Page 2053 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 4 June 2019
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are housed in the same cells as convicted criminals. Minister, why are you building a facility outside the prison walls when there are still problems with properly managing what is inside?
MR RATTENBURY: As Mrs Jones knows, the government has made a commitment to a justice reinvestment strategy tagged “building communities not prisons”. We want to break the cycle of repeat offending in the ACT, help people put their lives back on track, and make our community safer by reducing the rates of recidivism in this territory. To do that, we know we need to do things differently.
We also know that the AMC is under population pressure regarding capacity. That is a well-known fact. Part of our strategy is to do two things: one is to make the long-term investment in programs that will help people break that cycle of offending, as I have spoken of; the other is to have some additional capacity at the AMC.
We know that the AMC is essentially a complete maximum security prison. Because there is only one facility, and we do have maximum security detainees, the entire facility is built to that standard. But not everybody in the AMC needs to have that level of security.
In New South Wales we see sites like prison farms, where people are at a much lower level of security as that matches their individual assessment, their point in the rehabilitation process and the like. We see an opportunity here in the ACT to become more nuanced in the type of prison classifications that we have: to have people in a classification that matches their needs. Not everybody needs to be at maximum security. This will give us some additional capacity.
In a way, it is about helping people to rehabilitate, and to get their lives back on track. We know that just about everybody in that jail will come back into our community at some point in time. Very few people will be there for the duration of their natural life. We need to think very carefully about how we give those people skills and capabilities so that when they come back out they do not fall back into their old ways but become thriving members of our community. That is what we are seeking to do through this facility.
MRS JONES: Minister, how is it reasonable to state that you will be able to deliver a reduction in our higher recidivism rates when you cannot manage the facility that we already have?
MR RATTENBURY: I think the best way we can help people to get out of that cycle of offending is to actually work with them on the underlying issues in their lives that lead to criminal behaviour, whether that is a mental health problem, an acquired brain injury, drug and alcohol addiction—the various things that we see in people. We know that the vast cohort of people in the ACT are coming along with those sorts of issues.
The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare recently released data. Admittedly, it was a small sample, but in that small sample of people coming into the AMC more than 80 per cent self-identified that they had taken illicit drugs in the period before
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