Law and order policy in Australia has been very different from that in the United States. During the past decade, the guiding principle in Australia has been that imprisonment should only be used as a last resort. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s Australia actually decreased its imprisonment rate despite an escalating crime rate.
This is in marked contrast to the pattern in the United States where, from the 1980s onwards, the imprisonment rate increased substantially. Thus, we see the crime rate climbing until the 1980s, then flattening following the stabilisation of the imprisonment rate, then falling through the 1990s following the increased rate of imprisonment from the 1980s onward.
These trends support Charles Murray’s analysis of the potency of penal policy, which lead him to draw two basic lessons:
In Australia, it does seem that the spiralling crime rates of the 1970s and 1980s had as much to do with declining detection and conviction as with declining use of imprisonment. This suggests that penal policy is an important element in the fight against crime.
Source: Peter Saunders and Nicole Billante, Does Prison Work? Vol. 18, No. 4, Summer 2002-2003, Policy, Center for Independent Studies.
For text http://www.cis.org.au/Policy/summer02-03/polsumm0203-1.htm
For more on Crime http://www.ncpa.org/iss/cri/
FMF Policy Bulletin\20 May 2003
