Page 3112 - Week 07 - Thursday, 1 July 2010
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One of the recommendations in the dissenting report from the estimates committee was:
… that the Minister provide the Assembly with a detailed explanation of why and when remandees are mixed with sentenced prisoners and the Government’s plans to mitigate the safety and human rights concerns that this situation causes.
I think that is a pretty reasonable request. I know there are some political issues around the prison. I know this has been a great point of contention both between me and you, Mr Assistant Speaker Hargreaves, and me and Mr Corbell, but I do not think anybody could question that the ongoing situation where remandees and sentenced prisoners are put in the same locale—and it is leading to assaults and potentially to sexual assaults—is a satisfactory situation. I do not think anybody would consider that an appropriate thing to be happening at the moment.
Prisoners also have had a significant number of complaints—some prisoner complaints obviously will be spurious and some will be legitimate—but it did lead to an event where prisoners got on the roof of the Alexander Maconochie Centre to protest. That was a result of lock-downs that were occurring. If this prison were properly resourced or properly managed, then we would not see a situation where prisoners were getting on the roof because they were in lock-down. In other debates I have read what Mr Corbell said about giving prisoners time and busy times so they are kept occupied. But what we find out is that his system has been locking down prisoners 20 hours a day. Then he came out and denied that that had been occurring.
We know that there has been drug use at the jail. We know that there has been a hep C transmission. We know that there has been a wrongful release of a prisoner. I will read the words of the prisoner because they do bear saying again. This is what he said when he was released.
Anyone could have, murderers, bad armed robbers, they all could have got out, it was that easy.
I think we would all understand that what we want to do is keep criminals in the jail and not have a situation where they can be wrongfully released. There have also been cases where prisoners have been wrongfully detained after such time as they should have been released.
We are aware that certain programs, including rehab programs, are not being delivered to female prisoners. Again, this seems to be an issue with the size and the design of the prison. And we know that the government is now contemplating expansion of the prison within the next five years. Again we are seeing a GDE scenario where, rather than getting it right the first time and building it to the capacity they should have, we are going to have to go back and retrofit the jail. I am sure that in the long term that is going to cost us a lot more than if they had delivered it on time, on budget and on scope in the first place.
There are ongoing security defects. Defect 2.6, I believe, has not yet been resolved. There are problems with the radio frequency identification system, which, on my understanding, is still not operational. This is a significant period of time after the jail
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