Page 3889 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 25 September 2019
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Corrective Services completed the works to construct a new internal perimeter fence for the women’s compound on 6 August this year. This incident highlighted the need to make infrastructure changes at the AMC. Two detainees voluntarily and deliberately jumped fences to find a place where they could meet up. Mrs Jones has made a particular assertion about what those detainees got up to. For the record, those detainees have denied Mrs Jones’s claim to Corrective Services. Because there is no security footage, there is no way of verifying her claims about what took place while they were outside CCTV range. It is colourful for her to suggest that, but it is not based on any fact. I do not know what the detainees got up to and they have declined to disclose that to Corrective Services.
I will also spend a short moment to advise members that the AMC is certainly not in any state of complacency about the needs of female detainees. I recognise that female offenders often have specific needs that differ from male offenders and it is important that these needs are considered when providing accommodation and programs, such as educational, training and rehabilitation. A women offenders framework will formalise this process.
ACT Corrective Services began the planning phase of a women offenders framework in August this year. The framework aims to address the specific needs of female offenders in order to optimise their chances of successful rehabilitation and reintegration into the community. The development of the framework will involve consultation and active engagement with non-government organisations and key stakeholders and is expected to be completed by the end of the financial year. Of the 33 women currently in custody, 17 are employed in prison work, with the remaining 16 unemployed because they are new receptions, do not want to work or have not yet completed their OH&S training.
Corrective Services continue to seek new partnerships with the non-government women’s sector and the broader community sector to offer new programs and rehabilitate these women, who very often come to the AMC as victims with experiences of trauma and deep disadvantage that require care and sometimes long-term support to fully appreciate and address.
I note Mrs Jones’s observations about the reintegration centre and whether it will have a male focus only or whether women will be offered those services also. This is a difficult issue. This is designed to be a minimum security environment. It is outside the wire at the AMC; it is focused on maximising people’s sense of being ready to leave custody and going back to some sort of normal life. Because it is a low security environment, the mixing of males and females is something some in our community are concerned about, and that is the question we are seeking to work through at the moment. I have sought advice from a range of staff of Corrective Services, but also community stakeholders, as to how we might address that question.
At this stage we do not have a clear answer to that question because there is not an easy answer, but we can address this in a range of ways. The women do not necessarily need to be physically in the reintegration centre to undertake an integration program, and we are currently exploring a range of opportunities. These are not finalised, so I am not in a position to brief the Assembly today, but when we have gone through all the available options we will provide an update to the chamber.
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