Page 4347 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 27 November 2013
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MR HANSON: Let me quote some of the extracts from the evidence from the Official Visitor. He said:
What happens quite often is that detainees are locked down more than they used to be because of the various categories of detainees … The problem is: where do you house people? Of course, double bunks have been installed in the cells, and then there are difficulties about who shares with whom …
… the real problem is that quite often there are particular detainees who just cannot be housed in certain parts of the jail …
There are many prisoners who live in fear of being mixed with other prisoners.
Basically, in some cases they cannot get to programs when they ought to be able to … Other detainees have to be locked in while one group is allowed out. So the overcrowding has contributed to the difficulty of handling these people.
This is a quote from the Official Visitor. I asked the Official Visitor a question about lockdowns. He talked about the issue of lockdowns by saying:
It happens on a fairly regular basis, particularly since some of the blocks have had two regimes, which means one group of detainees is allowed out in that block while another will be locked in because they cannot mix. You can see that you are actually halving the time out.
He went on to say:
I would say now, with overcrowding, it is becoming fairly restrictive, more so than originally intended.
Then we get onto the very disturbing aspects of the evidence that he provided:
Unfortunately, with the overcrowding, there is more tension in the jail and obviously people are being locked down and they might resent that, and so there may be a little more tension, I would say, than in the past.
He goes on:
But, you see, the big problem with the ACT is that there is only one jail, and we are putting mixing categories. That makes it very, very difficult …
Remand detainees are mixed with sentenced prisoners now. That is a no-no. I mean, you do not do that.
This is the Official Visitor. Let me say that again:
Remand detainees are mixed with sentenced prisoners now. That is a no-no. I mean, you do not do that.
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