A STUDY of Australia's prison populations has found young men and those from indigenous backgrounds are most likely to have more than one spell in jail.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics study, covering prison census data from 1994 to 2007, found the rate of recidivism leading to added jail time was roughly steady, with about 56 per cent of prisoners having done a period in prison by 2007.
Over the period of the study, prison populations increased by an average of 3.7 per cent a year.
The proportion of men in the jail system varied from 92 to 94 per cent over the 13 years of the study, while the number of indigenous prisoners varied between 18 and 21 per cent.
But the number of prisoners being jailed after previously serving a prison sentence rose by 3.2 per cent over the same period.
"Re-imprisonment was strongly associated with being young, being indigenous or having been previously imprisoned," the ABS report said.
"To a lesser extent, re-imprisonment was also associated with being male."
The re-imprisonment rate was highest in the Northern Territory, where about 68 per cent of prisoners had been jailed before.
This was blamed on the demographics of its prisoners, many of whom were young men, the report said.
"In all jurisdictions except Queensland, prisoners released in recent years were more likely to be re-imprisoned than prisoners released in the mid-1990s," it said.
Almost 60 per cent of all prisoners released in the three years to June 1997 had not been sent to jail again before June 30, 2007, the report found.
Those jailed for serious offences, including those involving illicit drugs, sex offences and road traffic offences, were much more likely to return to jail for similar offences.
Opinion: Indeed it is a worrisome sign, implicates that the crime rate in the jailing and jurisdictions system in Australia had failed in nurturing the transgressors to turn over a new leaf particularly in young indigenous men. Why men? Why crime and men are always closely associated with higher number of men put in jail. Why the men don't even have a sense of remorsefulness after what bad deed they had did before? Well, it is a crucial issue to think about. Indubitable the young men tend to like to solve problems and overcome their stress in an aggressive way. However, it is also up to one EQ to control their own emotion and behaviour. This biological culprit can't be blamed solely though. May be it is the time for Australian government to revise their litigation and education system to halt this problem from further protracting.
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