Taxpayers are each forking out $140 more a year for prisons than would be needed if Australia maintained its 1985 rates of incarceration, according to Andrew Leigh.
The assistant treasury minister will reveal the cost of Australia’s rising incarceration rates in a speech to the Australian Institute of Criminology on Monday.
Leigh will say incarceration has doubled since 1985 despite the murder rate halving in the same period, as tougher bail laws and longer sentences put Australia out of step with comparable countries such as Britain and Canada.
Indigenous Australians are among the most incarcerated people on Earth with 2.3% of Indigenous adults currently behind bars, Leigh will say, according to an advanced copy of his speech seen by Guardian Australia.
Indigenous youth justice advocates met on Sunday to reinvigorate calls to raise the age of criminal responsibility to 14 years.
Labor’s national platform states that incarceration “fails to reduce recidivism, provide effective outcomes for victims of crime or to make our communities safe”, promising federal Labor will work with states and territories to pursue “evidence-based criminal justice policies … which rely less on high cost and harmful prisons”.
In practice both major parties at the state level have made a virtue of tougher sentencing.
In the speech to AIC’s conference Leigh draws on his own academic work noting the incarceration rate in 1985 was 96 prisoners per 100,000 adults, a figure that reached 202 per 100,000 in 2022.
“The crime rate in Australia for most categories of crime has been falling since the mid-1980s,” he says. “Rates of murder have halved. Car theft rates have plummeted. Robbery rates are down.”
Leigh blames “stricter policing, tougher sentencing, and more stringent bail laws” as the main drivers of prison population growth.
He credits “better community policing, immigration, rising incomes, the removal of lead from petrol and the mandatory installation of electronic immobilisers on new vehicles” as factors driving crime rates down.
“This suggests that it should be possible to have an Australia with less crime and less incarceration.”
Leigh also points to the 70,000 children of the 40,000 Australians in full-time custody, warning they will “suffer mental anguish … do worse at school [and] be more likely to end up on welfare and in crime themselves”.
Indigenous incarceration has doubled from 1% in 1990 to 2.3% today, with worse results in Western Australia where one in 30 Indigenous adults is in prison.
“That’s only a snapshot at a particular point in time. If you look at First Nations men of my generation, a quarter will spend time in jail.”
“First Nations children are also jailed at 20 times the rate of non-First Nations children, and were more likely to be jailed without being sentenced.”
Leigh estimates Australia spends $4.7bn every year on prisons, or $240 for every Australian adult.
“Therefore, if the incarceration rate had remained at its 1985 level, Australia would have saved $2.6bn.
“Put another way, the rise in incarceration since the mid-1980s costs every Australian adult $140 annually.”
Leigh noted that the US has a higher incarceration rate than Australia but noted it had “fallen substantially over the past decade”.
In Tuesday’s federal budget the Albanese government announced a $99m package for first nation’s justice, including $81.5m for justice reinvestment projects.
Attorneys general in all jurisdictions are currently developing a proposal to increase the minimum age of criminal responsibility.
After the Indigenous Youth Justice Conference on Sunday, Australia’s first Indigenous senior counsel, Tony McAvoy SC, said there was no reason to delay the reform.
“These laws harm children at a critical time in their development, while doing nothing to address crime,” McAvoy said.
“In fact, locking up children locks in a pattern of reoffending which is detrimental to individuals and the broader community.
“We need be both humane and smart about this issue and recognise there are much better ways to lower crime and release people from the cycle of incarceration.”
