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Ask most people in the street and they would say that crime has increased over the past 30 years.

"But t's actually not true," said Dr Hilde Tubex, ARC Future Fellow in the Crime Research Centre. "Criminality is not going up, but imprisonment is, and we hear more about it in the media, so we assume that crime must be rife."

She says it is not just the media that are influencing the public opinion. "Crime and punishment have also become popular electoral topics for politicians, and they are trying to win votes with a law and order discourse: being tough on crime."

Dr Tubex recently organised a four day workshop / conference for national and international experts in comparative criminology and penology (the study of the punishment of crime and prison management). This was made possible by a grant awarded by the Vice-Chancellor in 2011. The workshop was held on Rottnest Island, having a special penal heritage used as an exclusively Aboriginal prison for the first few decades of the Swan River colony.

"Working and living in close proximity on Rottnest made for a very dynamic exchange," Dr Tubex said.

Colleagues from Canada, the US, Belgium, the UK, New Zealand and Australia exchanged their experiences and views on what affects the size and composition of prison populations.

The problem, from these researchers' perspective, is increasing rates of imprisonment, especially among Indigenous populations. Dr Tubex's Future Fellowship project on reducing imprisonment rates in Australia focuses on the differences between Australian jurisdictions and the overrepresentation of Indigenous people in prison.

"The situation is worryingly similar in Canada, where the imprisonment rates are also highest in the provinces with a large Indigenous population," she said. "When Professor Anthony Doob from the University of Toronto was talking about Indigenous imprisonment there, he could have been talking about Australia."

The workshop was followed by a one day conference at Notre Dame University in Fremantle, open to government agencies, practitioners and university students.

"The field of comparative criminology is relatively young," Dr Tubex said. "It started in the 1980s when prison populations began to increase in most industrialised countries and criminologists were wondering what was happening. Answers are being sought in legislation, prosecution, sentencing and release policies.

"But there are also broader societal characteristics that have an impact, such as demographic and socio-economic factors, the difference between a strong neo-liberal of a more welfare-oriented state model, political systems and their relationship with media and public opinion. The deeper we look into the problem, the more complex it becomes."

"But the most important lesson we learned from this gathering is that mass imprisonment is not an inevitable doom scenario. The experts provided us with alternative ways that worked for Canada, for Scandinavia and for European countries. But even in the US there are catalysts of a possible reform, and all these examples gave us ideas for strategies to reduce imprisonment in Australia."

The group plans to submit a proposal for a special issue of a prestigious journal of criminology to publish the outcomes of their workshop.