Justice Policy Summary

Reducing crime with prevention & intervention

The Greens support a humane justice system that focuses on genuinely addressing the causes of crime rather than increasingly punitive measures and curtailing civil rights.

In the pursuit of short-term electoral gain, Labor and the Coalition exploit community fears and prejudices and outbid each other with ever more draconian legislation. The disadvantaged and powerless suffer most from this brutality. This “law and order” approach has failed to reduce crime but has massively increased the prison population. It is expensive and damaging.
It costs as much to hold a person in prison as it does to employ a teacher.

The Greens support early intervention measures such as smaller classes and better educational opportunities, which have been shown to reduce crime and can be funded by spending less money on gaols.

In the short-term, the woeful under-resourcing of rehabilitation programs and social support services has contributed to nearly 80% of first-time prisoners re-offending. More gaols and longer sentences are not the way to make our society a safer place.

Up to 80% of gaol inmates are there for crimes involving or caused by drugs, yet the Iemma Government has failed to adequately resource drug rehabilitation services or reform drug laws.

The Greens advocate:

• repealing Labor’s draconian amendments to the bail laws and sentencing that weaken the presumption of innocence and the raft of other ‘law and order’ legislation that targets young people, people of ‘middle eastern’ backgrounds and disadvantaged groups;
• social support and services to address the causes of crime, which include poverty, inequality, alienation, lack of self-esteem and the boredom of unemployment;
• treating drug use as a health and social issue and not as a criminal matter;
• abandoning plans for new gaols: institutionalisation should be a last resort;
• offender rehabilitation, victim support, home detention and community work orders;
• increased funding for Legal Aid and community legal centres;
• resourcing refuges, half-way houses, crisis centres, and rehabilitation centres; and
• treating juvenile offending as a social issue where harsh sanctions are not appropriate.

The Greens reject laws that:

• result in the needless and discriminatory intimidation of young people and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, including the use of “sniffer dogs” and “move on” laws;
• weaken fundamental legal principles, such as “innocent until proven guilty”, unanimous verdicts and double jeopardy; or
• allow preventative detention without trial for so-called terrorist suspects.