Page 3400 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 23 September 2015
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practices that are put in place for their benefit, and this is often to the detriment of other detainees in the prison, to the courts and the correctional system and to the community more broadly. That is a reality, and I am happy to admit that and I have got no qualms in stating that on the record despite what Mr Rattenbury might think I believe.
The issue at hand is what is being done to stay one step ahead? He pointed to the super max up the road in Goulburn where they also had issues of mobile phones, drugs and other contraband entering the jail. What I would suggest is that we look at what they are doing up there to stay that one step ahead. They have just announced new security screening measures – full body scans – to be implemented similar to what is at an airport. They are also introducing mobile phone jamming technology.
Mr Rattenbury admitted himself that mobile phones are devices that are often used to organise and to continue criminal activity from inside a prison. Well, let us take one of the obvious steps. Let us introduce some mobile phone banning systems into the AMC that will eliminate that option that prisoners are currently using—again, a proactive step which has not been taken locally.
Another issue that I chose to mention was prison industries, and when the AMC was conceived the design was that prisoners in the facility would be kept busy. They would either be earning or they would be learning. They would be engaged in work or they would be engaged in education. But the Auditor-General’s report has said that structured time, including family visitations and therapeutic programs, consists of only around five hours per week on average per prisoner, not the 30 hours that was originally designed. That is a substantial amount of time that detainees are spending either locked up in their cells or free within their cell blocks to occupy themselves. Of course, we all know what happens with idle time and idle hands.
There was an interesting editorial in the Canberra Times published in April of this year, and it was in response to the Auditor-General’s report. There is a very good quote which I think sums up things quite nicely, and the article says:
Prisons, particularly those with prisoners of mixed classifications, are always a challenge to administer efficiently, productively and humanely. The ACT is a trailblazing endeavour—Australia’s first human rights compliant prison and one with a prevailing emphasis on prisoner welfare and rehabilitation. Teething difficulties were always on the cards, therefore. These were almost certainly exacerbated by the Stanhope government’s failure to ensure sufficient capacity at the jail to cater for a significant rise in the prisoner population just a few years after its construction. To have no overarching rehabilitation framework for the prison—when such frameworks are common in other jurisdictions—seems another failure of sizeable proportion. ACT taxpayers may have reasonably expected too that prisoners who wanted to work would be provided with such. Yet, the audit concludes employment opportunities are limited, and confined mostly to the prison’s running.
That goes to the core of what a prison is supposed to be there for, and that is to provide an opportunity for offenders to rehabilitate so that they may seek to mend their ways and go forward and be constructive, contributing members of our community.
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