Page 1005 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 31 March 1993
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Obviously, if you are spending some time in gaol - - -
Mr Connolly: It is not that foreign.
MR HUMPHRIES: It might not be that foreign, but if you are a single mother, for example, or you are a single mother by virtue of the fact that your husband or de facto husband is in gaol, if you are a single parent perhaps raising two or three kids, barely able to meet the cost of rent, family expenses and so on from the social security payment, you are not going to be able to get to Sydney very often to see dad in Silverwater gaol, or wherever it might be - - -
Mrs Grassby: Not Silverwater.
Mr Connolly: Silverwater is a women's prison.
MR HUMPHRIES: Not Silverwater, I beg your pardon; some gaol in Sydney or even further afield. We have prisoners all the way up the north coast. We have prisoners in Bathurst and other places. It is clearly unsatisfactory, Madam Speaker, to have that situation continuing. We are not meeting the needs of our own system if we do not provide for some alternatives.
The Minister has talked in this place about embracing alternatives and looking at alternatives. I believe that he has alluded to, or if he has not he will encounter, legal problems in extending a full range of those options available in prisons in New South Wales when we do not have access to our own system. It is very hard for us to take a prisoner out of the New South Wales gaol system, say on some sort of early release program, have him or her commit another offence and then be sent back to the New South Wales gaol system. (Extension of time granted) Thank you, members. I will be brief. It is not going to be possible to explore all those options and have all those alternatives if we have to be constantly translating people between the two systems. There are difficulties in doing that which are either very obvious or unseen at this point. As I say, if we do not embrace those questions in the near future we will have been failing the people to whom I think we have a clear duty.
We all regret the incidence of crime, we all wish that crime would not occur; but when it does occur it is clearly the view of every judge and every magistrate in this community, and I think every one of us here, that on occasions the appropriate response is a period of imprisonment. If that is the case we must not wash our hands of the responsibility that we have for those prisoners. I hope that the rather tepid response we have in this report to that central issue of Paying the Price, that centrally important issue about the treatment of prisoners, will not be left on the backburner by this Government; that it will embrace the important question of how to deal with it, and that we will have some move towards the building of an institution in and for the ACT in the not too distant future.
We are seeing options developed in other places which are both economical and humane to their inmates. The Minister, I think, has visited some institutions in Queensland - - -
Mr Connolly: I have not yet, but I intend to.
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