WA/ Satellite Surveillance

Dear Friends and fellow stakeholders,

Re : Satellite Tracking of offenders of serious crime released to community supervision.

AUSTRALIA: WA: It is understandable that the Minister for Justice is looking towards a surveillance program. His department have failed him and need to be constantly under his watchful eye and surveillance of their own key performance indicators.

However, his proposal for using high tech satellite tracking of specific types of offenders in WA could be seen as just another attempt to produce a 'tough on crime' vote winner. Such new technologies always look good on paper. Then comes the serious questions. How does one effectively police it, and will it really act as a deterrent?

Then there is the cost of establishing and maintaining such an operation over one of the largest single jurisdictions in the world. We also need to ask if this plan has been discussed among other government departments such as Police, Family and Childrens' Services, the Aboriginal Policy Unit - and the independent judiciary? Should not the offender be presenting as a low risk to the community when they leave the prison and under the eye of community corrections officers?

Knowing that resistance is strong among perpetrators of Domestic Violence, the further knowledge that someone is looking from far off may not lessen their motivation to be in close proximity to the focus of their attention. And how will police be able to respond? For example, what is going to happen to a person who is living out at Marble Bar or the back of Bruce Rock who is placed on a domestic violence order? By the time that the police get to the scene, the offender may have produced a further victim. Offenders and Victims need real support following the aftermath of crime not pie in the sky Robocop. Surveillance from the sky fails to address violence in the family home.

What we need is a balance here. More surveillance through the support and concerns of Community Corrections officers who need to do more than invite an offender into their office once a week. It takes time and energy, including government resources to challenge offending behaviours, and this and previous governments have failed victims of crime and the community by showing disregard for effective community based and prison programs.

The 'What works' principles have been continually watered down or even neglected in WA, leaving offenders, victims and the community with an Offender management which is itself under review by Justice Mahoney and the Office of the Inspector of Custodial Services, and a justice system that seeks the headlines such as this to distract public attention from grass roots failings, high prisoner numbers and a constant stream of dissatisfied victims of crime. The satellite needs to look into the justice department to see what is working and what is not.

We do need to find more support and attention to Strong women's groups and Men's groups, and effective rehabilitation programs that see offenders treated as social beings and not individuals and outcasts from social structures of support. Quality research into this area is essential.

Surveillance techniques will not prevent crime, and will only remove the public gaze from the immediate concerns of a justice system itself requiring constant surveillance.

Brian Steels

A pensioner support group has called upon the state government to provide all other people with the same satellite surveillance programs as the Minister of Justice is supplying to ex-prisoners and serious and career criminals.

Spokeswoman for the group, Ms Killjoy, said that the program will be able to be purchased similarly to the new rent-a-cop.

Ms Killjoy say that 'Under the new surveillance scheme, any housebound partner will be able to keep track via satellite of their errant loved one who may have a desire to call in at a house of ill repute or a local casino". 'It will also assist grandparents who wish to keep an eye on the shortcomings of grandchildren as they wander through shopping centre' Malls say Ms Killjoy, 'and of course, it could help parents who may wish to know just where in the neighbourhood, their prized genetic seeds are being sown at any time of the day or night'.

Under the tag-a-mate scheme, any community minded group can purchase hours of tagging and satellite surveillance time and rumour has it that channel 10 is wishing to purchase the rights to screen some footage live to air.

Spokesman for Road-Toll Express says that it will be able to give truck operators and shipping companies a better idea of where the goods are disappearing to, adding "we have wanted to track our truckies who like to stop in the bush for a long pee for some time. Now we can tell just how long some of those stops are, we can't wait for the day when we can get prints to go with it'.

A corporate sponsor for the Minister, says that his company's chocolate product 'time-out' will seek further sponsors in this innovative program that began life as a prisoner watch-dog. 'The possibilities are endless, you can't believe just how far we can ruin someone's fun and impose havoc on civil liberties - this is just the start'. He went on to say that 'Our next big step is to use surveillance link-ups with home surveillance kits, and a state of the art IT package called bedroom peeps - of course this can't be used by ex prisoners, but everyone else will really get a turn-on!

He did concede to the author that this could go against the kind of thing that some prisoners programs had tried to put a stop to.

Brian Steels with some WA humour on the tag-a-mate@ program.

By Justice Action 29 August 05

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Reduced sentences to curb prison boom!

Senior judges will tell courts to reduce terms by 15% as jail population heads towards record 91,000.

UK: Senior judges are to urge the courts to cut average sentences by 15% in the hope of preventing the prison population soaring to more than 91,000 within five years, it emerged.

Home Office ministers were forced to revise upwards their projections for prison numbers after the population inside Britain's jails reached a new record of 76,506 last Friday.

Prison numbers stabilised last year and the Home Office had been hoping that the recent rapid growth would plateau at 80,000.

But the total has accelerated since February and is now running 2,700 ahead of projections.

Home Office figures show that since the autumn the courts have become increasingly punitive with the average sentence length increasing by 6% to just over 17 months.

This has been compounded since April by a continuous increase in the numbers held on remand awaiting trial.

Ministers had hoped that new measures to boost the use of community punishments in the 2003 Criminal Justice Act would temper the rise in the prison population.

The projections make clear that the Home Office is banking on the new sentencing guidelines council, chaired by the [ruling class] lord chief justice, Lord Woolf, being able to persuade the courts to cut the sentences passed on those sent to prison for one year or longer by 15%.

The revised prison projections say that this is the minimum necessary just to hit a best-case scenario of holding prison numbers to 77,380 by 2010. The worst case scenario says the prison population will hit 91,500 within five years - 3,000 higher than the last projections published in January.

Juliet Lyon of the Prison Reform Trust said ministers had been lulled into a false sense of security.

"The stark reality is that over 80 jails are now overcrowded, with many at bust limit, prison numbers are spiralling out of control, conditions are deteriorating and there is a corresponding shocking rise in the number of self-inflicted deaths in custody," she said.

"Budget cuts, low staffing levels and a service demoralised by threats of privatisation is a toxic mix undermining basic decency and prison safety."

The Liberal Democrats' home affairs spokesman, Mark Oaten, said that the government's target of keeping prison numbers below 80,000 now appeared to be a lost cause.

"If numbers continue to grow at the rate we have seen this year, the prison system will soon be in deep crisis," he said.

"Jails are supposed to cut crime through education and training. Chronic overcrowding means prisoners are idling their time away in their cells instead."

Mr Oaten claimed that the Home Office kept changing its mind on whether it wanted judges and magistrates to give longer or shorter prison sentences.

But the shadow home secretary, David Davis, said the figures showed that there were not enough prison places to keep up with the increase in the prison population and claimed that the government's response of expanding the early release scheme was no answer.

By Alan Travis posted 28 July 05

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Custody as the challenge to corrections

The custodial environment is justified in terms of a variety of principles of punishment.

Despite their problematic nature, however, recidivism figures do not suggest that the prison component of a sentence improves prospects for deterrence or rehabilitation, by comparison with other sentencing options.

In a recent UK Home Office review of punishment outcomes, 59 per cent of prisoners discharged from prison in 1998 were re-convicted within two years of release.

As for community corrections, despite a high level of successful completions (over 80 per cent), the actual re-conviction rate remained around 55 per cent.

The crucial distinguisher, therefore, may be the economic and emotional cost of imprisonment, against negligible comparative benefit on the recidivism score.

While Weatherburn suggests that higher imprisonment rates have some impact on crime rates, the best figures he can draw are a 10 per cent increase in the prison population bringing about a 2-4 per cent reduction in crime.

Translated to current NSW punishment practice, that would mean that an investment of around $350,000 might register a minimal crime rate drop. If the same was to be spent on community corrections and probation in particular, the return on crime reduction would be significantly better.

The ultimate popular wisdom on why we need prisons is that they contain the dangerous and make communities safer, at least for the term of the imprisonment. Hence, the longer we can make that term, the safer we feel. Except for the occasional good year, escape rates in NSW continue to be around 1.5 per 100 prisoners. But at over 70 a year that may not be such a comforting figure.

The data referred to in other parts of this chapter tends to suggest that, in terms of recidivism, deterrence, and even crime prevention, the results from community prevention options are no worse than the prison, often better, and always so much cheaper. In addition, it would appear that rehabilitation and restoration have better chances of success outside the prison than in a custodial setting.

Loss of correctional motivation outside prison walls

The deteriorating relative investment in community corrections in recent years speaks volumes about how often successful, non-custodial punishment programmes are out of political favour. In addition, the predominance of the prison as the popular punishment model has meant that under-resourced and apparently undervalued alternative sentencing options do not figure in political considerations of the efficacy of the criminal sanction.

Recent evaluations of the Drug Court and Juvenile Conferencing in NSW should give the community confidence in diversionary initiatives, and the international experience of both suggests a significant potential benefit in their expansion. However, the corrections discussion seems disproportionately located in custodial settings.

A consequence of this might be to expect research and development in the area of pre-release programmes. The research is there, as well as the empirical confirmation, that well planned and well-resourced pre- and post-release initiatives will ensure important and realistic correctional outcomes.

As will be mentioned, the challenge is to reinvest in non-custodial corrections, and to recognise the corrective capacity of community collaborations and partnerships.

This will require some declaration of political interest. To ensure this in the prevailing penal climate, it may be necessary to include the development of community corrections models prominently within an integrated progressive punishment plan.

Is correction possible in prison?

Victoria, for instance, is investing substantially in a best practice strategy to reduce re-offending, as Birgden explains:

In addition to risk management to address community protection and justice principles, enhanced well-being to address autonomy and therapeutic principles is required. The psychological theory of good lives proposes an enhancement model of rehabilitation. The legal theory of therapeutic jurisprudence proposes how the roles of legal actors may be therapeutic. Both theories are concerned with the enhancement of psychological well-being.

Birgden argues for a correctional system responsive to offenders. She suggests the possibility of a 'culture shift' to reaffirm rehabilitative as well as punitive goals for sentencing.

Where cognitive treatment programmes in prison seem to work against a measure of reconviction, they have been operated in a 'what works' context. Programmes which come within this reference include the Canadian-originated 'Reasoning and Rehabilitation' and 'Enhanced Thinking Skills'.

These programmes promote self-control (thinking before acting), inter-personal problem solving skills, social perspective taking, critical reasoning skills, cognitive style, and understanding the values which govern behaviour.

Not inconsistent with the Canadian studies, while reconviction rates for the treatment population were up to 14 per cent better than the control group, this only held for medium to low risk prisoners. For high risk, the differential fell to a low 5 per cent. In any case, this study provides a potential for a cost effectiveness evaluation of offender programmes.

As suggested earlier, recidivism rates alone as a performance measure of the effectiveness of offender programmes are too narrow an evaluation of rehabilitation practice in prison. More realistic is an integrated approach focusing on the climate of programme delivery, cost effectiveness, the programme's integrity and the treatment outcomes. In this respect, life quality issues are a vital measure of the relevance of correctional programmes in prison.

If rehabilitation is to be preferred as a motivation for punishment, then its location should be in community corrections and restorative environments, if only on the basis of cost effectiveness considerations. In saying this, however, in the medium term prison will be the environment for certain offenders, and there is no reason to deprive them of rehabilitation programmes, provided performance measures and resource justifications shift from unrealistic to simple, practical, obvious and predictable concerns.

There is significant evidence that prison life and society tends to exacerbate the behavioural and social determinants of crime. Violent, inhuman, unsafe, confrontational, and exploitative prison settings will distort appropriate social and moral messages consistent with crime prevention.

A reluctance to deal with illiteracy, drug abuse, anger, indolence, and marginalisation will leave offender populations ill prepared for social reintegration. An under-resourcing of pre-release programmes will compound the problem.

These issues can be confronted in a more basic, universal, best practice model for prison life, and as such will achieve the small but consistent improvements in prisoner life quality that produces measurable performance indicators.

The Home Office, as the administrator of English prisons, is now required to meet modest targets in the improvement of prison life and the reduction of re-offending following release. This has necessitated the development of a new context for corrections, one directed to the improvement in the quality of prison life and an investment in 'what works' with offenders.

A recent study to evaluate the quality of life in five English prisons from the perspective of staff and offenders found that staff and prisoners agree on 'what matters' in assessing prison quality, suggesting that there is a broad consensus about values; that these include respect, fairness, decency and order; that prison life quality resembles the expectation for civil society; and that safety is a critical concern. One prisoner respondent reflected on his aspirations for prison treatment:

To me, being treated with humanity means being provided adequate, reasonably comfortable and clean accommodation and being acknowledged as a person with individual needs, desires, concerns, strengths and weaknesses.

Prison staff would find it hard to argue against this. However, it is the bigotry of public opinion about prisoners 'getting it too easy' which tends to endorse further social exclusion in prison.

Paradoxically, it is this that increases the likelihood of re-offending on release and the associated threat to community safety.

Along with this commitment to the quality of life in prison has been an appreciation that time and money needs to be invested on an inmate-by-inmate commitment to improved sentence planning, and better arrangements for post release supervision.

Progressive punishment plan: harmonising sanction and rehabilitation

If crime control and community safety are to continue as the motivations for punishment (recognising just deserts and deterrence principles), then lower re-offending targets as public service/government commitments seem reasonable for corrective services agencies. This means that, for rehabilitation programmes to play a realistic part in the achievement of these targets, there must be a two-pronged approach to corrective services:

(1) In an atmosphere of rationalised prison resources, correctional programmes should be integrated and offender-centred. In this respect, individualised sentence management strategies should be a priority. Life quality concerns will be an important programme focus and relevance indicator. The programmes must operate under straight-forward performance indicators, which rely neither on problematic risk measures nor artificial selection criteria such as the diagnosis of original offending.

(2) Non-custodial environments for correctional programmes are to be preferred and promoted, if only on the basis of cost effectiveness. Such programmes must rely on investment in pre-release and post release transition and institutional support so that re-offending targets will be secured.

This dual approach will work if it focuses on 'what works', rather than what 'might' work. It must also grow from a foundational environment of trust and mutual self--respect rather than in an atmosphere of discriminative access to behaviour management, and thereby early release, based on suspect measures of re-offending risk.

The development of community collaborations and partnerships in the development and delivery of custodial and non-custodial correctional programmes should be encouraged as the natural progression from custodial corrective climates designed to foster cultural change within and without the prison. Particularly in the areas of employment, work ethic generation and purposeful activity, locating corrective initiatives within community settings increases the potency of employment as a factor against re-offending.

Ultimately, a progressive punishment plan, which has as its central plank corrections and restoration, will need to argue its relevance in a different way to the prison. Imprisonment is accepted as a preferred sanction despite its failings because of an epidemic of community confidence in its capacity to protect. This approach can and should be challenged by an approach to punishment planning which values realistic evaluation.

For corrections programmes inside the gaol in particular, consideration must be advanced for regimes, conditions and costs in the creation of practical prison performance indicators, such as: average hours engaged in purposeful activity; time unlocked; programme completions; total education study hours; nature of prison employment; releases on temporary (pre-release) license; accommodation in cells beyond their capacity design; prisoners testing positive for drugs; escapes; assaults and self harm; cost per uncrowded place.

A renewed commitment to rehabilitation within a smart and resource effective criminal justice model will build bridges between custodial and community corrections. Issues of cost and resource accountability in public spending are eventually catching up on the lavish investment in the failing prison of previous decades. Rights based and equitable correctional opportunities are the essential precursors for a return to rehabilitation that avoids the excesses of the sixties, the denial of the seventies, the rejection of the eighties, and the disappointment of the nineties.

By Professor Mark Findlay 20 July 05

Crime and Punishment

Prisons, by their nature and the communities they house, suffer more acutely from the social exclusion that characterises the underprivileged parts of Australian society. Without the exacerbation of a custodial experience, these characteristics alone militate against the successful reintegration of prisoners back into the community.

Prisons as progressive punishment?

Prisons, by their nature and the communities they house, suffer more acutely from the factors of social exclusion that characterise the underprivileged sectors of Australian society.

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