Prisoner education and training, and other characteristics: Western Australia, July 2005 to June 2010

Executive summary Spending public funds on educating and training prisoners can generate a significant return on investment, because as this report argues, studying in prison can reduce costly recidivism and improve life outcomes for ex-prisoners. What are the costs of recidivism? Let’s start with incarceration. Prisoners cost money - about $110,000 per prisoner a year. With over 4,000 prisoners in WA prisons at any one time and a turnover of 8,000 prisoners per year, incarceration is a costly business. In addition, there are policing and legal costs related to finding, charging and sentencing alleged offenders; as well as costs to the community in relation to property damage, insurance premium increases, lives lost and harm and trauma to victims of crime. Reducing recidivism alone can therefore bring about huge cost savings to the government and the community. Then there’s the cost of welfare dependence. In the short term, these include payments to families of incarcerated breadwinners and unemployment benefits for ex-prisoners; just two of the many different types of welfare payments administered by Centrelink. In the longer term, intergenerational welfare looms for an increasing number of disenfranchised, unskilled and unemployed workers, including exprisoners who are further disadvantaged by having a criminal record. Improving employability and reducing welfare dependence can therefore reduce demand on the public purse, as well as promote more productive lives. In Western Australia, considerable efforts have been made by the WA Department of Corrective Services (DCS) to reduce recidivism and improve individual and community outcomes. Internal reviews of offending behaviour by the Education and Vocational Training Unit (EVTU), which has provided courses and classes in Western Australia prisons for many years, show proportionately fewer repeat offences by ex-prisoners who studied in prison, compared with those who did not. Missing from these reviews however is the bigger picture. This research project demonstrates how studying in prison can lead to better labour market outcomes and reduced recidivism, and provides an evaluation of the resulting impact on welfare utilisation. This report is the first of three and summarises the prison training data. It indicates that the Western Australia prison population is diverse, and as can be seen from the class and course profiles, prisoners have varied education and training experiences

The role of art education in adult prisons: The Western Australian experience

Incarceration costs are high; in Australia, for example, each prisoner costs an average of AUD 115,000 per year. Other countries are also feeling the fiscal pinch of high incarceration costs, and a number of jurisdictions are now closing some of their prisons. Most prison costs are non-discretionary (accommodation, meals, etc.). But some of the costs relate to discretionary activities, services and facilities (including schooling). In terms of correctional education, many prison managers try to invest any meagre correctional education resources available to them in those classes and courses which have proven to have the best results, such as improved labour market outcomes and reduced recidivism, minimising subsequent re-imprisonment. Course offers for prisoner-students include vocational training, adult basic education (ABE) and art studies. The two-tiered question this paper asks is: do art classes and courses produce these measurable outcomes and, if not, are there other reasons why they should continue to be funded? Addressing these issues, the authors argue that (1) these measurable outcomes are too narrow and do not reflect the complex but less quantifiable benefits to the individual and the community of studying art in prison, and (2) better measures of all impacts of art studies in prisons are needed, including qualitative and humanitarian aspects

Comparison of microfluidic digital PCR and conventional quantitative PCR for measuring copy number variation

One of the benefits of Digital PCR (dPCR) is the potential for unparalleled precision enabling smaller fold change measurements. An example of an assessment that could benefit from such improved precision is the measurement of tumour-associated copy number variation (CNV) in the cell free DNA (cfDNA) fraction of patient blood plasma. To investigate the potential precision of dPCR and compare it with the established technique of quantitative PCR (qPCR), we used breast cancer cell lines to investigate HER2 gene amplification and modelled a range of different CNVs. We showed that, with equal experimental replication, dPCR could measure a smaller CNV than qPCR. As dPCR precision is directly dependent upon both the number of replicate measurements and the template concentration, we also developed a method to assist the design of dPCR experiments for measuring CNV. Using an existing model (based on Poisson and binomial distributions) to derive an expression for the variance inherent in dPCR, we produced a power calculation to define the experimental size required to reliably detect a given fold change at a given template concentration. This work will facilitate any future translation of dPCR to key diagnostic applications, such as cancer diagnostics and analysis of cfDNA

Carving out employment futures for Aboriginal ex-prisoners in the resource sector

The resource sector in northern Western Australia draws its workforce from local purpose-built towns (drive-in/drive-out (DIDO) workers) and metropolitan areas fly-in/fly-out (FIFO) workers). However, each of these arrangements has a downside. Mining towns are costly to build and maintain. Staff turnover is high. FIFO lifestyles adopted by city-based tradesmen seeking high incomes can lead to social dysfunction. Hence, the question: is there a viable alternative in these regional and remote areas for local communities to provide workers and ancillary support for the resource sector? For example most of the inland mines in Western Australia are located near or within Aboriginal communities. Returning to these communities are ex-prisoners who have had the opportunity to gain trade skills while in metropolitan prisons. This article considers whether Aboriginal ex-prisoners might be gainfully employed in the resource sector in the Pilbara and Kimberley regions of Western Australia