'NO CHOICE BUT TO BUILD MORE JAILS'

The State's prison population will continue to rise, and the "vast
bulk" of released prisoners will re-offend, a parliamentary inquiry
was told yesterday.

The Corrective Service Commissioner, Mr Leo Keliher, said 152 of every
100,000 adults in the State were imprisoned in September last year -
up from 133 per 100,000 in early 1995, a 14 per cent increase.

At the same time, the prison population had grown by 75 per cent in
Queensland and 36 per cent in Western Australia.

"We believe that, based on best information, based on current activity
of the NSW Police Service and on sentencing trends of the courts, that
there will continue to be growth in inmate numbers," Mr Keliher said.

The department had to respond by building more jails, he told the
Upper House inquiry.

In the US, the prison population had grown by 60 per cent from 1995 to
1998. It had grown by 30 per cent in Britain and 70 per cent in The
Netherlands.

Ms Marilyn Chilvers, from the Bureau of Crime Statistics, said bail
was being refused more often - increasing the number of people on
remand - and a greater proportion of those found guilty of certain
offences were jailed.

The research director of the NSW Judicial Commission, Mr Ivan Potas,
said tougher sentences for traffic offences, such as dangerous
driving, had added to the prison population.

Mr Keliher said the Corrective Services Department had no influence
over the number of prisoners or the rate at which they re-offended.
The vast bulk of prisoners would re-offend, he said. While about 27
per cent of first-time inmates would go back to jail, more than half
those who had been to jail several times would return.

The department ran education and counselling programs but had few ways
of measuring their impact on the likelihood to re-offend. If a heroin
addict re-offended, this was not a failure of the system, he said.

"People have a lifetime of socialisation: the parents, the school
teachers, the local parish priest, the local football coach. There's
all sorts of people who have a major impact on these people who turn
up in my custody, and the fact is we do not have all of the answers in
such a short space of time to guarantee that these people will never
commit crime again."