Page 4693 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 27 November 2019
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That is why I brought this motion today, long before I had seen the report of the Inspector of Correctional Services. It is the view of others—not me; others—that the situation is so dire inside this prison that much worse things will occur. Let us all hope that is not the case. The constant mantra of this minister is “There are problems. We take them seriously. We are working on them.” No evidence has been produced that there is any intention to move the women out of the men’s side of the prison.
I described to a local Aboriginal elder the fact that our women are housed in a section of the men’s prison where they can hear them; where they walk past them with line of sight to them when they leave their unit; and where they get wolf-whistled. And, as has been reported to me, at least one woman has walked past her own rapist. He said to me, “That is shameful.”
That is shameful. The minister has no plan to fix that fundamental problem. Yet he comes in here and says that he thinks we can have fewer people offending. There is no plan to have fewer people offending. There is no action taken by the minister that would change the mental state of someone inside that facility to improve it or to change the health situation of someone inside that facility to improve it. If the minister wants to know why there are more people on methadone in this prison than elsewhere, it is his job to find that out, not mine. But the results speak for themselves. There are clearly problems with too many people being on the methadone program. The Canberra population is not so special that double the people entering the prison have an addiction to something that requires methadone.
The minister said in his speech that this facility needs modernising. It is 10 years old. This is not Her Majesty’s prison from some central Sydney location. This has been open for only 10 years. For the vast majority of the time it has been open, this minister has been in charge of it. It is a failed facility, and it needs a great deal of help.
I cannot say often enough how disgraceful it is that the women are now permanently housed on the men’s side of the prison.
In the minister’s response to my motion, he tried to say that the things I have stated in my motion are incorrect, but he totally failed to do so. When he discussed escapes from custody, he compared the numbers in the ACT to the numbers in New South Wales. On face value, everybody knows that there are many more prisoners in New South Wales then there are in the ACT. On top of that, he conveniently likes to leave out escapes from the hospital, because they do not fit someone’s definition of escapes. They fit the community’s definition of escapes, minister.
The minister has also shown his lack of understanding of this area because he does not actually know what a methadone exit program is. He has no idea what a drug exit program is. He is claiming that a methadone exit program is something you put people on after they leave the facility. A methadone exit program, a drug exit program, is something you do inside the facility to work with people one on one to achieve their aspirations for dependence on drugs or not. It is a slow medical process to let people deal with the underlying reasons why they are incarcerated and why they have drug dependency.
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