Page 1003 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 31 March 1993
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
The treatment of ACT prisoners within that system has been a vexed point, and I am pleased to note in the Minister's response that the Government, even before it brought down its response to Paying the Price, took the trouble to conclude with the New South Wales Government agreements which defined such things as the standard of treatment and the rights of prisoners within the New South Wales system; that it has provided for placement agreements, so that there is some element of control over where prisoners are sent in that system; and that it has negotiated the very important question of the cost to the ACT of housing prisoners in that system. We have been paying historically very large sums of money to house prisoners in the New South Wales gaol system - costs comparable with the cost of putting somebody up at the Hyatt Hotel here in Canberra. I am pleased to note that the Government has embarked on a process of renegotiating, and in fact has renegotiated, the cost of that. It might still be a very expensive process to send someone to gaol, but it is not nearly as expensive as it once was.
Of course, other things have happened. In the Assembly we recently readjusted the period of time that a person serves in lieu of payment of a financial penalty imposed in our courts. I think, from memory, we converted that from one day for every $25 to one day for every $100, so that prisoners serving time in lieu of payment of a penalty now serve the same period whether they are sentenced in New South Wales or ACT courts. Those are positive developments.
The Government has given a clear undertaking to act on questions of improvement in the position of those who are described as mentally ill offenders, those people who have clearly committed an offence of some kind but whose position simply cannot be equated with that of other people who come before our criminal justice system and who are clearly people with full capacity and make a fully rational choice about whether they commit crimes or they do not. The need for action in this area is extremely urgent and I detect a commitment on the part of the Government to do something about that, although I reserve judgment as to whether this is really happening at a pace which we would find to be acceptable.
Madam Speaker, the thing that is disappointing about this report is its avoidance of the central question of what to do about our own ACT corrections system, our capacity to house our own prisoners. A number of important options were referred to in the Paying the Price report as alternatives to imprisonment. But in a very real sense, Madam Speaker, it is not possible to fully explore alternatives to imprisonment unless one actually has that option available as well. I recall the Minister saying a few days ago, I think in this Assembly, that the Government saw imprisonment as the last resort, as an option of last recourse, as a way of treating only the most intransigent prisoners, the most incorrigible committers of crimes. I think we would all agree with that general approach, but inevitably there will always be people for whom the appropriate response to the commission of a crime is sentencing to a period of imprisonment. There is no question of that. In those circumstances it remains important for us to ensure that we are getting good value for money when we do commit very large sums of public money to the process of housing, feeding and educating people who have committed crimes in the ACT.
I believe, Madam Speaker, that it is, for the most part, true that we will never get that value for money by sending those prisoners to the New South Wales system or, for that matter, any other system presently operating in Australia. I believe that it is incumbent on us to embrace the necessity of dealing with our
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .