Page 2039 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 7 June 2017
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The report concluded that the program has been effective in terms of outcomes for clients. Return to custody episodes for clients reduced by 23 per cent compared to the three years before the program was introduced …
We are seeing reduced crime almost across the board in Canberra, and we are making serious headway on reducing reoffending. There is a clear link here.
That was in Minister Rattenbury’s ministerial statement in March 2017 on the extended through-care program. I am happy for the minister to make improvements in his corrections portfolio, and, in providing a constructive approach, I will highlight issues that arise as we go on with the debate.
There is no doubt that there is a clear link between recidivism and crime data. Where reoffending is reduced, the crime rate is known also to reduce. However, we are not seeing significant reductions in the recidivism rate in the ACT, and we are seeing a concerning increase in certain crime rates.
With respect to the crime rate, the ACT Policing annual report showed that crimes against the person increased by 22.2 per cent in the last year, and reported assaults have increased by 40 per cent since 2014. Assaults in the Canberra city centre have almost doubled, from 281 in 2014 to 430 in 2016. Moreover, at the time of the minister’s statement, the ACT Policing crime statistics map of the ACT for January to March 2017 showed an increase in crimes since 2015, up by almost 500 crimes. Crimes on the increase included assault, burglaries, theft, property damage and vehicle theft. They were the highest they have been in the past five years.
In addition to the minister’s statement on crime, which paints perhaps an inaccurately rosy picture, the rate of recidivism is also up from 2013, where the imprisonment rate of recidivists was 73 per cent. As stated earlier, the ABS reports that, in 2016, 74 per cent of ACT prisoners had previously spent time detained, the highest proportion of any state or territory.
The minister has an ambitious target in his parliamentary agreement of a 25 per cent reduction in recidivism by 2025. That is good, but we need to be up-front and transparent about what reductions have actually been achieved by providing tangible benchmarks to work with, unaffected by too much spin.
The extended through-care program is a good program. Any program that aims to reduce reoffending, improve community integration post release and improve social health outcomes of offenders being released from the AMC, I believe, is both supported and expected by the Canberra community. But I do have some questions for the minister, and I will briefly go back to some numbers that he may not have heard because he was having a conversation with officials here.
The question that I put earlier was about the 22.6 per cent reduction that you have stated. What does that actually mean? Does it mean that 77.4 per cent of participants have reoffended or does it mean that there has been a reduction from the 74 per cent recidivism rate amongst those people down to 51.4 per cent? That is at the heart of what I am trying to get at, for the minister’s benefit.
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