THERE'S MORE TO FIGHTING CRIME THAN FILLING JAILS

The Solicitor-General is being too simplistic when he says courts are
going soft on certain offences, writes Don Weatherburn.

In a small but, unfortunately, much publicised section of his book
Uncertain Justice, the NSW Solicitor-General, Michael Sexton, joins a
large chorus of people who believe that crime has increased (at least
in part) because the courts have gone soft on it. Housebreaking is so
rarely reported, investigated and punished, he says, it has
effectively been decriminalised.

Views of this kind are so common they would be unremarkable were they
not espoused by the State's second most senior law officer. In his
case they betray a lamentable grasp of the facts on crime and sentencing.

More disturbingly, by exaggerating the role of the courts in
controlling crime, they frustrate the development of a more rational
debate about law and order policy. Given the proclivity of politicians
and the media to exploit public concern about crime, it is worth
reflecting a little more deeply on these issues.

First, some basic facts. The percentage of housebreaking victims who
report the offence to police is actually very high, hovering around 80
per cent. The clear-up rate for the offence has always been low
(between 5 and 6 per cent) although, for reasons discussed shortly,
this is less a matter of concern than it might appear. About half of
those arrested for the offence are convicted. Many not convicted of
housebreaking are convicted of other offences, such as possession of
housebreaking implements, unlawful possession of stolen goods or
heroin dealing.

In the local courts about 40 per cent of those convicted of
housebreaking are sent to prison, eight percentage points higher than
in 1990. In the higher criminal courts, even those without any prior
convictions face a better than 50/50 chance of going to prison.

Anyone previously imprisoned for housebreaking is virtually certain to
get another prison sentence. The average minimum term imposed upon
those convicted of housebreaking is eight months in the local court
and close to two years in the higher criminal courts. In the most
serious cases the average minimum prison term is more than five years.

Why not imprison everyone convicted of housebreaking and triple their
prison terms? Wouldn't that reduce crime? Would that things were so
simple. Our property crime problems stem from two different groups of
offenders. The largest group, which I'll call "desisters", are
essentially opportunistic offenders. They dip their toes into the
water of crime and then desist without any (or much) need of formal
intervention. A smaller group, which I'll call "persisters", start out
early in crime, finish late and commit a lot of crime along the way.

Because the risk of apprehension for desisters is so low, the threat
of tougher sanctions is not an effective deterrent. Incapacitation of
desisters by imprisoning them, on the other hand, is pointless because
they will stop offending anyway.

The best way to reduce the aggregate contribution of desisters to
property crime is to reduce the opportunities to profit from it. That
is why police focus a lot of attention on those who receive stolen
goods rather than on every passing juvenile housebreaker. That is also
why the Government's action in tightening the law surrounding
pawnbrokers and second-hand dealers made so much sense.

What about persistent offenders? Sooner or later most of them end up
caught. But most are heroin users more concerned about the prospect of
going into withdrawal today than about the prospect of apprehension
next year or the year after. They can be incapacitated through the
imposition of long prison terms. But the courts already impose long
prison terms on them.

It would help to get more of them out of circulation. That is why the
State's prison population has been rising over the past two years. It
would help even more if we could reduce their drug problems. Again,
that is what expansion of the methadone program, the drug court and
other diversion schemes are designed to do.

Have these policies worked? It is impossible to say with certainty but
housebreaking has dropped by 10 per cent and robbery has dropped by
about 20 per cent over the past three years.

Some (including Sexton) suggest that we might be better off
decriminalising drug use. This is not an option to be dismissed
lightly. The risk of providing drugs such as heroin, even just to
dependent users, however, is that heroin prices in the illegal market
will fall. In the short run this will reduce property crime levels. In
the long run it may lead to increased heroin consumption.

Why should we care about increased heroin consumption if there is less
crime? One reason is that while heroin use can be made relatively
harmless to healthy users, the effects of the drug are not necessarily
harmless to others. Regular heroin or cocaine use, for example,
increases the risk of child neglect. Child neglect increases the risk
of juvenile involvement in crime. Thus while the short-run effect of
providing heroin to dependent users may be a drop in property crime,
the long-run effect may be just the opposite.

Reducing crime, to borrow from Malcolm Fraser, was never meant to be
easy.