Prison spending and the prison population both are going through the roof, in the USA, UK and Australia. In California, America’s almost bankrupt state, Governor Arnie Schwarzenegger is biting the bullet and slashing spending on prisons to allocate more funds to universities. When will Australian politicians wake up, and do something similar?
‘Governator’ to cut prison spending, allocate more to universities
By Bill Rowlings*
The Republican Governor of California is at last starting to see the futility of every-increasing prison budgets…when will Australia’s politicians see the same light?
Arnold Schwarzenegger, ‘The Governator’ who is best known for his macho man roles in ‘Terminator’ movies, has announced plans to slash the money California spends on prisons so he can funnel more funds into the state’s universities instead, Jennifer Steinhauer reported in the New York Times.
Arnie wants to change California’s constitution so that the state’s money going to prisons is not permitted to exceed what is spent on its public university system. He proposes allocating at least 10% of the state’s general fund to higher education and no more than 7% to the state prison system. California is facing another $22 billion budget gap next financial year.
The state’s 33 prisons and 12 community correctional facilities hold about 170,000 inmates. There are an extra 53,000 more inmate beds planned for the near future. The annual budget is now about $11.5 billion.
“Choosing universities over prisons…” Schwarzenegger said to the Californian State Legislature in January 2010. “This is a historic and transforming realignment of California’s priorities.
“The priorities have become out of whack over the years. I mean, think about it, 30 years ago, 10% of the general fund went to higher education, and 3% went to prisons. Today, almost 11% goes to prisons, and only 7.5% goes to higher education.
“What does it say about any state that focuses more on prison uniforms than on caps and gowns?” he said. “It simply is not healthy.”
Hallejulah, CLA says.
But, of course, the cause of today’s excessive prison spending was Schwarzenegger-style politicians around the world – including in Australia – competing with each other to create more and more draconian “law and order” campaigns to be seen to be “tough on crime”.
Adrenaline pumping through their throbbing arteries, chests and cheeks puffed out, they introduced harsher laws imposing longer sentences on old crimes, and brought in new, ‘serious’ crimes for what had been petty juvenile offences. ‘Three strikes’ laws put children and adults in jail for an extended period even when the third offence was as minor as stealing a Mars bar. They forced judges to impose mandatory sentences, and tied parole boards’ hands by permitting fewer options for good behaviour remission, if any at all.
Prison numbers went through the roof, requiring the building of new jails and forcing the employment of many more prison officers to man them. Prison budgets gobbled up an ever-increasing percentage of state budgets. This happened in the USA, and in the UK, and in Australia
Just as in America and Britain, the same types of simplistic politicians hold sway in Australia, particularly the Labor SA Attorney-General Michael Atkinson and his Liberal WA counterpart, A-G Christian Porter, and Opposition parties almost everywhere. The politicians are aided and abetted by election strategists from both major political parties in most States and Territories whose political marketing nous starts and stops with “let’s have a law and order campaign”.
Who hurts most, without realising it? Taxpayers, because they pay, year after year, for the politicians’ stupidity in thinking that locking up more people will eliminate crime. But the poorer and downtrodden know very well that, as usual, they suffer most in a physical sense. In the USA, it’s African-Americans who disproportionately populate prisons; in Australia, it’s Aborigines.
Their numbers in Australian jails rose a further 10% last year on 2008. Indigenous prisoners make up 25% of our prison population whereas they comprise about 3% of Australians.
Governors throughout America, like Schwarzenegger, are realising that they can no longer afford the fiscal madness. At last, they are weighing priorities and spending to get value for their citizens’ taxes, rather than buying votes with scare campaigns and beat-ups, aided by a media as unbalanced in its thinking as are the politicians in theirs.
In Australia, locking people up at a cost of about $270 a day on average, or nearly $100,000 for each prisoner a year, is just plain stupid if there are less expensive options that can produce better long-term outcomes. Academics and researchers say there are plenty of preferable options, particularly for helping juveniles for whom the current system of detention is simply ‘crime school’ – primary, secondary or tertiary, depending on how many times they’ve been locked up.
Taxpayers (and voters) should demand that politicians in Australia “do an Arnie”, and spend more on education and health and community services than they do on prisons. Let’s see more universities and hospitals in Australia rather than the forbidding walls or wire of more and more jails, with greater numbers of prisoners behind them.
* Bill Rowlings is CEO of Civil Liberties Australia. He campaigns for politicians to undertake cost-benefit analyses of their numerous ‘law and order’ schemes.
For items on the Rise of the Prison Population in Australia, and on how Law and Order (LO) politicians are costing us dearly, click here.
NYT story: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/07/us/07calif.html?th&emc=th