The report identifies the number and characteristics of alleged offenders aged 10 years and over for selected states and territories, complementing existing ABS publications relating to victims, criminal courts and corrective services.
Young, male and causing injury
Young people (between 10-19 years) accounted for one third (33%) of all offenders proceeded against by police. The 15-19 age group had the highest offender rate for any age group (5,900 offenders per 100,000 people aged 15-19 years). 78% of all offenders were male.
Some 26% of offenders were proceeded against more than once during the year, with 4% being proceeded against five or more times.
The most common principal offences were:
o Acts intended to cause injury (330 offenders per 100,000 people aged 10 years and over);The Whiteness of Reporting?
o Public order offences (315 offenders per 100,000 people aged 10 years and over);
o Theft and related offences (240 offenders per 100,000 people aged 10 years and over)
o illicit drug offences (both at 240 offenders per 100,000 people aged 10 years and over).
Works such as The Power of Large Numbers: Population, Politics & Gender in Nineteenth Century France (Cornell University Press, 2000) by Joshua Cole and Labelling People: French Scholars on Society, Race & Empire, 1815-1848 (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003) by Martin Staum illustrate the way that nations and their statisticians have constructed 'suspect identities'. The ABS report indicates that ethnicity remains of significance in crime reporting, with special recognition of offences by (and, implicitly, among) Indigenous people. The Australian state constructs criminal identities, through the ABS report, in terms of age, gender, jurisdiction and 'Whiteness'.
Data on crime, prosecution and incarceration is consistent with past studies regarding the reported incidence of offences (and of victims) among Indigenous people (eg the 1987 national Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody), underpinning disagreement about causation and responses, such as Peter Sutton's The Politics of Suffering Indigenous Australia and the end of the liberal consensus (Melbourne University Press 2009).
The ABS report notes that people who self-identified as being Indigenous accounted for more than six out of every 10 offenders (61%) in the Northern Territory. For New South Wales, 10% of offenders self-identified as being Indigenous, while the proportion in South Australia was 9%. Those figures are disturbing, given that as at 30 June 2008, the proportion of people aged 10 years and over who were Indigenous was 27% in the Northern Territory, 2% in New South Wales and 2% in South Australia. For all three jurisdictions, acts intended to cause injury was the most prevalent principal offence for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous offenders.
The ABS had earlier reported that as of 30 June 2006 there were 25,790 prisoners (sentenced and unsentenced) in Australian prisons, an imprisonment rate of 163 prisoners per 100,000 adult population. Of the total prisoner population, 93% were men and 7% were women. Unsentenced prisoners include prisoners awaiting a court hearing or trial and convicted prisoners awaiting sentencing. Unsentenced prisoners comprised 22% of the total prisoner population. Most (57% or 14,676) prisoners (both sentenced and unsentenced) had served time in an adult prison prior to the current episode.
A US point of reference is provided by the Crime in the United States, 2008 (CIUS 2008) report from the Federal Department of Justice. The US reportedly accounts for around 25% of the world's prisoners, imprisoning 756 people per 100,000 residents (with roughly one in every 31 adults either in prison or on parole and 55% of the federal prison population serving time for drug-related offences). African Americans have a one-in-three chance of being imprisoned at some point in their lives.
Private Security
The Australian Institute of Criminology has meanwhile noted that private security personnel now outnumber police by more than two-to-one. In Australia during 2006, some 52,768 personnel were employed full-time in the private security industry, compared with 44,898 police. During that year there were 266 security providers and 226 police per 100,000 population, a much lower rate than the estimated global average of 348 private security officers and 318 police (with upwards of 900 security personnel per 100,000 population in South Africa).
Both the police and private security industries have similar ratios of male to female employees (approximately 76% to 24% respectively). Security personnel frequently occupy an older age demographic than police, with the police being more highly educated and bette paid. Available data indicates there are over 5,000 security and investigative businesses registered in Australia (with over 110,000 licenses, issued mainly to individuals)there is substantial concentration: five companies account for nearly half of the security industry market share. Four of the five companies are foreign-owned.