True crime stories
Who we’re locking up
We all know that crime rates are rising, and that the law enforcement authorities – the police and the courts – aren’t putting enough offenders behind bars.
The trouble is that both these common beliefs are wrong. The crime rate is falling, and the prison population is rising.
Beechworth slammer
That’s how Martyn Goddard on his Policy Post introduces his contribution These are the people we’re locking up. He describes the demographics of the prison population. They’re young and disproportionately aged 25 to 44: they are the very people who should be contributing in the workforce, rather than costing more than $500 a day to be kept in prison. Their pre-prison life Goddard describes is tough – 43 percent were homeless before they were jailed – and they are generally in poor health.
One telling figure in Goddard’s analysis is that 54 percent of prison entrants are daily smokers, compared with 11 percent in the general population. Smoking correlates closely with a host of other indicators of disadvantage including obesity, low education, a background of family violence and unemployment. Smoking is a good indicator of general disadvantage.
Goddard asks “does it have to be like this”? He answers his own question:
Of course not. It’s like this because the community, and its leaders, have so little understanding of the people it puts in prison.
Collectively, we have made a choice. We have chosen to adhere to the idea that prison deters crime, when all the evidence shows that it doesn’t; that punishment, not rehabilitation, should be the main purpose of the criminal justice system; and that people living those desperate lives do so because it’s what they want.
It’s a dumb choice because it’s an expensive choice. Spending on rehabilitation and on alleviating the conditions that lead to crime would place a high demand on public budgets. But would that be more than the cost of imprisonment, the opportunity cost of keeping potentially productive people out of the workforce, and the cost of recidivism?
Gender-related violence
In 2022 around 50 000 women and girls were killed by their intimate partners or family members.
That’s one of the figures in a document by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime: Gender-related killings of women and girls (femicide/feminicide).
It’s accompanied by a short fact sheet Five essential facts to know about femicide, which explains many reasons why the report’s figures are probably underestimates. One of those essential facts is that some groups of women and girls face far greater risk than others. The fact sheet states that “despite data limitations, the available evidence from Canada and Australia suggest that indigenous women are disproportionately affected by gender related killings”. Overall figures for Australia, however, show a significant downward trend over the last ten years.
The report provides some evidence that Covid lockdowns were associated with increased partner-on-partner violence. Counterintuitively, the lifting of lockdowns was associated with an increase in violence, possibly because that was the opportunity for women to try to end an abusive relationship.
Killings are the worst manifestation of gender-related violence, but there are many other forms of violence. The ABC reports on forms of control and immobilization associated with car insurance (but, unprofessionally, does not provide a link to the source of this useful research).
Italy’s murder rate
Nicholas Gruen draws our attention to an article Why the land of the Mafia has a low murder rate, published in Aporia.
The author, Noah Carl, points to three factors that contribute to Italy enjoying a low murder rate.
First is its age structure. Most violent crime is committed by men between the ages of 15 and 30. Italy has the fifth oldest population in the world.
Second is its low rate of immigration, and in Europe immigrants tend to have a higher propensity to violent crime than the native-born. Australians may find this to be a surprising finding, but this reflects the composition of European immigration, which is less regulated and is very different from ours.
Third, and somewhat different from usual explanations about crime, is what Carl calls a “healthy drinking culture” in Italy. Binge drinking is rare in Italy, and so too are the problems that accompany it.