Page 2841 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 16 August 2017
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There is still evaluation to be done on some of these programs, but I think the commitment to taking a justice reinvestment approach, where we seek to spend money on preventing people from coming into custody rather than simply building bigger jails, is the right way forward for our community. It improves community safety, it spends money most effectively and I think it is the best outcome for our community as a whole.
Let me turn briefly to specifically addressing some of the points that Mr Wall made in his remarks today. I will apologise to Mr Wall in advance, because I may not address all of the points that he raised. Mr Coe and Mr Hanson started a conversation over the top of his speech and I actually did not hear all of the details, but I will seek to answer some of the key points that he raised.
Mr Wall made an interesting point. The context is that, because of the increased number of female prisoners, the management unit of the AMC has been turned into a dedicated female accommodation area. I should be very clear about this, and I think I have been in this place before, but for the sake of absolute clarity, I state that this is completely separate from the male accommodation. There is no male access to this area; there is no passing interaction. It is a quite separate area. That is something that Corrective Services briefed the Human Rights Commission on, as well as other oversight bodies, prior to moving females into that part of the AMC.
Mr Wall made what I thought was a surprising observation, in that, because the women were there, they were depriving other detainees of access to the management unit. The purpose of the management unit is for those who have been involved in some sort of misconduct or offending behaviour inside the AMC. So I can assure members that most detainees are not keen to get to the management unit, given its purpose. Also—if I misunderstood Mr Wall, I apologise—it sounded like he was talking about the management unit being the place for crisis accommodation. Let me be quite clear to the Assembly that the crisis support unit is not affected by the movement of female detainees; it remains available for its purpose of crisis support for those who find themselves needing that sort of care and attention.
Mr Wall curiously made reference to “$100 million later”, after the expansion. I can clarify for the Assembly that the original budgeted cost for the accommodation expansion was in the order of $50 million. That project in fact came in $9 million under budget and those funds have been reinvested in the AMC for other purposes, to further improve the facilities available to detainees.
It is really important, particularly with the public comments that Mrs Jones has made in recent times, to be clear that we do not have an accommodation crisis at the AMC. The current muster at the AMC is 458 detainees today. As Mr Wall noted in his remarks, we have accommodation for well over 500. Yes, we do need to juggle it around a little bit, but Mrs Jones’s public comments sought to imply that people are having to sleep on the floor. I have heard repeated comments that we only have space for 29 women but there have been up to 45 in there. We have space for all those detainees and we have made space for them, and we will continue to further examine
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