RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
Job/hobbies : Cayman Islands Actuary
 |  Subject: Ignorant OZschwitz state PM ignores the experts on prison overcrowding  Sat Sep 10, 2016 3:20 am | |
| In her bible on toddler behaviour, The Mighty Toddler, the midwife and Australian high priestess of baby knowledge, Robin Barker, lists common toddler behaviours.
They bite, they hit, they refuse to share. They are defiant and egocentric. They have no impulse control and no ability to regulate their own emotions.
Toddlers are sociopaths, basically.
If they were adults, they would comprise large chunks of the state's prison population, which is expanding even though crime rates are down.
Next, Barker lays out the research on discipline.
Avoid negative reinforcement – which means giving a lot of attention (albeit negative attention) to bad behaviour.
For behaviour that cannot be ignored, generally speaking, the harsher the punishment, the more likely the cute sociopath is to reoffend.
Which doesn't make sense until you realise that your job is not so much to deter naughtiness, as to teach the child to regulate herself.
The research says that hitting children only makes them more aggressive.
And if you do decide to hit them, Barker says you should ask yourself whether you're doing it because you really believe it will deliver the best result, or just because you feel the impulse to quickly expunge your own negative emotions.
The same way the child himself might.
If only Premier Mike Baird and his Corrections Minister David Elliott would read Robin Barker, the mummy's companion, most famed for bestseller Baby Love.
Perhaps they would learn, in simple, common sense language, that being "tough on crime" delivers zero results, and that a justice and jailing policy driven by a desire for a quick blooding in response to a tabloid campaign, only makes our streets less safe.
And that locking people up – the harshest punishment Australian society has available to it – only fuels demand for more people to be locked up.
The Mighty Toddler must be stuck under the Premier's nose as a last resort, because he has rejected all the experts' findings on adult misbehaviour.
This week another of these experts came out to declare the $3.8 billion expansion of the state's prisons a "manifest and very expensive failure of public policy".
Dr John Paget is an academic at Charles Sturt University, but he is also the recently departed Inspector of Custodial Services in NSW, the independent watchdog that reviews correctional facilities and reports to Parliament on matters of concern.
Paget says the whole system is a matter of concern. Prisons are a "blunt and ineffective crime control measure". They have little deterrence value and they increase the likelihood of reoffending. NSW has the worst recividism rate of all the states.
None of this is new information. But like donkeys following the tails of the shock jocks, in its last budget the NSW government allocated $3.8 billion to the expansion of the prison system.
This enormous sum will provide 7000 more prison beds, but anyone who has the ability to read could tell you it would be better spent on rehabilitation, early intervention programs or even preschools – early childhood development is now known to be one of the best ways to stop under-privileged children growing into adult criminals.
But as Paget pointed out, that would require an actual recognition at the evidence.
Evidence that is not usually quoted by 2GB's Ray Hadley when he's railing against the latest parole-crime outrage, or by the Daily Telegraph when it is splashing with the terrifying news that sex offenders are out on day release.
The wilful blindness of the Premier and his minister has led us to a situation where crime rates are lower than they have ever been, and yet the state's prisons are overcrowded.
Tempting as it might be to think that crime rates are low precisely because so many bad guys are in prisons, that's not the case. The Baird government cannot claim credit for the fall, and neither can any of its predecessors, at least not directly through law-and-order policies. Criminologists attribute the trend to rising wages and a heroin shortage.
It is politically possible for governments, even conservative ones, to lower incarceration rates through sentencing reform, or through funding programs which divert people from prison.
In the US and the UK, conservative politicians have recognised a punitive penal policy is too expensive and produces bad social outcomes.
In the US, the trend towards reducing prison populations was hastened by the Global Financial Crisis, when governments began to realise they just couldn't afford to house and feed so many offenders.
Maybe we are victims of our own prosperity. Baird's government, lacking imagination, has only one solution to the prison over-crowding problem: build more prisons.
It is the latter-day version of Georgian England, where crims were stuffed into hulks on the banks of the Thames.
At least the Georgians had a plan B: send them to New South Wales.
http://www.smh.com.au/comment/mike-baird-ignores-the-experts-on-prison-overcrowding-20160908-grby61.html |
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