I've recently become addicted to the TV
show Orange is the New Black. Orange Is the New Black revolves around Piper
Chapman who is sent to a women's federal prison for 15 months for transporting
a suitcase full of drug money. The characters in the show are deep and complex
and each episode drives the overall series plot whilst focusing on a smaller
character driven plot. I would highly recommend it to anyone.
While the show is focused on the American
prison system the issues that arise out of these conditions are not unique to
America. In a country with relatively low crime rate, paradoxically Australia
has a high incarceration rate. Prison populations are projected to rise and
accelerate primarily because of harsher sentencing. So is there a disconnect between
crime and punishment in Australia's states?
Prisons are an extremely expensive, blunt
and harmful instrument for crime control. It costs between $90,000 to $100,000
a year to house someone in prison, this price goes up to roughly $140,000 if
prisoners are female. Moreover, prison construction is extremely expensive - in
Victoria it's about half a million dollars per prison bed so Victorian jails
are at capacity and the state spends literally billions of dollars on prison
expansion to house these people who will be sent through into jail through
these harsher sentencing policies.
New South Wales has traditionally
imprisoned people at twice the rate of Victoria for no gains in terms of the
safety of the population. This is despite the data which shows that the crime
rates in Victoria and New South Wales are similar. The quickest way to
marginalise someone is to connect them with the criminal justice system so that
they then become someone entrenched in a completely other way of living.
A compounding issue to all of this is that
prisoners and prison guards assume predefined societal roles that are hard to
break. The Stanford prison experiment (Zimbardo's Prison Experiment) was a
study of the psychological effects of becoming a prisoner or prison guard. 24
volunteers were selected to participate in the study and were randomly assigned
to be either prisoners or prison guards. The participants adapted to their
roles well beyond Zimbardo's expectations, as the guards enforced authoritarian
measures and ultimately subjected some of the prisoners to psychological
torture. Many of the prisoners passively accepted psychological abuse and, at
the request of the guards, readily harassed other prisoners who attempted to
prevent it. The experiment even affected Zimbardo himself, who, in his role as
the superintendent, permitted the abuse to continue. Two of the prisoners quit
the experiment early and the entire experiment was abruptly stopped after only
six days. At the conclusion of the experiment it seemed that the situation,
rather than their individual personalities, caused the participants' behaviour
(basically the societal environment is the driving force of behaviour).
Prisons merely breed more crime as inmates
further take on their assumed roles. Recidivism rates are higher amongst people
who are processed through traditional prisons compared to thereauputic and
restorative justice systems. Furthermore, funds can be redirected towards
important community needs such as education, health, post release programs, public
housing, transport, and rehabilitation facilities across the country. Spending
money in these areas would provide community service opportunities as an
alternative to incarceration.
Prison acts as a broad brush for societal
ills. We lock up murderers and we lock up those who have robbed a store to fuel
an addiction.
There are alternatives though; Cognitive
Behavioural Therapy, Restorative Justice (the Koori Courts in Victoria are a
prime example of the success of this method), Mentoring programs and Rehabilitation
Programs have all shown success in decreasing recidivism.
Unfortunately it is all too easy for a
politician to just say they are tough on crime than look at this issue with a
more nuanced perspective.
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