Page 1538 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 4 May 2016
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visiting regime of any prison in Australia. We operate visits from 8.30 am to 6.30 pm five days a week. Mr Stanhope in the paper cited Cooma and Goulburn jails. They operate visits on two days a week. So what the AMC offers is weekday visits, weekend visits, 8.30 am to 6.30 pm.
There is a limit. We only have one visitors room. We have to be very mindful of certain things. For example, when families come to visit, we have convicted sex offenders in the jail and we cannot have them in the visit centre. We have to be very careful of having them in the visit centre when families turn up with children. These are awful issues to talk about but this is the reality. We are seeking to minimise that kind of contact by having a new visits regime, so that we get the appropriate separation. There are families in this town who know each other and bear grudges. We cannot have them mixing in the visit centre. That is why a more detailed regime has been put in place.
Also, with the new accommodation units, our prisoners are better separated. It means that our staff can move people around more effectively so that the full visit time is utilised whereas, previously, there have been issues with transfers and visit times have been eaten into. These are the sorts of considerations that have gone into this visit regime. We will continue to monitor it and I will continue to receive feedback, but I want to emphasise that this is about trying to get a more fair and equitable distribution.
I believe the amendment I have moved offers a range of information that Mr Wall was seeking and hopefully members will find it useful and accurate.
MR WALL (Brindabella) (5.25): In closing, it is disappointing that the minister keeps trying to hide from the fact that there are substantial issues out there and continually denies the calls by the Canberra Liberals to have a full, overarching review of security, admin and procedures out there. Until there is a change of government, hopefully in October, nothing will change under the reign of this minister.
As far as Mr Rattenbury’s amendment goes, I am happy that he continues to note, as we did, the increasing rate of Indigenous incarceration rates. I share Mr Rattenbury’s dismay that corrections is at the back end of this issue and that the problem stems from the engagement with police and the courts system first of all. I thought Mr Corbell, as the Attorney-General and also as the minister responsible for ACT Policing, may have contributed something on this issue today. Seemingly, he is happy to leave it to the Greens to deal with the issue. At the back end, once they have been dealt with by the police and the courts, a solution on Indigenous incarceration rates will not be solved at the jail. It needs to be solved at the front end of law enforcement in the territory.
I will touch briefly on the operating costs of the AMC. Mr Rattenbury in his amendment chose to put in the real net operating expenditure, and cited the figures he mentioned in his speech. Those figures are a per prisoner, per day cost. Over those five years it is good to see that those figures have reduced somewhat, because the number of prisoners in the jail has increased substantially. The overall running costs of that place are getting extremely expensive. The operating cost has reduced from
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