Silverwater prison in NSW. Australia should be spending more to prevent people going to jail than on housing them in facilities like this. AAP/Paul Miller

Is this sustainable? Simple logic would suggest not, unless we want to start actively cutting health and education budgets to warehouse criminals.

Wouldn’t we better off spending that money more wisely, trying to prevent people ending up in jail rather than providing facilities when they are sentenced to custody?

“Justice reinvested” may sound like a new term here in Australia, but the concept is one which I have been urging for more than twenty years.

It is built on the understanding that our present criminal justice system, and especially our prisons, are not working effectively in the service of the wider community and is failing in its attempts to maintain community safety and to build community harmony.

Given expenditure on Australian prisons is now approaching $2 billion a year, it is also a particularly expensive operation. Consequently the “justice reinvestment” movement proposes that it is now time to consider more effective and more economically viable alternatives.

So “justice reinvestment” is about not only reinvesting the money that we are currently spending on the construction and operation of an expanding prison network in more effective programs of crime prevention and control, but also ensuring that we protect the human resources that have been substantially impacted by this expansion: particularly our indigenous population, migrant and refugee communities, the mentally ill, the homeless and persons from low income families and neighbourhoods.

Surprisingly this movement has been given momentum by some of the more conservative political forces operating in the United States, namely Republican representatives in Texas.

The movement began in California in 1988. When I visited I found evidence of the beginning of this movement but it was located more in the prison reform groups and the human rights organisations.

They were already using the argument that the present direction and programs of the criminal justice system were not effective and were increasingly eating up a greater percentage of the State’s annual revenue.

Since that time, of course, the American criminal justice system – led by California and other states including Texas – has expanded beyond belief to the current situation where one in 100 American citizens is housed in a correctional facility or under post release correctional supervision in the community.

Here in Australia, over the last twenty years, we have been following a very similar path, and our national prison population has been increasing at three times the rate of the national population, despite the fact that serious crime has not significantly increased in most categories over this same period of time.

Overcrowded prison holding areas in California. Should Australia really go down the increased imprisonment route? AAP/California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

During the last fifteen years I worked closely with Professor Tony Vinson of the University of Sydney in national research studies that mapped social disadvantage by postcode.

This research discovered extraordinarily high correlations between levels of social disadvantage and imprisonment. It pointed to the frightful scenario that has been developing in Australia that your postcode could become determinative of your future, in terms of poor education, lack of participation in the job market and eventual engagement with the criminal justice system.

Of course there are many extraordinary examples of individuals, both indigenous and non-indigenous, who grew up in the most disadvantaged neighbourhoods and who are regarded as successful. But the postcode research pointed to the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of other examples where this was not the case.

A pattern was emerging in the last ten years in Australia where some communities were “dropping off the edge”. Primary school teachers were beginning to predict with confidence which of their students would end up serving lengthy periods of their lives in high security prisons. This should never be tolerated in Australia, especially during a time of generally high economic growth and development.

That is why the concept of “justice reinvested” makes so much sense when we consider the future directions of Australian society.

The current Senate Inquiry receiving submissions and holding public inquiries about “justice reinvested” is a critically important opportunity to reinforce that point of view.

With limited financial resources in Australia, we cannot afford to continue repeating the mistakes of the past and relying on the criminal justice system to deal with major social problems.

There are more effective and less intrusive solutions available and these approaches are capable of diverting vulnerable citizens away from our criminal justice system in a way that brings real healing and builds greater community cohesion.

Pay attention to the findings of this current Senate Inquiry and let us hope that its recommendations to be passed down in June of this year do not get lost in the forthcoming Federal election. It is too important an opportunity to let pass.

Peter Norden (AO) is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University. He has a broad range of experience in the non-government services sector, and has worked extensively at developing and managing innovative social service programs in the community. This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

Queensland Premier Campbell Newman announces his government’s plan to outsource, rather than completely privatise, many public services. AAP/Dan Peled

Yesterday was the day when it was all meant to come together, with Newman having to make the biggest call of his political life. In announcing his government’s response to an audit of the state’s finances, he had to decide whether his Government would support the sale of major pieces of Queensland’s “family farm” – particularly the state’s multi-billion-dollar power assets.

To the surprise of many, and despite a lot of pressure from the money men at the top end of town, Newman declared “we will save the farm”, rather than “taking the easy way out and having a fire sale of assets”. Instead, he outlined a much quieter and in some ways craftier program of outsourcing and competitive tendering. Private operators are likely to end up leasing and running more state-owned services, from ports, trains and buses, through to health care, including elective surgeries.

Queenslanders are no friend of privatisation, that’s for sure. Only 14 months ago, they savagely punished the Bligh Labor government for going down this path without a mandate. It would need a pretty strong case to convince a seasoned politician like Newman to try that option again. So how strong was the case in favor of a fire sale?

A closer look at the books

Just days after being elected, the Newman government appointed former federal Treasurer Peter Costello to lead a A$2.2 million audit of Queensland’s finances. The 1000-page final report – released in full yesterday – recommended selling the state’s electricity and port assets to raise more than A$25 billion and rapidly reduce debt.

Costello continued the hard sell right up until the last moment, including inside the cabinet room for his final briefing to MPs. In an article in the Australian Financial Review that cited a debt figure of A$82 billion, Costello declared: “Queensland has a problem. Its credit rating has been downgraded, it’s paying higher and higher interest costs and something has got to happen… If it doesn’t change, it’s just going to get worse and worse.”

But just how gloomy is the Sunshine State’s budget outlook?

While A$82 billion sounds like a lot of debt, the picture was always more complex than Costello would have us believe.

General government balance sheet, Mid-Year Economic and Budget Update, p.15

The Queensland general government sector in fact had no net debt in 2011/12. And while net debt is projected to grow to a peak of A$9.6 billion by 2013/14, it then starts to fall and then continues its downward trajectory.

Still, you might say, A$9.6 billion is a lot of money to owe. That would be true were we talking about a household or a business – but not for the Government of Queensland, which can tax its citizens to pay the bills and tax them more heavily if it really has to do so. Queensland is, after all, one of Australia’s lowest-taxed jurisdictions, with its per capita taxation in 2012/13 more than $450 below than the Australian average.

But according to Costello’s Commission of Audit, net debt is not the best measure of the state’s liabilities. It includes the financial assets that have been built up to fund the state’s super schemes and which therefore are not available to cover the gross debt on issue. It recommends a different measure, called net financial liabilities:

“As the net debt measure includes investments, it takes account of the large investments Queensland uses to offset its superannuation liability, it does not take account of the liabilities. Under existing Government policy, these investments are held to meet the State’s superannuation liability. Because these investments are not available to reduce gross debt, net debt is not a suitable metric to target in setting an appropriate fiscal strategy… The Commission consider that the most suitable measure of debt is the concept of net financial liabilities”.

The State’s net financial liabilities (A$39 billion in 2011/12) are much higher than its net debt, and it is this that needs to be paid down. But how good is this as a measure of the State’s balance sheet? The answer is not very, because it ignores the physical and other assets that are crucial to the balance sheet equation (worth a cool A$182 billion in 2011/12).

What’s a worthier economic measure?

Net worth is generally considered to be a better measure, for it includes all assets and liabilities and not just those that are financial. Far from being in trouble, Queensland is in fact well and truly in the black according to this measure, with a net worth in the general government sector exceeding A$170 billion in 2011/12, climbing steadily to almost A$180 billion not long after the next scheduled election.

All this is not to say that the Queensland budget is in fine shape. Far from it. But its problems stem not from its balance sheet but the substantial gap between operating income and expenses. Queensland’s operating budget shifted from surplus to deficit in four very difficult years, when revenues went into an unexpected spin and have yet to fully recover. This year the deficit is tipped to exceed A$11 billion, which is very large on any measure and would seem to be genuine cause for concern.

However, this includes one-off expenses associated with flood damage that cost more than A$4 billion. It also includes almost A$1 billion set aside for redundancies arising from Newman’s first budget. When these are excluded, the deficit is a more manageable A$6.3 billion. This is still large, but importantly is not tipped to last forever.

Fiscal balance, Mid-Year Economic and Budget Update, p.4

The Mid-Year Economic and Budget Update also shows that the operating account is projected to return to surplus by 2014/15, with the corrective measures already put in place being enough to turn the ship around without the need for any more drastic action.

If Queensland’s debt is not large, its net worth is positive, and the government by its own admission reckons it is on track to achieve its financial principles, why bother with a massive asset sales program that would antagonize the people?

Far better to be crafty and privatise services in other ways, through an outsourcing and competitive tendering program that can turn the public sector inside out, but hopefully jeopardise fewer MPs’ seats. For Premier Campbell Newman, who resides in a marginal electorate himself, hearing that the money men are disappointed may not be such a bad thing.

David Hayward is Dean of the School of Global Studies, Social Science and Planning at RMIT University. This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

WorldMUN is an annual event, bringing together more than 2,000 university students from more than 80 countries to take part in model United Nations sessions, engaging, debating and working together to tackle the big global issues.

This was the first year it was hosted in Australia, and RMIT was one of the major hosts and sponsors. The conference reached new heights this year, being one of the few of its kind to be directly endorsed by the United Nations – launching youth engagement and global influence to a whole new level.

My role during the conference was a part of a dedicated team of local logistical interns, tasked with the difficult job of ensuring the large-scale event ran smoothly. My responsibilities spanned from showing international delegates around the city, to taking part in official committee sessions and hosting social events at some of Melbourne’s best locations.

Throughout the event week, the committee sessions were held at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre, with extra activities and events being held throughout the city.

While the months of training are complete, and the week of the conference has come and gone, its outcomes and influence will last on. The efforts poured into committee sessions culminated in an officially drafted working paper, to be used in United Nations development sessions.

Even more inspiring than this however, was seeing people my age really get involved in their future, and pursuing the opportunity to be directly involved in change. A common theme that surfaced throughout was that the youth are not just our future, but are our present; something that rang true as I followed my peers’ deep engagement for a common goal.

On a more personal level, I loved the opportunity to meet new people and learn from such a diverse range of cultures. Both within the intern team and throughout the extensive range of delegates, I’ve now made friendships that have opened doors around the world and helped me grow as a person.

As an entirely youth-run event, the atmosphere was vibrant and, despite the sometimes hectic schedule, everyone got along like a house on fire and cultural distinctions created only positive interaction together with the great sense of kinship and common future.

The experience was also offered great opportunities for professionally development, and I found I had learned great new skills sets and refined others. Activities like these strengthen your interpersonal skills, understanding of professional environments and the logistics of team work, and give you great networking connections for the future.

As a student of the Criminal Justice Administration BA, this experience offered a slightly unfamiliar perspective on global importance, and has allowed me to learn a lot. WorldMUN has driven my passion in social sciences towards an international relations perspective, which will now direct my future studies, combining both criminal justice and global relations.

Getting involved with experiences like these is highly recommended. RMIT ensures that it is involved in plenty of exciting ventures and taking part really does give you a lot back. I now have a clearer picture of my future and have achieved some amazing insights. From the friendships gained, to the skills developed, to the great keystone on my resume and being part of true global change, WorldMUN has been worth every minute. Take these opportunities to get involved and you’ll thank yourself for a long time to come.

Luke Wright is currently completing his final year of the Bachelor of Arts (Criminal Justice Administration), in the school of Global, Urban & Social Studies at RMIT University.

Recording the small details as soon as possible is critical. Justin Lane/EPA

Memories, we know, are fallible, and in the case of acts such as this week’s horrific bombings in Boston, this presents particular problems. How can those charged with gathering eyewitness accounts – and those charged with giving them – be sure of what they’re hearing and saying? In a couple of words, they can’t.

Last night I tried to remember what I’d had for breakfast. A recollection of porridge and toast swam to the surface of my mind after a second or two, but now, less than 30 hours later, my memory is fading further – what did I have on my toast? – and I doubt I would remember anything even this specific if I hadn’t gone through the recall exercise last night.

Only a few hours separated my breakfast from the twin explosions in Boston. But similarly, witnesses to that terrifying event are already struggling to retrieve the details of their memories.

Critical evidence that might lead to the arrests and prosecution of the perpetrators is disappearing, even as you read this.

But my breakfast and the bombings aren’t the same, surely. Those of us who were alive remember where we were when we heard the Twin Towers had been attacked, when Princess Diana died in Paris, when JFK was shot …

We live with the assumption that certain memories, by the gravity of the events contained within them, will remain fixed for ever in our minds. But sadly research suggests otherwise.

Before the storm

Justin Lane/EPA

The really important information needed by police investigators and the FBI doesn’t relate to the moment of the explosion but rather the preceding minutes and hours: a glimpse of a suspicious action, a raised voice, an unusual smell, a hurried movement out of place in the crowd, a car registration, an item of clothing, and so on.

What may be a critically-important description of a person or object related to this crime will need to be dredged up from several hours-worth of mundane memories of standing, waiting, watching – or running, exhausted – at the end of yet another marathon.

The human capacity for accurate and reliable observation and recall is lamentably poor, and much entertainment can be derived from the various exercises in observation and eyewitness accuracy using videos designed for such classroom experiments.

Extensive research into false memories has demonstrated the fragility of even our capacity to remember what we remember. When it comes to encoding and retrieving memories, one thing is abundantly clear: memory fades fast.

For police and other investigators, time is absolutely of the essence when questioning eyewitnesses to a suspicious incident.

Over-exposure

MetroWest Daily News/Ken McGagh/EPA

It might seem eyewitnesses’ memories would be strengthened, and their longevity preserved, by exposure to footage and the stories of other witnesses and journalists endlessly playing on a variety of formats. But again, the research suggests otherwise.

In fact, there is a grave danger of contamination of memories through interaction with these sources of (potentially questionable) information.

So what can be done? Ideally, the police – and a very large team of highly skilled interviewers – would interview everyone immediately. Each potential eyewitness would be sensitively interviewed in a quiet, well-appointed suite with access to refreshments, restrooms and childcare.

CJ Gunther/EPA

The investigators would all be fully briefed and work in synchronisation, with every interview recorded and analysed, and the intelligence made available to every other investigator and dynamically cross-referenced to every other item of intelligence as it emerges.

OK, but this is planet Earth, 2013, not a science-fiction film. The best we can hope for is that a team of investigators small enough to maintain investigative cohesion, but large enough to cover the ground over the coming days, will be deployed immediately following a briefing and start interviewing potential witnesses.

We can hope they won’t waste time with the wrong people; we can hope they’ll be able to collate the data quickly; we can hope people will be contacted and interviewed before they start to forget critically-important details.

We can hope that, under huge pressure to get results, investigators won’t compromise the reliability of the information by using coercive or leading questions.

But we will probably settle for a lot less than this, because that’s just the way things are, right?

The paper trail

If we can turn our attention to a project underway in England, it would seem there is another way. The Greater Manchester Police have a special trick up their organisational sleeve called the Self-Administered Interview (SAI) – a paper-based interviewing system designed specifically for circumstances such as those of the Boston Marathon blasts.

Field trials commenced in the UK in 2009 to see if the SAI was beneficial to police investigating crimes with witnesses. One case study showed completed SAIs from witnesses were

comprehensive and detailed, containing useful information for legally proving the case against the defendants, and establishing the charge as a joint venture. Furthermore, using the SAI permitted them to identify three further key witnesses who provided formal statements containing important information concerning actions leading up to the incident.

The SAI form provides instructions to eyewitnesses so that they can record their account of the incident immediately. The completed forms are returned to the police and a small team of investigators can process the resulting data, maintain consistent lines of investigation, identify the key witnesses and contact them for a formal interview.

The subsequent interview is informed by the information gathered from the SAI, and the result is a more reliable and detailed account than is presently possible using existing witness interviewing protocols.

The Manchester public appear to have embraced the system, judging by high rates of participation and the pages of detailed accounts that have been submitted in field trials.

Police are enthusiastic about the project and keen to keep working with academics to expand it further to a wider range of crime scenes.

Will the system be available to the Metropolitan Police in time for the upcoming London Marathon? It’s likely it will, thanks to the high level of cooperation between police and researchers in the United Kingdom.

Clearly able to see the benefits of this project, the British Transport Police have already begun field trials in the SAI, and police in Norway commenced training in the SAI with The Netherlands soon to follow.

And in the case of Boston? In the time I have taken to write this article, more memories have faded, witnesses have been exposed to a barrage of potentially contaminating information and evidence has been lost.

Dr. Georgina Heydon is a Senior Lecturer in Criminal Justice Administration, in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University. She is an active researcher currently working on a number of projects and publications, and also provides expert testimony as a forensic linguist. This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.

Edmond and Corrigan, Building 8, RMIT University Swanston St, Melbourne, Vic., 1994. (Source: John Gollings)

If at all possible, complexity is to be avoided. Complexity takes work and time to negotiate and often requires a depth of knowledge and lateral thought.

Charming one-liners are the preferred mode. And our awareness of history and the richness of the endeavors of those who preceded us are largely limited to a chosen few.

Generally, we are neither a confident nor adventurous nation when it comes to investing resources and recognising the achievements and value of culture, certainly not in the arts.

One of the privileges and responsibilities of a university gallery is to be free of the need to meet popular expectations. In these places we can challenge the familiar by critically engaging with complex imaginative creative practices. Most importantly, we can expand our historical awareness by exploding the canonical repertoire of who and what matters.

Bearing in mind the why, at RMIT Gallery we are intrigued by the creative achievements of all generations, locally and globally, especially where there are interdisciplinary and cross-cultural elements.

It was in this context that a conversation began some years ago in the gallery as to how and on whose work we might focus. Different exhibition formats have been developed. On occasion we explore a body of work from one visual artist or designer.

Three such shows come to mind – the distinguished German sculptor and performance artist Klaus Rinke, who engaged with Aboriginal Australia before it was on the arts radar; Liu Xiao Xian, an Asian Australian cross-media artist who with wit and material mastery explores differences between the East and West in approaches to medicine, religion, ecological issues; and Australia’s first haute couture fashion designer, Hall Ludlow.

So the idea of an exhibition exploring the work of architect and theatre designer Peter Corrigan was immediately compelling, both in the achievements of the architectural firm Edmond & Corrigan (with Maggie Edmond), as well as Corrigan’s extensive work in theatre.

Edmond & Corrigan’s design for RMIT’s Building 8 won the RAIA Walter Burley Griffin National Award for Urban Design in 1995.

I first became aware of Peter Corrigan’s energy and influence as a teacher at the time RMIT became publisher of architectural journal Transition and then through his theatre work, having been engaged to photograph a set and costumes. Intrigue and respect have grown stronger over time. Peter Corrigan has always made clear to RMIT Gallery the need to be mindful of historical context. He has attended thoughtfully most if not all our exhibitions.

Now, fittingly, the distinguished architect will be the subject of an exhibition at RMIT Gallery – one that explores his complex imagination and influences. Peter Corrigan: Cities Of Hope opens on 12 April at RMIT Gallery. We have produced a short video to provide a taste of the complexity and many creative passions of Peter Corrigan’s world, achievements and influence.

RMIT Gallery exhibition co-ordinator Vanessa Gerrans has devoted a substantial effort over the past 18 months to this major curatorial project. Audiences will be able to appreciate how a lifetime’s worth of collecting, amassing, and immersion in art, books and ideas produces a depth and complexity of designs and cultural references not attainable from a cursory glance at electronic media.

In place of a Wikipedia link, we will be installing more than 500 of Peter Corrigan’s rare and interesting books, predominantly on architecture, and more than 150 artworks from Peter Corrigan’s own collection. This includes artists Micky Allan, Rick Amor, Christian Bérard, Kristian Fredrikson, Kristin Headlam, Bill Henson, Philip Hunter, Roger Kemp, Utagawa Kunisada II, Utagawa Kunisada, Daniel Libeskind, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Kenneth Rowell and Gabriela Tylesova.

As Peter Corrigan explains, the work on display is maximalist in style and the use of colour (the walls are a riot of orange, purple, green and navy) is intended to be life-affirming in the midst of our cautious, timid world, controlled by the rulers of taste and class.

The outstanding generosity of so many expert voices guarantee this will be an exhibition experience of extraordinary impact. And throughout, it is the voice and vision of Peter Corrigan, nudging, guiding, shaping, challenging, provoking, transforming, enabling and seducing, that we hear and see in all their contrarian passion.

 
This piece combines a series of extracts from the catalogue, Peter Corrigan: Cities Of Hope, RMIT Gallery 12 April – 8 June 2013.
Suzanne Davies is Director and Chief Curator of RMIT Gallery.