By Russell Marks

Most of the world is trying to reduce the number of people who spend time in prison – not because of some wokesque preference for the rights of criminals over the rights of victims, as the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly’s short-sighted calamitarians would have you believe. Rather, it is because spending time in prison is one of the factors which increase the likelihood that a person will commit a violent crime after they are released.

The reasons for this aren’t mysterious. Prisons – especially the Territory’s – are hopeless, authoritarian places which actively prevent their inmates’ rehabilitation. Whatever is driving a person’s violent behaviour – untreated trauma, alcohol or drug dependency, poverty, mental illness, personality disorder, anger – cannot and will not be addressed in the Territory’s prisons.

Instead, inmates quickly adapt to the values and culture of the prison, where power, control and violence are the main units of currency.

Yet, on the pretence of improving community safety following the tragic alleged stabbing death of Linford Feick, on April 30, the NT’s Assembly voted for the second time in just over six months to tighten bail laws. The result will be expensive to taxpayers, destructive to basic rights, and will fail to improve community safety.

Crime is a big social problem in the NT, as indeed it is elsewhere. With 1 in every 100 Territorians already locked up, it is little wonder that criminal behaviour doesn’t seem to be slowing. Rather than the solution it is being presented as, prison is in fact part of the problem. It’s been demonstrated that to gain a single percentage reduction in the crime rate, the imprisonment rate needs to increase by 6 per cent. Remarkably, a greater benefit can simply be achieved by increasing average incomes by 1 per cent.

That would be much less expensive to taxpayers than locking everyone up. There is no faster or more effective way to tip the Territory toward bankruptcy than to build new prisons, which are enormous white elephants that hoover scarce public money from health, education and child welfare budgets – where money spent actually does earn dividends for the community, including in lower crime rates – for at least a generation.

Yet that is what the CLP came to power promising, despite the experiences of places like Texas and Florida an entire generation ago.

Lia Finocchiaro has zeroed in on the fact that the 18-year-old teenager who allegedly stabbed Mr Feick was already on bail. She introduced hastily-drafted laws at the end of last month that establish as their starting point that “there is no bail for serious offending”. I suspect her omission of the key word “alleged” was intentional.

Ms Finocchiaro isn’t much concerned about the presumption of innocence. Nor were many of my clients, until they’re charged with a crime they didn’t commit. It’s not uncommon in the Territory for people to be charged with serious offences, sit in prison for months, and then be found not guilty at trial.

Legislators must pause to ask: why does the fact that an alleged offender was already on bail create such worry and concern?

It is tragic and often senseless whenever a person becomes a victim of a violent crime. But given the choice between supervised and monitored bail in the community and remand in a prison, a leader truly invested in community safety should choose bail, where there is at least a chance that drivers of criminal behaviour can be addressed. Astonishingly for a party that claims to want improved community safety, the CLP has axed community-based bail and rehabilitation programs.

Ms Finocchiaro’s CLP chooses prison, and unapologetically so. So does the Labor Opposition, and – remarkably – the Greens, which on April 30 enhanced their irrelevance by siding with the major parties. But if warehousing someone in prison prevents them from committing a crime, it only does so in the short term. In the longer term, when they’re released (as most offenders ultimately are), the community is measurably less safe.

Ms Finocchiaro might like to ask herself: why don’t all governments everywhere simply lock more people up, as hers is doing? The answer is that we’ve known for a very long time that reactive policy like that simply makes the problem worse.

The Territory – indeed the nation – is in the grip of a panic about crimes allegedly committed by people on bail. But we should be much more concerned about crimes committed by people after they’ve come out of prison, when they’re often not monitored or mandated to participate in rehabilitative programs.

More than three in every five prisoners in Australia had previously been locked up. This is the statistic that should truly anger us. The victims of those recidivist offenders are entitled to ask unapologetic, unimaginative politicians who continue to throw away taxpayers’ cash on prisons that don’t make us safer: why did you fail me?

Preventing crime and violence isn’t easy or straightforward, but it’s much better than reacting to it – however urgently, decisively or unapologetically – after someone has become a victim.

Russell Marks is a criminal lawyer in the NT, an adjunct research fellow at La Trobe University and the author of ‘Black Lives, White Law’ (La Trobe University Press, 2022).