The Economics of Just About Everything: The hidden reasons for our curious choices and surprising successes by Andrew Leigh

Author:Andrew Leigh
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Academic
Published: 2014-07-31T14:00:00+00:00

In this chapter, I’ve looked at some unexpected policies that drove the fall in crime over recent decades. Introduced to stem mass shootings, the gun buyback had its biggest effect in reducing domestic firearms killings (and averting gun suicides). Similarly, legalised abortion and unleaded petrol had a major impact on reducing crime in ensuing decades.

Yet today, too much of our criminal justice debate is stuck in the ‘tough on crime’ rut. While it is true that locking up more people does reduce crime in the short run, it also has a long-run cost in the form of unskilled ex-cons and children damaged by their fathers’ incarceration. What crime policy needs today are more innovative ideas, and the willingness to rigorously evaluate them. On the early evidence, education may be the best crime-fighting tool around.

At age 21, Michael Coutts-Trotter was jailed for conspiring to import half a kilogram of narcotics.37 He was addicted to heroin, and lucky not to have overdosed, been shot or contracted AIDS from the people whose needles he had shared in Darlinghurst. Entering jail, he weighed about 40 kilograms, and was ‘psychotic from lack of drugs and lack of sleep’. Over the next three years, he rotated through maximum-security jails, including Long Bay, Bathurst and Parramatta.

Two decades later, Coutts-Trotter was appointed Director-General of the New South Wales Department of Education. He had spent a year in a Salvation Army program after his release from jail, and then worked for senior politician Michael Egan. Former prisoner Bernie Matthews said Coutts-Trotter ‘has become a role model to those still behind the walls and razor wire of state prisons . . . one of the very few whose sheer guts and determination successfully defeated the vicious cycle of prison-parole-and-more-prison’. After a change in state government in 2011, the Coalition retained him as a senior public servant.38

Getting criminal justice policy right is not easy, but if there is one country that can lead the way, it should be Australia: the nation that showed the world that if they are given a chance, ex-prisoners can do just as well as anyone.

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