Page 898 - Week 03 - Thursday, 30 March 2006
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are subject to a mental health order. These deficiencies need to be addressed as soon as possible. I am concerned that the government has not committed sufficient resources to completing its review of the Mental Health (Treatment and Care) Act as soon as practicable.
The main concern I have with this bill is that it could be premature. By widening the definition of “mental impairment” the new law will result in more people being dealt with by the Mental Health Tribunal before that body itself undergoes reform to allow it to better represent the interests of the mentally ill people who come before it. Even with the best will in the world, if enough suitable accommodation for mentally impaired detainees is not available—and it is not available in the ACT—people may well end up being detained in the sort of accommodation that by itself constitutes punishment. Belconnen Remand Centre or Goulburn jail are not suitable places in which to detain the mentally ill or, some would say, those who are not mentally ill. The mentally ill are often the victims of physical and sexual abuse in jail and the experience can pose serious risk of exacerbation of their original symptoms.
I have expressed concern before that plans for the ACT’s supposedly world’s best practice jail include neither the provision of condoms nor a needle exchange program. That is a breach of the government’s duty of care to detainees under its custodianship responsibilities. Given the extremely high correlation between prisoners suffering from mental illness and drug use within jails, these considerations are critical in deciding on the most suitable and productive treatment for mentally impaired detainees. This bill is a step in the right direction.
The ACT can expect these issues to become more prevalent as the federal government’s welfare-to-work agenda is played out. More people with borderline personality disorders and other so-called borderline mental illnesses are likely to have their disability benefits cut, leading to their having to live on the streets or in otherwise dire financial stress, given the shortage of housing for low-income people. This will inevitably increase the symptoms that bring such people to the attention of the criminal justice system. I would like to quote from an article by Jennifer Smith and Anne-Marie Boxell called The intersection of mental illness and the ‘criminal justice system’ in Australia. Dated 7 December 2005, the article was published in New Matilda. It reads:
The 2001 New South Wales Inmate Health Survey provides comprehensive and alarming figures on the extent of mental illness amongst the New South Wales prison population. Over half of all female and 41% of male prisoners had suffered a severe emotional or mental health problem at some stage in their life. Of this number, 25% of women and 34% of men had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital and 40% of all female prisoners and 21% of all male prisoners had made at least one suicide attempt at some stage in their lives. Such rates of mental illness are far higher than in the general population. Sane Australia, for example, found that the level of psychosis amongst the prison population is an astonishing 30 times greater than in the population as a whole.
These figures are presumably well known to the government. I would like to think they are also well known to the opposition but it is sometimes hard to see evidence of that fact in their responses and policy prescriptions for criminal and drug-related behaviours. I urge them to take a few moments to digest the implications of these figures and perhaps
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