Police and prisons

South Australia has one of the lowest crime rates in the world. Yet last year, the state Labor government produced a budget which promises hundreds of millions in additional funding for the police and prisons, instead of addressing the problems facing workers and the poor across South Australia, from inadequate housing to ramping outside hospitals.

There is no “youth crime crisis”. The data shows we instead have a crisis of over-policing and imprisonment, with an increased imprisonment rate despite falling rates of crime. At only 10 years of age, the age of criminal responsibility in South Australia is well below the 14 years recommended by the United Nations. We should be raising the age, not spending more money to lock kids up in prisons. Instead, the Labor government is fuelling the reactionary chorus of law and order hysteria.

What is becoming clear is that the “law and order” policies of the major parties are targeting the poor, the homeless and people of colour, and are creating a more authoritarian society with fewer civil liberties and democratic rights.

The same punitive approach to criminality is not being applied to companies that commit wage theft, that lower safety standards, resulting in workplace deaths, or that engage in tax evasion. And police do not loiter in Beaumont or St Peters, harassing residents about where they got their jewellery—that sort of thing happens only in working-class areas.

The erosion of much needed public services such as housing, education, healthcare, and other attacks on our living standards are major contributors to the crime and anti-social behaviour that do exist. But the diversion of public money to running prisons takes away from funding for such services – and from programs that help people to deal with social alienation and to break the cycles of drug abuse and violence that often lead to prison in the first place.

SA Socialists will never capitulate to tabloid scare campaigns about crime. We will instead fight for better social services in communities and stand with those who disproportionately bear the brunt of “law and order” policies.

What we think

1. Any society based on the ownership of private property will necessarily condemn many people to insecurity and poverty, making crime inevitable.
2. Imprisonment is a barbaric and anti-human practice; society should move towards the abolition of prisons.
3. In place of a retributive justice system, we should have a restorative justice system.
4. The criminal legal system reflects and entrenches the oppression experienced by First Nations peoples.
5. The judiciary must not reflect or reproduce economic, social or political inequalities or hierarchies.
6. Wealth or privilege should not facilitate greater access to justice.

We’ll fight to

Justice and sentencing

1. End the “tough on crime” approach to justice and sentencing.
2. Campaign for a decarceration strategy that sees a moratorium on prison construction or expansion and instead redirects funds into trauma-informed community-based solutions to crime, to end imprisonment of women and primary carers, to address the over-representation of Aboriginal people in prison, and to abolish use of solitary confinement and the use of strip searching
3. Raise the age of criminal responsibility to at least 14.
4. Move to abolish youth detention to see that people under 18 years of age are not criminalised and incarcerated and, instead, treated with trauma-informed care and community-based solutions.
5. End labour exploitation of people in prison and instead provide them employee rights such as award wages and injury protection when working.
6. End the “war on drugs”.
7. Scrap all mandatory sentencing provisions.
8. End the use of overly harsh and punitive bail measures.
9. Increase funding to the Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement.
10. Instate full political rights for those serving sentences, including the right to vote and the right to stand as candidates.
11. Impose quotas on senior judicial appointments, ensuring that those from wealthy backgrounds are not over-represented.
12. Introduce or strengthen criminal penalties for corporations and wealthy individuals whose business activities have caused harm to individuals, to society or to the environment.

Police

1. Reverse all funding increases to South Australian Police over the last decade and redirect it into social welfare spending.
2. Disarm the police:
   1. Take all military style weapons and hardware out of police hands.
   2. End police use of so-called non-lethal weapons, including capsicum spray.
   3. Disarm police officers on patrol.
3. Black Lives Matter:
   1. Immediately fire all police and corrections officers implicated in black deaths in custody, police shootings or other violent conduct.
   2. Establish a black deaths in custody investigative unit as part of the ICAC.
   3. End racialised policing.
   4. Immediately suspended without pay Police officers charged with an indictable offence.
   5. Introduce mandatory sentences for police officers convicted of an indictable offence.
4. End police misogyny: strengthen penalties for police found to have acted in an abusive or misogynistic way towards women.
5. Stop police investigating themselves:
   1. Complaints against the police should not be referred to the South Australian Police Internal Investigation Section for investigation.
   2. Broaden the terms of reference of ICAC and adequately fund it so that it may rigorously investigate all complaints made against the police.
   3. Launch a Royal Commission into Policing and Police Corruption.
   4. Strengthen criminal penalties applying to police found guilty of violations and other offences and introduce mandatory prison sentences for police officers found guilty of indictable offences, unless exceptional circumstances can be shown.
6. Police the real criminals: Strengthen agencies tasked with investigating and prosecuting criminal business activities, environmental crimes and crimes against First Nations peoples or culture (for example, the destruction of Aboriginal cultural sites by corporations).

Prisons

1. Ban the building of new prisons.
2. “Homes Not Prisons”: Reallocate to public housing the budget for prison expansion.
3. Reverse the privatisation of South Australia’s prisons.
4. Make available voluntary employment for prisoners, paid according to standard Award rates.
5. Strengthen independent authorities that can investigate allegations of abuse by prisoners, prison staff and others, and grant them more powers to suspend abusive prison workers and shut down prison facilities that have a systematic culture of abuse.
6. Increase all welfare, health, education and cultural services available to people in prison.