The role of activism in criminal justice reform

On this day, 11 November 1880, Ned Kelly was hanged from the gallows of the Old Melbourne Gaol. 5000 stood outside in protest, a sizeable crowd given the population of Melbourne 130 years ago was only 280,000. 32,000 signatures were attached to the Petition of Mercy that was submitted to the Executive Council.

The Herald that afternoon reported on the event in these words:

“The general sympathy which appeared to be felt for the condemned man was not confined to the lower orders alone, as the crowd which assembled around the gaol gates this morning testified…. Women – many of them young, well-dressed and apparently respectable – were there mixing with the others.”

The Telegraph reporter, on the other hand, described the crowd as “A mob of nondescript idlers, whose morbid and depraved tastes had led them from the pursuit of honest toil. It must be acknowledged that the criminal and most depraved classes in the community predominated.”

These two contrasting observations from the Herald and Telegraph reporters at the time are evidence that even 130 years ago, there were strong and divergent perspectives in our community about crime, its sources, and how our government should respond.

Over the past 40 years of my close association with persons convicted of criminal offences, and in my observation of the criminal sanctions imposed on them by the Australian courts, it has intrigued me how the general community seems to be so divided as to how best to deal with behaviour that breaches the criminal law.

Reflecting more deeply on my experiences, I cannot help but think that our mentality, our mindset, our policy frameworks as a nation are still shaped by the heritage of our penal policy past.

Ten years ago I attended a conference conducted by Catholic Charities USA in Chicago. At that conference a paper was presented outlining the strategy being used in the State of Louisiana that used the demographic reading scores of 10–12-year-olds in different parts of that State to predict how many prison cells needed to be constructed in the coming decade.

We are doing precisely the same thing here in Australia. We know the strong positive correlations that exist between such variables as early school leaving and lack of further education and skills training and eventual unemployment with the frequency of criminal convictions and eventual imprisonment later in life. But throughout Australia we persist with the misguided view that we can manage such problems by extending the interventions of the criminal justice system rather than addressing the problem at its source.

The result is that the most disadvantaged communities around Australia, both in metropolitan, regional and rural areas are being more and more deeply mined by the instrumentalities of the criminal justice system. We see the impact of this most clearly when we refer to the overrepresentation of our Australian Indigenous community within the States’ and Territories’ prison populations. But the problem is not limited to our Indigenous brothers and sisters; it is the same pattern for every severely disadvantaged community in Australia.

How to address such entrenched long term disadvantage does not rest with the criminal justice system. It is the criminal justice system that is left to pick up the casualties when our other social systems have failed us.

Instead, carefully planned, collaborative, long-term, multi-disciplinary interventions in the most disadvantaged communities that seek to bring about real participation and empowerment will be necessary to produce lasting change.

So politicians, especially those who seek the power of government by promising more and more resources to the criminal justice system while knowing that real solutions rest elsewhere, ought to know better. They do know better, but they are prepared to be led by the loud, simplistic, manipulative and most sensationalist of our media commentators, in the hope of obtaining or preserving the right to govern.

California, once the wealthiest State in the United States, is threatened with bankruptcy, while spending more on the construction and operation of its prison system than it does on higher education.

Do we really wish to head in the same direction? Are there not any political leaders across our country who have the courage of their convictions to take on the outspoken media commentators who seek themselves to shape criminal justice policy, instead of the elected government?

I believe it is critical that we acknowledge the limitations of our present systems and our need for a substantial change of direction.

Courageous political leadership will certainly be required if we are to move forward in the coming decades, rather than reinforce the failures of the past.