Victorians head to an election this year with both the Andrews government and the Coalition opposition parties promising to increase the already extraordinary growth in the number of prisoners in that state. Last week Corrections Minister Gayle Tierney told The Age, which reported that Victoria now has 7000 prisoners (a rise of 70% in ten years) costing $800 million a year, “It’s unfortunate that we need to build new prisons but it just is a matter of fact unfortunately … and we need to ensure that we’ve got a secure prison system so that we can keep our community safe.”

But while Tierney and her opposition counterparts, such as Liberal Corrections Spokesman Ed O’Donohue, believe that more prisoners equals greater safety, the Productivity Commission’s latest data shows the contrary to be the case.

In its 2018 Report on Government Services, released in January, the Productivity Commission published data showing a major increase in recidivism — reoffending within two years of release from prison — among released prisoners in Victoria over the past five years.

In 2012-13, 36.8% of prisoners in Victoria returned to prison within two years. That figure has increased every year and at 2016-17 it sits at 43.6%. In other words, today over four out of every ten prisoners who are released in Victoria will be back inside within two years, either because they have been convicted of committing another offence or are on remand having been charged with an offence. The Productivity Commission data also shows that while in 2012-13 45.3% of prisoners were committing a further offence with a non custodial sentence within two years of release, that number grew to 57.7% in 2016-17.

These rises in recidivism rates in Victoria coincide with an increase in the prison population over the same period, according to the Sentencing Advisory Council, from 4884 prisoners in 2012 to 7,149 in 2017.

The rhetoric from politicians in Victoria and media outlets like the Herald Sun is that jail stops re-offending. Rarely does a week go by without Victoria’s largest selling newspaper fulminating about some “weak” judicial officer not sending an offender to jail. This incessant law and order campaign by media outlets, the police association, and victims groups, is having the desired effect. Last week the Andrews government announced the building of yet another prison facility, this time in Lara, west of Melbourne, at a cost to taxpayers of almost $700 million. Mr O’Donohue is also promising to lock more offenders away if the Liberals win this year’s election. He and his party would introduce mandatory jail terms for an even wider range of offences than is already the case, and his only criticism of the Andrews government is that the Coalition would run the prison system more efficiently and keep more prisoners locked away for even longer periods.

So while Victorian politicians, egged on by the media and pressure groups, are falling over themselves to see who can appear more punitive over the next four years, in New Zealand the Labour government of Jacinda Ardern is pursuing an evidence-based approach. Faced with the same link between higher recidivism and higher incarceration rates, NZ Justice Minister Andrew Little observed in February this year the rapid rise in prison numbers “follows 30 years of public policy-making, public discourse, that says we need tougher sentences, need more sentencing, need people serving longer sentences … criminalising more behaviour”.

“One of the major challenges is to turn around public attitudes — to say that what we have been doing for the last 30 years in criminal justice reform actually isn’t working. Our violent criminal offending is going up,” Little told the New Zealand Herald. Ardern’s Chief Science Adviser has released a ground breaking report setting out, in admirably non-emotional and empirical terms, the abject failure of jail as a means of reducing crime and proposing non custodial policies that have been shown to work well in other parts of the world in lowering recidivism rates to as low as 20%.

What a tragedy for Victorians that there is no Andrew Little or Jacinda Ardern running for election. Meanwhile expect offending rates to continue to climb as jails are filled by the next government of Victoria.