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Law and order? Hide your cash!

Law and order? Hide your cash!

With elections imminent, voters (taxpayers) should be wary of ‘law and order’ promises by politicians: their big-noting will cost you more than $111,000 a year for each new prisoner.

Law and order? Hide your cash!

Whenever you hear a politician on the hustings shout “Law and Order”, count the money in your wallet or purse.

If you don’t secure your money, soon you’ll have less.

Every time a politician decides to “crack down on crime” by sending more people to jail, you pay more. Politicians fund their big-noting by using your money to pay selected groups more.

The money goes usually to vested interests: police, prison staff, lawyers and, increasingly, to operators of private prisons and private support services.

With elections in Tasmania and South Australia soon (and maybe in WA for the Senate) voters in those states should be particularly wary of political promises about “law and order”campaigns.

Such campaign slogans are designed by political apparatchiks to create media headlines and allow re-runs on news broadcasts of crime scenes, with a secondary purpose of ensuring the support of the police unions (knows as “associations”).

The political manipulators use public perceptions of crime rampant to create additional fear in the community. Having raised the fear level, they promise they will do something about it.

But what the political elite are really promising, with fingers crossed behind their backs, is to pick money from your pocket.

 $305 per day, $111,000 per year

Every prisoner in Australia costs the taxpayer, on average, $305 dollars a day.

For every new prisoner, you as a taxpayer will pay about $111,000 next year.

Eventually, of course, you’ll have to help build newer and bigger prisons, which will push the average per day and per year cost up.

So, before deciding to cast your ballot on the politicians’ “law and order” furphy, think whether you’d cast your vote the same way if the campaign was described as a “tax the punters” campaign.

Instead of the bluster and ballyhoo associated with “law and order” campaigns, politicians should be promising hard-nosed analysis of what crimes and penalties produce disproportionate numbers in jail.

They should decriminalise ‘social’ crimes like victimless marijuana smoking; and they should promise to broaden rehabilitation programs which will cut crime by reducing reoffending. Prisoners who become smarter in jails don’t want to return.

Here’s the latest report on how much prisoners cost Australia, from the Productivity Commission’s 2014 Report on Government Services – http://www.pc.gov.au/gsp/rogs

 prisoner1By the way, major crime in Australia (and throughout the western world) is declining dramatically. For example, it has fallen 58% in England and Wales since 1995: http://tinyurl.com/ogzkske

 It declined 5% in the NT recently: http://tinyurl.com/mhhpkx7  …but, even when crime falls, as in NSW, the media report it in such a way as if it has risen: http://tinyurl.com/l9or4cb

The only real increase is in individual crime reporting by traditional media outlets desperate to retain relevancy as they lose market share: it’s in their interests also to increase fear in the community, because people (readers/viewers) react strongly to fear, concocted or not. By highlighting isolated incidents, they obfuscate the overall reality. “CRIME DOWN” is not a headline newspapers like.

From politicians and the media, we get fear-based campaigns and reporting to suit their ends, not those of voters and taxpayers.

The following graph shows how much property crimes have fallen in Australia by analysing the rates on the basis of the locations where property crimes occur: note that property crime in residential dwellings (you and I would call it home robberies) has fallen by more than 40% in Australian in the past 12 years…but you won’t read about that, or hear it on the TV.

prisoner2Property crime in Australia (Aust Inst of Criminology): http://tiny.cc/62xjbx

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