15th Reintegration Puzzle Conference

Renae ‘’Rocket’’ Bretherton is a 38 year old Aboriginal women who has been in and out of prison for most of her life. In the past, Rocket has found the process of reintegration to be very difficult. Rocket is becoming a strong advocate and passionate about making positive changes for other women in prison facing reintegration. She is also a strong voice about what can be done to improve outcomes for women involved in the justice system.

Matthew Willis is a Research Manager at the Australian Institute of Criminology, where has been for fourteen years.
His main research areas are crime, justice and community safety issues in Indigenous communities, correctional policy and practice and juvenile justice. He has conducted evaluations of a range of criminal justice programs and responses and is currently leading evaluations of national responses to radicalisation, extremism and grievance-fuelled violence.

Matthew’s previous research with the Institute has included homelessness amongst ex-prisoners, bushfire arson and federal offences. He has delivered numerous peer reviewed publications, consultancy reports, conference presentations and media interviews across his topic areas.
Matthew has operational management and policy experience with a range of Australian and ACT government justice agencies, including four years with ACT Corrective Services.

ABSTRACT

In recent years the criminal justice system across Australia has been dominated by two paradoxical phenomena – rising prison populations and falling crime rates.

The number of prisoners in Australia has increased by nearly 50 percent in the last 10 years, from 28,329 in 2009 to 42,974 in 2018. This growth has been most acute in the last five years and has particularly been seen among unsentenced prisoners and among women. There have also been differential degrees of increase between jurisdictions and across offence types.

The increase in Australian prison populations has occurred at the same time as a sustained decrease in crime rates, particularly for property crime, seen in Australia and internationally. In contrast to the picture often presented in the media and in public perception, offending within many categories has been falling across Australian jurisdictions in recent years. The decline in crime rates has been both sustained and widespread, being observed across several countries and most Australian jurisdictions, and between different birth cohorts.

This paper draws on interviews with correctional administrators, police officers and other members of the criminal justice system across Australia, together with published research and statistics to unpack this paradox and examine the factors that have been driving the growth in imprisonment. It explores why prison growth alongside falling crime may not be such a paradox and the implications of this for assisting people to return to, or remain in, the community.

Bruce Western is Professor of Sociology at Columbia University and Co-Director of the Justice Lab at Columbia University.

His research has examined the causes, scope, and consequences of the historic growth in U.S. prison populations. Current projects include a randomized experiment assessing the effects of criminal justice fines and fees on misdemeanor defendants in Oklahoma City, and a field study of solitary confinement in Pennsylvania state prisons. Western is also the Principal Investigator of the Square One Project that aims re-imagine the public policy response to violence under conditions of poverty and racial inequality.

He was the Vice Chair of the National Academy of Sciences panel on the causes and consequences of high incarceration rates in the United States. He is the author of Homeward: Life in the Year After Prison (Russell Sage Foundation, 2018), and Punishment and Inequality in America (Russell Sage Foundation, 2006). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow, a Russell Sage Foundation Visiting Scholar, and a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study. Western received his PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and was born in Canberra, Australia.

ABSTRACT

What happens when people are released from incarceration and return to their communities? How did they look for work and housing? How do they manage their addictions or mental illness, and why do some return to incarceration?

I addressed these questions in the Boston Reentry Study, a series of interviews my research team and I conducted with people leaving prison for neighborhoods around Boston. We found that imprisonment is followed by deep poverty and survival is assisted only by government programs and family support. While earlier studies focused on the stigma of a criminal record, the men and women of Boston also struggled greatly with human frailty -- mental illness, addiction, and physical disability -- that threatened success after incarceration and impaired the effectiveness of programs. They had experienced serious violence, often as perpetrators, but also as victims and witnesses, and often since early childhood.

Pervasive incarceration in the United States is similar in some ways to incarceration in indigenous communities in Australia. Poverty, housing insecurity, poor health, and racial injustice form the backdrop for a peculiarly Australian version of mass incarceration. I explore possible lessons that might be drawn from the US experience for policy reform in Australia.