Page 4207 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 21 September 2010
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MR SPEAKER: Yes, Ms Bresnan.
MS BRESNAN: Thank you, Mr Speaker. Minister, would possible necessary measures to reduce drugs in the AMC include solitary confinement for prisoners, no contact visits for prisoners from family, invasive body searches of all people entering the AMC, including visitors, health centre staff and corrections officers?
MR CORBELL: Mr Speaker, I thank Ms Bresnan for the question. The short answer is yes. If you wanted to prevent contraband from entering the prison, you would have to search, with a full body search, every person entering the facility, every time they entered it—including all prison staff, including all health staff, as well as all prisoners and all family and other people visiting prisoners during the visit sessions at the prison.
That is what you would have to do. You would have to have non-contact visits. There would be a complete and absolute prohibition on any form of contact visit. That means placing all prisoners behind glass, where they are not able to physically touch their husband or their wife or their girlfriend or their son or their grandmother or their mother or their father at any time, for whatever reason.
Those are the types of draconian measures that you would need to put in place to have an even higher level of assurance that you were doing your utmost to prevent contraband from entering the prison.
But no prison in the country does that, and there are good reasons for it. One of the best reasons for it is the maintenance of good order in the facility. You would simply not have prisoners’ compliance and prisoners cooperating in the conduct of the prison, if you imposed those conditions on them. Regardless of their behaviour, you would impose a draconian regime that simply could not be tolerated and would lead to disorder in the facility.
MR SMYTH: A supplementary, Mr Speaker.
MR SPEAKER: Yes, Mr Smyth.
MR SMYTH: Thank you, Mr Speaker. Minister, what screening measures are undertaken for visitors to the centre?
MR CORBELL: The types of measures that are taken for visitors who visit the facility include passive alert drug detection dog searches. They include ion scanning, and they also can include physical searches, but not invasive internal body searches or strip searches.
Mr Stanhope: I ask that all further questions be placed on the notice paper.
Papers
Mr Speaker presented the following papers:
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