centre | 28 Feb 2012

Australia has moved a step closer to ensuring independent monitoring, inspection and oversight of places of detention.

The Commonwealth Attorney-General, Nicola Roxon, and the Acting Minister for Foreign Affairs, Craig Emerson, today tabled a National Interest Analysis on Australia’s ratification of the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture.

The Optional Protocol is an international treaty which aims to prevent ill treatment and promote humane conditions by establishing systems for independent monitoring and inspection of all places of detention.

“It is not only in the interests of persons deprived of liberty, but also the broader community, that all places of detention – whether prisons, psychiatric hospitals, police cells or disability facilities – promote rehabilitation and reintegration. It is fundamental that all detainees are treated with basic dignity and respect. Independent inspections and oversight are critical in this regard,” said Human Rights Law Centre Executive Director, Phil Lynch.

At the national level, the Optional Protocol requires that countries establish what is known as a “national preventative mechanism”, or NPM. An NPM is an independent body with a mandate to conduct both announced and unannounced visits to places of detention, to make recommendations to prevent ill treatment and improve conditions, and to report publicly on its findings and views.

At the international level, the Optional Protocol establishes an independent committee of experts, the UN Sub-Committee on the Prevention of Torture, with a mandate to carry out country missions to monitor deprivations of liberty.

According to Mr Lynch, “The whole system is premised on the evidence and experience that external scrutiny of places of detention can prevent and redress torture and other forms of ill treatment. By making places of detention more open, transparent and accountable, it helps to ensure that persons deprived of liberty – whether people with psychiatric illness, prisoners, people with disability or asylum seekers – are treated with basic dignity and respect.”

Australia signed the Optional Protocol in May 2009. Since that time, progress on ratification and implementation has been slow, with wrangling between the states and the Commonwealth about who is to foot the modest bill for detention monitoring and oversight. According to Mr Lynch, “This is despite international evidence as to the very high social and economic costs of failing to prevent and redress ill-treatment.”

Mr Lynch said that, “Now that the NIA has been tabled, the Commonwealth, state and territory governments should all prioritise ratification and implementation of the Optional Protocol. Any further delay in the prevention of ill-treatment has intolerable social and economic costs and is simply not an option.”

The cynical world of America's private prisons

Sadhbh Walshe | guardian.co.uk | 3 February 2012

A major factor in why US prisons are overflowing is the highly profitable privatised industry that has an incentive to fill them.

In the past few decades, changes in sentencing laws and get-tough-on-crime policies have led to an explosion in America's prison population. Funding this incarceration binge has been an enormous drain on taxpayer dollars, with some states now spending more to lock up their citizens than to provide their children with education. It's difficult to spin anything positive out of that scenario, but as it turns out, even this blackest of clouds has a silver lining – silver as in dollars, that is, for the private prison industry.

In 2010, two of the largest private prison companies in America, GEO Group, Inc and the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) generated over $4bn dollars in profit between them. Their respective CEOs,George Zoley and Damon Hininger, each earned well in excess of $3m in 2010. Although there have been some concerns that any relaxation of sentencing or drug laws might negatively impact their bottom line (profit), they remain confident in their ability to drum up new ways of generating their taxpayer-funded commodities (also known as inmates): lobbying California for their excess prisoners being one; caging juveniles on trivial charges another. But the favorite, by a long shot, is the accelerated drive to lock up America's immigrants.

So far, these strategies seem to be working nicely. In their 2011 third-quarter earnings report, the GEO group proudly announced an increase in profits from the previous year. This joyous news can be at least partially attributed to changes in immigration law, particularly in states like Arizona and Oklahoma, which allow for, among other things, the indefinite detention of illegal immigrants, including those whose asylum proceedings are underway. The majority of immigrants who are picked up by law enforcement officials, mostly on civil charges, like being caught with a broken tail light for instance, will end up in privately run prisons. In many of these facilities, they will be charged $5 per minute to call their loved ones, whilst earning $1 per day for their labor, from which the corporation running the facility will profit.

Bombastic voices aiming to shout down the Attorney-General

Richard Ackland | SMH | February 10, 2012



"There is a misguided perception that the legal community is soft on crime and out of touch with community expectations" ... Chief Justice of NSW Tom Bathurst. Photo: Wolter Peeters

The Chief Justice of NSW, Tom Bathurst, issued the annual rallying cry to lawyers at Parliament House's new law term banquet. That was on the night of January 30. Part of his speech was about the crisis of confidence faced by the criminal justice system.

''Community trust in the system is eroding. Much of this distrust is fuelled by misinformation that is propagated by sections of the media who prefer to inflame rather than inform … There is a misguided perception that the legal community is soft on crime and out of touch with community expectations.''

The next available issue of The Daily Telegraph promptly splashed on page one with a fine piece of confected inflammation: ''Exclusive: Gays, minorities get bail but the rest … Go Straight to Jail.''
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Accompanying the exclusive was a little graphic of the NSW Attorney-General, Greg Smith, in pink, captioned: ''Marshmallow man: Greg Smith.'' By asking the NSW Law Reform Commission to review the Bail Act, the Attorney-General seems to have confirmed in many minds that he is a big, fat, pink softie who presumably will melt when heat is applied.

The fact that the Attorney-General hasn't yet received the report of the commission, or considered any proposals for reform, or put them to cabinet is beside the point.

Small fish in rough seas

Michael Gordon | The Age | February 8, 2012

Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young wants to stop hundreds of so-called Indonesian people smugglers from serving mandatory five-year terms in Australian jails. As Michael Gordon reports, the treatment of small-time players has big consequences.

Budi was waiting for a bus in Jakarta when he says a stranger made him an offer that was too good to refuse - 10 million rupiah (about $A1000) to crew a boat that would take a group of people to an unnamed island.

He was 19 years old, uneducated and a long way from his home on the Indonesian island of Ambon. Another man at the bus stop was offered the same deal and, like Budi, agreed without a second's hesitation. The only catch, they were told, was that they wouldn't get paid until they came back with the boat.

What neither of them understood was that there was never any chance that the boat would make the return journey, or that they would receive the payment. What neither could envisage, or even vaguely comprehend, was that they would wind up in an Australian jail facing a serious criminal charge with a mandatory five-year jail term.

Budi, not his real name, is an accidental people smuggler, if you accept that cooking noodles and keeping the engine going on an unseaworthy fishing boat for a group of desperate asylum seekers constitutes people smuggling. He is one of about 500 Indonesians in the Australian criminal justice system who share a common bond.

Almost all of them, according to what they have told lawyers, Indonesian officials and Australian Federal Police, are peripheral players in what, for a few Mr Bigs (who never accompany their human cargo to its final destination), is a lucrative business.

It is a sad reflection of the toxic debate between Labor and the Coalition on asylum seekers that one of the few areas of common ground is their support for legislation that denies judges any discretion in sentencing those who crew boats that carry asylum seekers to this country.

Under amendments passed by the Rudd government with Coalition support, so long as there are more than five people on the boat, crew members are charged with aggravated people smuggling and, if found guilty, sentenced to a mandatory term of five years in jail, with a minimum of three.

Today, Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young will challenge the consensus of the major parties by introducing a private member's bill to remove mandatory minimum sentences for people-smuggling offences, and enable the courts to distinguish between the architects of the trade and the incidental players.

While Hanson-Young's Migration Amendment (Removal of Mandatory Minimum Penalties) Bill would appear doomed, it will prod the conscience of MPs on both sides of the Parliament who agree with human rights advocates and judges that the mandatory jail terms for those who crew asylum seeker boats are problematic, to say the least, on several fronts.

Hardline A-G hits back at his critics

Anna Patty | SMH | February 3, 2012

It didn't take long for the vitriol over the state government's approach to law and order to start.

Ten months after the NSW election, the opposition and tabloid media have been dishing it out to the Attorney-General, Greg Smith, accusing him of being soft on crime.

One radio talk-back host recently accused Smith of being a step away from the Greens, saying he had failed to earn his stripes as a conservative Attorney-General.

When it comes to the rehabilitation of non-violent offenders, Smith would agree.

He says he is "more left-wing on issues like dealing with prisoners and rehabilitation than any other Attorney-General in the country".

But Smith, reputed as a tough public prosecutor when he worked for the DPP - having put away murderers including those who killed policeman David Carty - is hardline when it comes to serious violence.

In response to a recent spate of drive-by shootings in Sydney's south-west, the opposition and some commentators have confused the distinction Smith has made between his different approaches to sentencing and rehabilitation.

He believes in non-custodial sentences for less serious offenders and rehabilitation for people with drug and alcohol addiction or mental health problems.

When it comes to people guilty of serious violent crime, including the "buffoons" responsible for the shootings, repeat offenders and those guilty of child sex offences, Smith wants to toughen punishments.

Smith recently asked the Supreme Court to look at how judgments against people convicted of sex offences against children could be strengthened.

The Caging of America: Why do we lock up so many people?

 Adam Gopnik | The New Yorker | January 30, 2012

A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens. One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime. The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock.

That’s why no one who has been inside a prison, if only for a day, can ever forget the feeling. Time stops. A note of attenuated panic, of watchful paranoia—anxiety and boredom and fear mixed into a kind of enveloping fog, covering the guards as much as the guarded. “Sometimes I think this whole world is one big prison yard, / Some of us are prisoners, some of us are guards,” Dylan sings, and while it isn’t strictly true—just ask the prisoners—it contains a truth: the guards are doing time, too. As a smart man once wrote after being locked up, the thing about jail is that there are bars on the windows and they won’t let you out. This simple truth governs all the others. What prisoners try to convey to the free is how the presence of time as something being done to you, instead of something you do things with, alters the mind at every moment. For American prisoners, huge numbers of whom are serving sentences much longer than those given for similar crimes anywhere else in the civilized world—Texas alone has sentenced more than four hundred teen-agers to life imprisonment—time becomes in every sense this thing you serve.

For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. Ours is, bottom to top, a “carceral state,” in the flat verdict of Conrad Black, the former conservative press lord and newly minted reformer, who right now finds himself imprisoned in Florida, thereby adding a new twist to an old joke: A conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who’s been indicted; and a passionate prison reformer is a conservative who’s in one.

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.

How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.

Crime and punishment

Jack the Insider Blog | The Australian | 31 January 2012 

Recently, the Australian Bureau of Statistics published the figures for Australia’s corrective services systems and those who exist within it. The figures provide a starting point for reflection on the nature of crime in Australia and how it can be diminished.

There are some startling statistics.

The Northern Territory has a higher incarceration rate than the US (762 prisoners per 100,000 adult population compared to 504/100,000). US incarceration rates vary wildly from state to state, with Maine at 154/100,000 - lower than the Australian national average - while Louisiana stands at the top of the table, making light work of the Top End with 853 per 100,000.

The OECD average is 140/100,000. Across Australia in 2011 we incarcerated people at a rate of 167/100,000.

Prison populations have come down across the nation by two per cent since 2007. This is due largely to a decline in NSW (which contributes both a third of the nation’s population and now an even third of the nation’s prisoners) by eight per cent but this comes after a sharp increase in incarceration rates in NSW between 1995 and 2004.

In the NT, prison populations have increased by 46 per cent and in Tasmania by 32 per cent over the past decade. Queensland accounts for 19 per cent of all Australian prisoners, while the most densely populated state in the Commonwealth, Victoria, has just 14 per cent.

Overall there are 29,106 prisoners behind bars, sentenced and unsentenced. Unsentenced prisoners make up almost a quarter of the total. On average more than half of the nation’s prisoners have had a stretch in prison at least once before.

The average custodial sentence in Australia is three years.

But looking at incarceration rates is really only scraping the surface of crime.

It is estimated that reporting of crime runs at about 40 per cent of all crime committed. 32 per cent will be recorded by the police, just seven per cent of offenders will be detected, four per cent will be convicted and 0.1 per cent will go to jail.

The first and most obvious response is if our governments make more draconian laws, reduce bail applications and legislate mandatory sentences to the effect of say, doubling the prison population in quick time, there will still be 99 per cent of the crime occurring.

Well perhaps not, as those who do get caught often may have been getting away with quite a bit of unreported crime for some time. Nevertheless, the overall trend indicates that longer sentences may satisfy our desires to punish but achieve little else than create a longer list of individuals who, due to the criminogenic effects of prison, will almost invariably reoffend and make further contributions to crime statistics than would otherwise be the case.

The cost of crime in Australia is almost unfathomable. Yet it is the job of criminologists to make an attempt and most estimates put the cost at between $35 and $45 billion a year based on criteria such as direct financial loss, medical costs, lost productive capacity and assorted intangibles including the emotional costs to victims and families. For example the cost of one homicide is estimated at $1.8 million when the victim is aged between 18 and 34.

The direct cost of incarceration runs to about $80 per Australian man, woman and child or $1.6 billion a year.

Then there’s the cost of state policing - $3.2bn a year across the nation; the Commonwealth agencies from the AFP, the Commonwealth DPP, the Australian Crime Commission, the Attorney General’s office etc. cost $820 million. $350m is spent on Juvenile Justice and the courts themselves cost $410m to oversee it all.

The issue of crime prevention is complex and a whole-of-society problem.

William Stuntz, a Harvard law Professor, evangelical Christian and author of The Collapse of American Criminal Justice devoted his life to ending discrimination within the US legal system. He died of cancer in 2011.

Stuntz identified plea bargaining as a scourge and one of the primary causes of the unravelling of the criminal justice system in the US.

It is a scourge that has beset our legal system, too.

In general plea bargaining will see an offender plead guilty to a lesser charge. There is no trial. Unlike the US system, there is no direct bargaining on sentencing in Australia but offenders will appreciate the sentencing scale when they put their hands up.

The statistics on plea bargaining across Australia’s state jurisdictions are difficult to obtain given the clandestine nature in which the bargaining is conducted but approximately 70 per cent of offences in our higher courts are resolved in this manner.

This is an unsatisfactory means of dispensing justice – unacceptable for victims and often likewise for offenders who are represented by overworked and under-resourced public defenders.

Plea bargaining has become rife in our court system to reduce costs. The cost of a trial in the District or County Courts is $10,000 per day and that does not include the cost of defence.

So, there must be a realisation that more money will need to be spent, at least in the short term to ensure that as many, if not all serious offences go to trial to allow a jury to determine guilt or innocence based on the evidence and the legal principle of reasonable doubt.

But according to Stutz, it is not just a trial but the manner in which it is conducted that can make the difference. If an offence occurs in, say, the Blue Mountains region of NSW, then the trial should be conducted there and the jury taken from a pool of residents from the local area.

The rationale is that the regionalisation of juries will provide greater insight and understanding of the peculiarities of the offence and the context in which it may have been committed as opposed to a jury selected from anywhere around the state who have no local knowledge, no real empathy for the victim and may come to the courtroom with certain prejudices obtained from tabloid media.

Stuntz’s thoughtful recommendations would not create a perfect system but may well create a system that is less imperfect than the one in place at the moment.

Certainly, it will lead to better outcomes for victims and while it will be more expensive the hope is that in time, the better dispensation of justice itself will reduce the incidence of crime overall.

It is just one measure available to our legislators who too often run a tough on crime agenda that offers no benefit to our communities and merely amplifies the problem.

New Book: When American Religion Meets American Mass Incarceration

Sara Mayeux  | Prison Law Blog | 9 January 2012



Insofar as America is (descriptively) exceptional,* two key differences setting America apart from its peer nations are mass incarceration and popular religiosity. Assuming the U.S. is most usefully compared with Canada, Australia, and Western Europe (I acknowledge not all will share this assumption), none of these peer nations match the U.S. imprisonment rate and few come close to American levels of church membership, church-going, or public professions of faith. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, many American prisons offer a wide array of faith-based programming (even, or especially, prisons where secular education and rehabilitation programming is meager: for instance, in Louisiana’s Angola State Prison, you can earn a BA from a Baptist theological seminary, but no non-Christian college courses are offered). An evangelical group, Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship Ministries, is among the most prominent national organizations sending volunteers into prisons and advocating for criminal justice reform.

How does this convergence of American religiosity with American imprisonment fit with the First Amendment’s ban on state-established religion? In her book Prison Religion: Faith-Based Reform and the Constitution (Princeton UP, 2009), Buffalo law professor Winifred Sullivan uses a recent lawsuit as a case study for considering this question. From the book’s introduction:

In December 2006, in Des Moines, Iowa, a U.S. District Court judge found unconstitutional a faith-based, in-prison rehabilitation program operating in the Newton Facility of the Iowa Department of Corrections, a program known as InnerChange Freedom Initiative (IFI). … Approximately a year after the District Court’s decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit found Prison Fellowship Ministries at the Iowa prison to be acting “under color of state law” in a program of conversion and discrimination. The Iowa Department of Corrections finally terminated its contract with InnerChange on March 10, 2008. (IFI programs are currently present in the prisons of five other states: Arkansas, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, and Texas. Private faith-based prison programs managed by other religious groups also exist in many states. Some states, including Florida, have initiated their own state-run, in-prison, faith-based programs. Because of variations in contracting arrangements, the effect of the Iowa court’s decision on these other programs remains unclear.)

AU v. PFM is acknowledged to be one of the most significant recent court cases considering the application of the establishment clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to the new “faith-based” social services. A legal and social climate substantially more hospitable to government/religion partnership than in the recent past has made possible an increase in the number of government contracts with private, “faith based” social service providers, particularly those operating in prisons. … Notwithstanding the actual decision in the case, set in the larger context of religion in the United States, the trial testimony reveals a religious culture in which the sacred and the secular can be seen to be sinuously and ambiguously intertwined and support for religious authority more thoroughly located in the individual rather than in traditional institutions.

I look forward to reading the rest of Sullivan’s book and perhaps blogging about it further.
(h/t: Legal Theory Blog)

—

* (I’ll leave prescriptivist exceptionalism to the politicians.)

Effective law and order policy need not be a shot in the dark

Don Weatherburn | SMH | January 10, 2012

It's hard to find anyone these days who doesn't believe in evidence-based policy. Politicians swear their allegiance to it, bureaucrats praise it and I've even been lectured by a taxi driver on the need for a more evidence-based approach to crime control.

Evidence-based policy stands in contrast to policy based on hunch, prejudice, guesswork or the desire for a ''warm inner glow''. The public service's embrace of it has been more rapid and fervent than Saul's conversion on the road to Damascus. If this epiphany were real, ordinary taxpayers would have much to celebrate, especially in the domain of law and order. But, sadly, it can't be believed.

You would never be able to market a pharmaceutical drug in Australia without rigorous evaluation by the Therapeutic Goods Administration. But state and territory governments routinely spend large sums of taxpayers' money trying to reduce crime and re-offending without subjecting the measures to any evaluation. Where evaluations are undertaken, the results are often ignored.

The promise to appoint additional police and impose tougher penalties on crime are staples at nearly every election; yet no Australian state or territory government has ever promised to evaluate and publicly report on the effects of additional police and tougher penalties.

And it isn't just those old staples that escape critical scrutiny. The list of policies shown by my office to have no effect on re-offending in NSW includes high fines for drink drivers, supervision of offenders on good behaviour bonds, detention for juvenile offenders, the forum sentencing program (a restorative justice program for young adult offenders) and the circle sentencing program (under which Aboriginal offenders are brought before community elders for sanctioning).

Despite the negative results, all these policies remain in place. Meanwhile, programs that have been known for years to be effective, such as the NSW Drug Court Program, are only now being expanded.

Why do governments trumpet the virtues of evidence-based policy, while often ignoring it in practice? One reason is that law and order policy is as much, if not more, influenced by what's popular than by what's effective.

Tough penalties and measures that give victims an opportunity to confront offenders and demand an apology and restitution go down well with the general public. Giving cognitive behavioural therapy to violent offenders to help them manage their anger is nowhere near as attractive, even though it works.

Another reason is that, far from being politically neutral, senior public servants often have political or policy agendas of their own that they want to pursue.

A third reason is that unlike areas such as those of health and education, criminal justice agencies have no entrenched culture of research and development.

Fourth, the public servants who end up managing rehabilitation programs often end up becoming forceful advocates for those programs and trenchant critics of evaluations that produce negative results.

The long-term solution to all this is a better-informed public and more rigorous scrutiny of law and order policy by the media. Here are 10 questions one should ask of any government that declares its commitment to evidence-based policy:

1. Does the government state the objectives of its law and order policies and programs in terms that can be measured? If not, there is no way they can be properly evaluated.

2. Does the government base its policies and programs on the results of systematic reviews, such as those published on the website of The Campbell Collaboration, an international research network? These reviews objectively summarise the results of all past rigorous research into the effectiveness of various interventions in preventing crime and reducing re-offending.

3. Are the government's law and order policy advisers trained in both research methods along with statistical analysis?

4. Does the government provide researchers with comprehensive access to information on the rate at which convicted offenders are reconvicted?

5. Does the government provide to researchers comprehensive access to all information on reported crime?

6. Are all major new programs subjected to rigorous cost-benefit or cost-effectiveness evaluation by an independent agency?

7. Are all evaluations subjected to independent peer review by appropriate experts in the field to detect flaws?

8. Does the government abandon or substantially modify programs that have been shown to be ineffective in achieving their stated goals?

9. If the government substantially amends a policy or program, is the revised policy/program evaluated?

10. Does the government ever delay or withhold the results of evaluations it commissions? If so, then the government is clearly keen to persist with policies that are not supported by evidence.

Without this planning, training, transparency and responsiveness, policies may amount to a complete waste of public money.

Where governments are truly committed to evidence-based policy, it should be possible to answer all these questions with a ''yes''.

Dr Don Weatherburn is director of the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.

Is Prison Culture Killing Our Children?

A. Scott Washington, J.D. | Hip Hop Justice | December 2010

A factor that cannot be ignored when discussing urban violence is over reliance on incarceration in this country. To ignore the causal connection between contemporary criminal justice policy and the rise in youthful urban violence is turning a blind-eye to factors that are rotting the foundation of contemporary urban society.

There are nearly 2.4 million persons incarcerated in state or federal prisons in this country. Half of those persons are African Americans. Obviously, identifiable behavior patterns are associated with African Americans being disproportionately incarcerated. On the other hand, the intersection of public policy and poverty has collided with the forces of history, race, economic theory and human vulnerability to create a social pathology like none seen before in this country. As a result, “prison culture” is now firmly embedded in inner city America.

Following 35 years of tough on crime policy, the affect of generational incarceration and recidivism has created an environment ripe for this new subculture within the inner city. This subculture is fueled by the extremely violent and brutal customs and values that were born within the concrete walls of this country’s correctional institutions.

Prison culture, which is now abundantly present in the inner city, is directly connected to the extreme and pervasive violence we are experiencing in the African American community. These conditions grow exponentially, parallel to the prison population in this country. This phenomenon is cyclical and, as the statistics suggest, actually increase violent criminal activity in both the inner city and suburban communities. Therefore, community safety is significantly compromised by the tough on crime mentality associated with contemporary criminal justice policy; particularly, this country’s drug control efforts that have become the fundamental premise of our national crime policy.

Our children have become the collateral damage of contemporary American criminal justice policy. For many inner city residents and African American children in particular, criminal justice policy and poverty have contributed to a blurring of cultural, as well as social values. During the welfare reform era we spoke about children raising children. What prison culture has resulted in today is children raising themselves. A significant proportion of our inner city youth today are the children of prisoners that inhabit this nation’s prisons. When these children reach adolescence they are typically raising themselves in the bowels of contemporary urban America.

What criminal justice policy and poverty have perpetuated in this country is the social disenfranchisement of African American children. The forces of public policy, poverty, and human vulnerability have conspired to create this new and peculiar universe within the inner city. The apparent evolving nature of this new inner city subculture and its intersection with poverty and social pathology has created an environment ripe for youthful urban violence to flourish.

The questions that must be raised here are: 1) what are we going to do with the massive numbers of unskilled, undereducated, and often, recalcitrant felons that will be returning to our communities over the next several decades (98% of the 2.4 million prisoners in this country will be released)? 2) When will policy be implemented to deal with the flaws and inadequacies in current drug control policy? 3) When are our lawmakers going to present concrete solutions for problems that cannot be conquered by locking up millions of Americans?

A. Scott Washington, J.D. is a formerly incarcerated person who has earned a Bachelors Degree in Urban Studies with an emphasis on contemporary urban problems and a Juris Doctor Degree from the University Of Dayton School Of Law. Also, he is Assistant Professor of Criminal and Social Justice at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois. A. Scott Washington also co-hosts a radio program entitled, “Hip Hop Justice Radio” which airs Tuesdays & Wednesdays from 6-8 PM CT on Party 934 and 94.9 FM, Hudson Valley New York.

Aboriginal crime and punishment: spending on jails but not outcomes

Inga Ting | Crikey | 16 December 2011

The rise of a punitive "law and order" culture in Australia has had a profoundly racial dimension, manifested in soaring rates of indigenous incarceration. The number of indigenous adults held in the nation's jails has increased for the 11th year in a row -- as Crikey revealed in part one yesterday -- while over the past decade the indigenous imprisonment rate has outstripped the non-indigenous rate by a factor of 11, ballooning more than 47%. The non-indigenous rate grew 4% in the same period.

This shift towards the use of crime and punishment as a tool of social control -- known as "governing through crime" -- has led to the rise of a "risk agenda" that concentrates on the risk of crime occurring, not just actual crime. In this society of heightened fear and increased surveillance, punishment is increasingly targeted at those on the periphery. And no group lies more at the periphery than indigenous Australians.

That outcomes for Aboriginal Australians are deteriorating in all but a select few areas has been confirmed by virtually every government report released this year. Here is an extract from just one -- the Productivity Commissions latest Closing the Gap report, Overcoming Indigenous Disadvantage: Key Indicators, released in August:

"Nine years after this series was commissioned, there is still a considerable way to go ... Wide gaps in average outcomes remain across most indicators. Of the 45 quantitative indicators in the report, for example, available data show improvement in outcomes for only 13 indicators ... For 10 there has been no real improvement, while for another seven, including social indicators such as criminal justice, outcomes have actually deteriorated."

Some of the most shocking indicators are in the area of health, where hospitalisation rates are vastly higher for indigenous men and women than for other Australians.

Ratio of indigenous to non-indigenous rates of hospitalisation

Reason for hospitalisation                                            Women               Men

Injuries caused by assault                                             31                        7

(i.e. hospitalisation rate for indigenous women 

31 times higher than the rate for 

non-indigenous women) 

Injuries caused by non-fatal family violence assault      31                        25

Mental and behavioural disorders                                  1.5                      2.2

Chronic disease:

End-stage renal disease                                                 15                        8
Diabetes                                                                        5                         3.5
Circulatory                                                                    2                         1.5

According to the same report, indigenous adults indicate having a disability that profoundly or severely restricts core activity at around twice the rate for non-indigenous people. They are also twice as likely to be recent users of illicit substances as other Australians and four times as likely to be homeless.

David Woodroffe, managing solicitor in criminal law at the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency in the NT, says the Northern Territory intervention has invested heavily in institutions focused on punishing criminal behaviour, while providing minimal services to help those who turn to crime in the first place.

"There’s more policing in communities -- more police stations and police posts -- so more people will come to the attention of police, will be charged, get into the [criminal justice] process. But there’s no corresponding in relation to other services ... there’s no youth diversion programs, there’s no rehabilitation services, etc. So basically, government’s providing an impetus for detecting crime and prosecuting crime but there’s not the services there for reducing crime or turning people away from it. And that’s why we see, with the lack of services like that, people becoming entrenched in the criminal justice system."

Aboriginal crime and punishment: incarceration rates rise under neoliberalism

Inga Ting | Crikey | 15 December 2011

The number of indigenous adults held in the nation’s jails has increased for the 11th year in a row, despite the nation’s prisoner population falling for the first time in a decade.

According to the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics data, the indigenous prisoner population increased by 1% in the year to June 2011 while the total prisoner population dropped by 2%. The gap between indigenous and non-indigenous imprisonment rates grew by 0.1%, with indigenous Australians now 14.3 times more likely to be incarcerated than non-indigenous Australians. Today, about one in four prisoners are indigenous even though indigenous Australians make up just 2.5% of the general population.

While the reduction in the national prisoner population makes a welcome change, the fact remains that it has expanded by 30% over the past decade despite falling crime rates across the nation. At first glance, this doesn’t make sense: crime rates have decreased dramatically in the past decade (see the complete data) while incarceration rates — especially indigenous incarceration rates — have continued to climb.

The problem lies in the common assumption that punishment is a direct outcome to criminal behaviour, says Chris Cunneen, Professor of Justice and Social Inclusion at James Cook University and a criminologist with more than 20 years’ experience in indigenous criminal justice. “Sentencing and imprisonment is not related to crime. It’s a function of government policy,” he told Crikey. “The fact that we’re locking up more people is … really about changes to law and practice.”

Killer's sharp suit fails to dress up a hollow tale

John Silvester | The Age | September 30, 2011



Matthew Johnson in the clothes he has worn most of his adult life.

THE man in the witness box doesn't look like an institutionalised inmate and one of the most dangerous men in Australia.

In his well cut shark-grey suit and matching tie he could pass for a fitness-conscious stockbroker: the type that chooses the shaved head look favoured by many modern metrosexuals.

There are no signs of jail tattoos, body piercings or battle scars to hint at the man's 20-year criminal history that now includes 159 criminal convictions - the last added yesterday when a Supreme Court jury found him guilty of murdering underworld identity Carl Williams inside Barwon Prison.

Yet at his first appearance to testify there are signs that the outfit is not the witness's daily business attire but clothes bought to impress the jury. On the sleeve of the brand new suit are four spare buttons, still loosely attached by a piece of tailor's cloth. The back slit on the jacket is held together by a single temporary stitch - a sure sign it is fresh from a store rack rather than a private wardrobe.

Over three days in the witness box, Matthew Johnson stuck to his improbable story, that he killed Williams in self-defence. His barrister, Bill Stuart, argued through the trial it was a case of ''kill or be killed''.

Such a position was somewhat eroded when the jury saw prison video of Johnson attacking Williams from behind on April 19 last year, beating him eight times over the head with the metal stem of an exercise bike and dragging him into his cell.

There they saw Johnson in the clothes he has worn most of his adult life: the prison garb of red T-shirt and shorts.

In the witness box, Johnson maintained he believed Williams was planning to kill him using four billiard balls inside a sock as a weapon. His voice was controlled, his answers measured and his version of events - totally unbelievable.

Even Johnson didn't seem confident the jurors would swallow his story. ''The moment I made up me mind to kill Carl, I just assumed that the next 30 to 40 years I'm spending in jail,'' he told them.

The exact number of years will now be decided by Justice Lex Lasry at a later sentencing date but Johnson's estimation seems certain to be around the mark.

When the jury of seven women and five men returned their verdict after 14 hours of deliberation, Johnson showed no emotion. The decision would hardly have surprised the career criminal who knew this day was coming from the time he launched his premeditated attack 19 months earlier.