Page 2041 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 7 June 2017
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MRS JONES: Sure. I am happy to speak again to that later in the debate.
MR RATTENBURY (Kurrajong—Minister for Climate Change and Sustainability, Minister for Justice, Consumer Affairs and Road Safety, Minister for Corrections and Minister for Mental Health) (5.34): I welcome the opportunity to talk in the Assembly today and have a conversation with colleagues about issues of recidivism in our corrections system. It provides me with an opportunity to both answer some of the questions Mrs Jones has posed today—and I largely agree with Mrs Jones’s motion—and bring a range of information back at a later point in time. I have circulated amendments, and I seek leave to move the amendments circulated in my name together.
Leave granted.
MR RATTENBURY: I move:
(1) Omit paragraph (1)(a).
(2) Omit paragraphs (1)(c) to (e).
(3) Omit paragraph (2)(c).
I will come to my proposed amendments in a moment, but I will start with talking about recidivism overall, particularly in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community. I look forward to coming back in September with even more information based on what has been asked for today. Of course I, like everybody in this place, am concerned about the high recidivism rate identified in the Australian Bureau of Statistics 2016 Prisoners in Australia report. For the awareness of members, there are a number of measure by which recidivism is measured, and I will explain those now.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics measures all people who have returned to custody who have previously offended. Then there is the report on government services issued in late January each year which measures people who have offended in the previous two years. So there are two different measures out there: the ABS one is whoever has offended in their lifetime and the report on government services is whoever has reoffended within a two-year period.
The report on government services 2017, which covers the 2015-16 financial year, shows that the overall rate of ex-detainees returning to custody fell for two years in a row—from 46.6 per cent in 2013 to 41.9 per cent in 2014 and then 38.7 per cent in 2015—and then rose again in 2016 to 41 per cent. In the past couple of years we have seen a downward trend and then unfortunately a bounce back up in 2016. That figure is still below the 2013 and 2014 figures but, nonetheless, is above those of 2015. This is largely due to a 5.7 per cent increase in recidivism among non-Indigenous men, and unfortunately this goes to the heart of the motion before us.
In 2015-16 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people accounted for 22.8 per cent of the total AMC detainee population. I acknowledge that this is deeply concerning. We
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