Prisoner Support and Treatment

The Hon. K.L. VINCENT (14:49): A supplementary, Mr President: I want to offer a point of clarification on my question on the second part of it which was: statistically, what impact does participation in prerelease programs have on reoffending? Given that it is cheaper to prevent incarceration, aren't we enabling young people with intellectual disability, low literacy or mental illness access to education options while on remand?

The Hon. P. MALINAUSKAS (Minister for Police, Minister for Correctional Services, Minister for Emergency Services, Minister for Road Safety) (14:50): I do not have a statistic at hand which talks to a specific program delivering a specific outcome in terms of reducing the rate of reoffending. But yes, of course, where there are investments made or where a prisoner has had access to a degree of rehabilitative services, the likelihood of them reoffending reduces. There is no doubt about that. There is no holistic statistic because the nature of the programs offered to people who find themselves in custody are varied dramatically. There are people who find themselves getting rather intensive programs or criminogenic programs applied to them due to the nature of their initial offending versus someone else who might just have a basic prison industries program afforded to them, so there is no single holistic statistic.

Each individual program, as I understand it, has measures and statistics associated with it, and part of the reason behind that is that we want to make sure we have an evidence-based approach around who gets what services in prison. There is no point in applying a particular program to an offender if they do not have any likelihood of responding to it. Particular programs have different success rates depending on what cohort of prisoners you are referring to.

The question of providing services and programs to people on remand is a question that the Strategic Policy Panel, which I have put together to look at reducing the rate of reoffending, is specifically looking at. We have a remand rate in South Australia that is in the order of 42 per cent. Approximately 42 per cent of people who find themselves in custody in South Australia are on remand. That statistic in respect to women is, tragically, even higher. In excess of 50 per cent of female prisoners in our prison population are on remand.

One of the consequences of that is that they do not necessarily have access to rehabilitative programs. That is something that is actively being looked at by the Strategic Policy Panel, which I am looking forward to reporting to me in due course, which may provide recommendations to the government to see if that issue is worthy of being amended in a policy sense.