Page 4687 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 27 November 2019
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it is seized? There are various opinions that it ends up back in the prison. Drug detection capability is not up to the standard it should be and a significant problem exists with the detainee disciplinary process, including arbitrary and inconsistent application.
There is a lack of proper incentives and earned privileges, and informants are not properly protected. Women inmates are not properly inducted or given appropriate information about their rights and obligations and there are not enough suitable recreation facilities or activities for them. The armoury does not have a proper inventory. We do not even know what is meant to be being kept in the armoury of the prison.
Minister Rattenbury has been the minister responsible for corrections for seven years, the majority of this facility’s existence. The minister is either disinterested or incapable of running a properly functioning prison.
The very mandate of the AMC—to be a rehabilitative and healthy prison—is being undermined on a daily basis. Jon Stanhope and Katy Gallagher lauded the value of having prisoners closer to their families and that it would be better for their rehabilitation. They would be pretty unhappy with the state of play at the moment.
To recap, we have had deaths in custody, escapes, record rates of assault, emergency declarations, accidental release of prisoners, illicit drug abuse, high methadone use without an exit program, low staff morale and understaffing, overcrowding of the prisoner population, and now more than 100 systemic failings compromising prison safety and rehabilitation, as identified by the Inspector of Correctional Services in the Healthy Prison Review of the Alexander Maconochie Centre 2019.
Every one of these failures undermines the human rights and rehabilitative mandates of the Alexander Maconochie Centre. Alexander Maconochie himself, the man this facility was named for, had a great regard for incentives for prisoners to work hard. He believed it would improve them and that they should be able to obtain release earlier. That was his radical idea at the time—that if a prisoner did the work assigned to them and got through it faster than expected, they had had the opportunity to improve themselves as a person.
This facility would make Alexander Maconochie cry because people are just being locked in their cells all day with nothing to do. The education numbers are not real because people are enrolling in courses and dropping out of them and not finishing them. As one of the female detainees who is quoted in the report asks: what is the point of enrolling in education if it is held once a week or once a fortnight? People are not obtaining certificate-level training. What they are doing in there is not useful to them on the outside. People who have requested degree-level training are being told they cannot access it, and the list goes on.
Minister Rattenbury has had seven years to secure the prison. Instead, the prison has become more dangerous. Mr Rattenbury needs to be replaced with a more capable and interested minister. Therefore, I am asking for the minister to resign and take a break
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