The Price of Crime Without Doing Time

The Australian crime rate has escalated over the past 40 years. According to the International Crime Victim Survey of 17 countries, Australia now ranks second highest overall (behind England and Wales) on the rate of victimisation, and we score higher than any other country on so-called `contact crimes' such as robbery and assault.

But as the number of crimes has grown, our willingness to send offenders to prison has declined. True, we have a bigger prison population than we used to (per head of population, we now have about double the number of people in prison than we did in 1950). But imprisonment per crime committed has fallen quite dramatically.

In 1964, about 120 people went to prison per 1000 serious crimes. By the mid 1980s this number had fallen to around 30 prisoners per 1000 serious crimes, and it has remained at this level ever since. The chance of going to prison if you commit a serious offence is therefore four times smaller than it was 40 years ago.

Could this reduced risk of imprisonment help explain the continuing rise in crime?

We recently compared 40-year trends in crime and imprisonment rates in Australia, New Zealand, England and Wales and the United States. We found a fairly consistent pattern.

In all four countries, for as long as the rate of imprisonment per crime fell, the number of crimes committed continued to rise.

In America, however, they started to get tough in the 1970s and 1980s. As crimes continued to escalate, so the Americans started to respond by locking up increasing numbers of offenders. Today, the US has a much higher per capita prison population than any of the other countries we looked at but its crime rate has plummeted.

During the 1990s, the assault rate in the US dropped by more than one-third, burglary rates more than halved, robberies fell by two-thirds and car theft fell by three-quarters. In Australia, by contrast, burglary and car theft fell only marginally during the 1990s while assault and robbery rates continued going up.

Perhaps influenced by America's success, New Zealand and England and Wales both began to make more use of custodial sentences during the 1990s. And sure enough, in both countries, the crime rate (which had been increasing inexorably until then) began to fall from the mid to late 1990s onwards.

Australia, however, has not followed the other three countries. The chance of going to prison if you commit a serious crime is no higher now than it was 20 years ago. It is therefore telling that the crime rate shows no sign of falling here, as it has done in the UK, the US and across the Tasman.

Prison works in two ways. First, it has an important role in deterring potential offenders from committing crimes. Most people contemplating burglary or car theft weigh up the pros and cons, at least to some extent. Crime, like any other money-making activity, entails some degree of rational calculation, and the greater the risk of getting caught and punished, the less inclined we are to do the deed.

Second, prison works by incapacitating criminals. By putting them away, we are removing the opportunity for them to commit further crimes.

There is, however, a down-side. It is well-known that locking up novices with experienced criminals can increase the chance that they will re-offend prison is a pretty blunt instrument when it comes to reforming people, and it can be a brutal experience. Furthermore, any expansion of the prison system would be a very expensive option.

Nor is our declining use of prison the only explanation for rising crime.

The probability of a crime being solved has fallen alarmingly, due in part to a fall in the number of police officers available to deal with each crime (194 officers per 1000 serious crimes in 1963; 54 officers per 1000 serious crimes in 2000).

Social and economic changes too have undoubtedly played a part. Indeed, in Britain and America, there are signs that crime may be increasing again as the economy weakens.

Prison is not, therefore, the only solution we should be looking at. But if we hope to turn things around in the way that America, and more lately New Zealand and the UK, appear to have done, it is likely to be an integral part of any successful policy.

Nicole Billante is Research Assistant, and Peter Saunders is Director of Social Policy Research, at the Centre for Independent Studies.