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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Tuesday, 22 June 2004) . . Page.. 2260 ..

warehousing model of corrections. This is where society sent an offender to prison to take them out of society altogether. All too often the societal view was that prisoners were sent to prison for punishment and not as punishment.

The rehabilitative model recognised that the deprivation of liberty was the punishment; that there was no need for additional punishment and that the accent was on rehabilitating the offender so that he or she would not reoffend. This model ceased its application once the rehabilitated prisoner left the prison gates. Unfortunately, because the model did not address the holistic environment of the prisoner, recidivism was not affected. The result is that about 60 per cent of prisoners—more in some parts of the country—come back into the system. The restorative justice model has three prongs. The first is the rehabilitation of the offender in a corrective services institution; the second is the restoration of the rehabilitated offender back into the community; and the third is the restoration of the community for the damage done to it from the crime.

We often forget that the family unit is an integral part of any community. Our attention to the restoration of the community must involve the restoration of the offender’s family as part of that community restoration. Only too often society pays attention to the rehabilitation of the offender through behavioural change programs within a corrective services institution and through such organisations as prisoners aid. It pays attention to the rehabilitation of the victim, through the courts, by participation in sentencing options, through victims of crime assistance schemes and through voluntary organisations such as the Victims of Crime Assistance League, or VOCAL.

In some instances society addresses the injured community by having offenders do some type of community service such as working in the community, either as part of a prison program, as a probation condition or as a community service order. However, little attention is paid to the plight of families affected by the incarceration of one of their members. It is often the case that an offender’s family is the last to know about a crime committed by the offender. That is very often the case with white collar crime, paedophilia and cyber crime.

Families in Australia’s non-indigenous communities usually include the partner, children and parents of the offender, but can include the cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents. But for indigenous people the meaning of “family” has a much wider definition. For the immediate family an incarceration can mean dire consequences—from destitution, horrendous feelings of shame and stigmatisation and bullying of children at school to feelings of grief and loss.

Within the ACT, as with other jurisdictions, there are some support services for these families, but nothing really cohesively presented to the families. It is difficult for people to find their way around the myriad processes and procedures in the courts and prisons. The despair people feel is enhanced by this confusion. There are few services to assist a person dealing with psychological pain, to assist a parent in explaining to a child what has happened, or to just listen to the outpouring of confusion and grief.

The Legislative Assembly’s Standing Committee on Community Services and Social Equity has provided a report addressing this issue and suggesting ways the ACT community can assist these silent and forgotten victims of crime. The report, covering 42

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