Opinion piece by Bill Crews AM

The Minns Government has a prison overcrowding problem. Its answer is to spend $49 million for almost 1000 more prison beds.

But before taxpayers stump up millions more, we should ask a simple question: will more prison beds actually mean less crime?

I have worked with people in and out of prison for 50 years, and I have seen first-hand what locking people up does and does not achieve.

While this expenditure is an attempt to solve the very real problem of dangerously overcrowded prisons, the government is coming at it from the wrong angle. Pouring money into more beds while ignoring the reasons people are ending up in custody is short-sighted policy, and will fail to reduce crime.

NSW already spends more than $2 billion a year locking people up. If prison reliably made communities safer, this new investment would be easier to justify, but decades of evidence tell us jailing is failing. Prison fails to reduce crime or reoffending, it leaves the drivers of offending untouched, and the experience of incarceration itself makes people more likely to offend again.

That is not a system delivering a good return on our investment in community safety.

Protecting the community is important to all of us, but we need to ensure our efforts to build community safety extend beyond simply the moment in time that someone is locked up. Fewer than 1 per cent of people in NSW prisons are serving life, which means almost everyone behind bars today will one day be released into the community.

What matters then is whether prison makes people more or less likely to offend again.

The current system is failing on its own measures. Around 45 per cent of people released from sentenced imprisonment in NSW are back in prison within two years, and 60 per cent of people in custody today have been there before. Meanwhile the more contact a person has with prison, the more likely they are to reoffend, particularly when they have had no access to education, programs or a pathway into work.

The immediate overcrowding problem in NSW is being driven overwhelmingly by remand. A record 6398 people are now being held in NSW prisons awaiting the outcome of their cases — 46 per cent of the entire prison population. The Government itself says its tougher bail laws are contributing to that growth.

Whatever our politics, most of us want the same outcome: less harm and fewer victims. On that measure, our current approach is failing.  We spend billions on incarceration and next to nothing on the programs that have a proven track record of changing behaviour.

If policy decisions send more people to prison, and the response to overcrowding is simply to open more prison beds, we create an expensive cycle with no end in sight.

Other places have shown there is a better way. For example, Scotland adopted an evidence-based public health approach to violence and achieved transformational results, bringing down both crime and the number of people sent to prison.

Adding more prison beds is the policy equivalent of buying a fleet of ambulances to wait at the bottom of a cliff. It does nothing about what is pushing people over the edge, and it draws funding away from the areas where it would do the most good: family violence programs, mental health services, education, family support and First Nations place-based responses.

The economics stack up too. The cost of keeping one adult in prison for a year is around $119,000. With families and services across NSW under financial strain, every one of those dollars is money that could be going to schools and hospitals, or to prevention programs that cost a fraction as much and help stop the next crime before it happens. In Bourke, a KPMG assessment estimated that changes associated with the community-led Maranguka justice reinvestment project delivered $3.1 million in economic impact in 2017 — around five times the project's operating costs.

The overcrowding problem is real. But if we want safer communities, we also need to stop people going over the edge.

If the Minns government is serious about community safety, that is where the next $49 million should go.

Bill Crews AM is Founder of the Rev. Bill Crews Foundation, broadcaster and patron of the Justice Reform Initiative