Page 2706 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 10 August 2016
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One thing that we have said we would like to see as a reform is a proper domestic violence court. I think that that would be a good way to go. It has certainly got support from many who deal with these complex issues in the community.
There is a lot to go through in this portfolio. It is an important area of government. I have noted a couple of areas where I think that the government has done all right. But, across the board, particularly in that police portfolio, under the previous police minister, I think the treatment of our police has been nothing but shameful.
MR WALL (Brindabella) (9.31): I rise to speak to the Corrective Services portion of the Justice and Community Safety Directorate. For a number of years I have been happy to lead the charge for the Canberra Liberals on a number of issues that have continued to plague the corrections system and, more specifically, the AMC through this term of the Assembly. Security has been one of the major issues at the forefront of what has been happening within Corrective Services and the ACT corrections system over the past couple of years. Time and again we see contraband and we see violence. We see assaults, drugs, fires, escape attempts and items being thrown over fences; symbols of a prison system that is in dire need of some attention, change of direction and better management.
We have seen phones entering into the prison system, allowing criminals to continue their criminal behaviour whilst they are on the inside. Drugs are continuing to flow into our corrections system, causing addicts to continue using and crime to continue occurring whilst prisoners are serving their sentences. We have seen the audacity of some inside the AMC to not just use a mobile phone to record a fight but to then put it on social media, showing that there are absolutely no consequences, or very few consequences, for those on the inside who are seeking to break the rules.
We have had reports of fires. We have had escape attempts. Most recently—and I asked the minister a question in question time—whilst the Symonston facility was being used as an overflow stopgap measure to deal with the capacity issues that have plagued the AMC since the day it opened, we hear of an escape attempt—Shawshank Redemption-style—where prisoners have sought to punch a hole in the wall and conceal that hole by using posters to cover the work that they have been doing in an attempt to escape. That is a prison system in absolute disarray.
When it comes to the purposes of a prison, what it is supposed to be there for, it is a rehabilitation opportunity. It is an opportunity for us as a society to take people out of the community who have done wrong and give them an opportunity by equipping them with the skills and the life behaviours that they need to go forward so that, hopefully, at the end of their sentence they become constructive members of our community.
In this term we have seen the AMC record one of the highest recidivist rates in the country. Almost 50 per cent of people who were released were back within two years for the same or a similar offence. God only knows the number of prisoners who were back within two years on a different offence. I dare say the recidivist rate in the ACT is much higher than reports such as the ROGS would have us believe.
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