Page 1348 - Week 05 - Thursday, 31 May 2007
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I will draw members’ attention to two issues. The first is that when a detainee is received into custody, there is a duty of care obligation on officers to ensure that there are not elements of clothing that can be used to cause self-harm. So things such as shoelaces, belts, draw-cords and other potential ligatures need to be removed, because we know that they have been used to cause self-harm and to commit suicide. So there are good operational and safety reasons for not permitting those items of clothing to be present in the prison. Detainees, under the model we are proposing, would be issued with safe, clean clothing which includes footwear with, for example, velcro fasteners so that there is no ability to use shoelaces as a ligature.
There are other important operational and safety rules that actually protect the interests of prisoners as well. A person coming into a prison with expensive clothing, for example, could be subject to bullying and being stood over in the prison because the expensive clothing could become a commodity. That would actually put that person at risk in the prison. So you need to stop it being a commodity in the prison as well. That is another important provision.
Those are the two most important elements. There is also the issue about permitting people to wear their own clothing during visiting times. The immediate problem that that raises is: how do you distinguish between the visitor and the prisoner? We are not going to be putting prisoners in a situation where they are sitting behind a glass panel and talking through a telephone. That is not going to be the way it works; it will be a much more humane setting. But there will still be a need to be able to distinguish between the prisoner and the visitor. For all those reasons, the government does not support this amendment.
It is not about saying that we want to force people to be in conspicuous and degrading prison clothing. That is not what it is about. It is actually about ensuring the safety of the people who are in remand and in the prison itself and it is about ensuring that we uphold our duty of care in terms of looking after the people who are in that setting.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (5.56): Mr Speaker, this has got to be probably the most impractical amendment that has ever been attempted to be moved in the Assembly. As both Mr Seselja and Mr Corbell have outlined, for a number of reasons it simply would not work. To try to hang on the chief executive of the department this incredibly onerous and impractical amendment is to show a complete lack of understanding of how correction systems must work. The other problem here is how, for instance, one ensures that this clothing remains clean. Are we going to have separate laundries for each of the prisoners? Are we going to ensure that different detergents are added to ensure that the wash is done in the most appropriate way? If something is ruined by the prison laundry, is the department liable?
When you get to this level of detail in the actual act, while the attempt to make the place more humane might be commendable, one has to have a practicality behind it. After all, this is about a prison, and incarceration does carry with it some restrictions to one’s liberty, and that includes choice. For instance, the storage of particular items of clothing can become a nuisance. When you add that to what Mr Corbell has said about safety and whether somebody could use a piece of clothing, whether it be a shoelace, a belt or some other apparel, for self-harm, what you have here is an indication of a lack of understanding of how corrections systems work.
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