Page 2837 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 16 August 2017
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Safety annual reports show the average daily female prisoner population has continued to grow, particularly amongst Indigenous women. It has not been growing exclusively in the past few months; this growth dates back to the year the AMC was opened.
The minister also confirmed that he is considering both short and medium-term options to address the mismanagement of women’s accommodation in the AMC and that ACT Corrective Services is undertaking a feasibility study into the future needs of the ACT’s prison population, with the needs of women detainees as a top priority. While it is pleasing to see the minister finally taking these issues seriously and giving them due consideration, it is a shame that it took an accommodation crisis again at the AMC, and the highlighting of this crisis, to force the minister to act. This is not the way to run a government.
It was revealed in the government’s response to the Select Committee on Estimates yesterday that the ACT government is not being open and accountable about the immediate need to fix the women’s accommodation crisis at the AMC. Recommendations 81 and 82 of the estimates committee report recommend that the ACT government immediately address the lack of dedicated accommodation for women within the AMC and that the minister report back to the Assembly on any plans it has for resolving this issue. Arrogantly or disrespectfully, the government’s response is merely to note these recommendations.
Overall the government has agreed to 59 recommendations, agreed in principle to 36 recommendations and agreed in part to 10, but it only notes what must be considered as serious recommendations; that is, those which seek to improve the operation, the accountability and the transparency of the prison in the ACT. There are still many unanswered questions about how the government failed to foresee the growth in women’s incarceration and why the level of accommodation for women in the AMC is inadequate. There is also the question about how the government is going to resolve this issue. I am calling on the government and the Minister for Corrections to come clean and stop treating the population crisis and the solution for women in the AMC as an afterthought.
The minister needs to explain why there was not plan for the level of population growth in women detainees and to explain the modelling methodology and the basis of fact used to forecast the likely population of women detainees. Did the minister consider the over 5,000 per year growth in the ACT’s population which the Chief Minister keeps going on about? Did the minister look at those national and international trends when considering the expansion of the AMC when it was under consideration a couple of years ago? If the minister did look at these trends, how is it that we find ourselves in a situation where 45 women are in custody in a facility which offers dedicated accommodation for only 29 of them? If the minister did not look at the national and international trends or, more importantly, the local trends, why do we find ourselves in this situation?
The minister should provide to the Assembly a clear time frame for when women detainees will stop being housed in the management and health units in the AMC.
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