Who Cares For or About Those in Gaol?

It is a pretty simple proposition - people in custody are owed a duty of care by the Government.

That has not stopped the AdelaideNow website from whipping up a story about compensation paid to prisoners injured in custody.

AdelaideNow... $230,000 paid to injured criminals

In fairness to Michael Owen, his article is quite balanced, but a different flavour is placed on it by the headline using the word "criminals" when the article is about "prisoners." Given the very high remand rates in South Australia, many of our "prisoners" have not been convicted of any charges they may face!

As can be seen in the readers' comments, this has planted the idea that somehow criminal offenders receive compensation for their crimes.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky said: "The degree of civilisation in a society is revealed by entering its prisons." Winston Churchill said that a society's attitude to its prisoners, its "criminals", is the measure of "the stored up strength of a nation".

I wonder what those men would have thought of these comments?

Mental Health System and Remand Prisoners

With the news today that an inmate had escaped from the supposedly secure Brentwood unit at Glenside Hospital came the revelation that he was apparently on remand for Assault.

Assuming that "on remand," in the context of that news article, means "remanded in custody" then serious questions need to be asked about why prison inmates are being held in institutions other than prisons. The Correctional Services Act provides that prisoners should be housed in prisons.

Whilst it is important that people in prison with a mental health problem receive proper treatment and care, it is also important that proper safeguards are in place to ensure to people who are imprisoned are being kept separate from the general population of persons who might be at Glenside Hospital. Patients may be in a secure facility at that hospital for any number of reasons -- and it might not be in the best interests of the community for them to be housed together with prisoners.

Here is a link to the article at AdelaideNow, but the content of this article has already changed a couple of times today, so by the time you read it, it may be very different from the article that I read.

An Anniversary To Be Ashamed Of

February 2008 marked the first anniversary of the use of the City Watch House to hold remand prisoners.

The fact that there has been so little outcry about this is a sad reflection on our society.

No matter how much people might want the guilty to be punished, this is about the way we treat the innocent.

To our eternal shame. And the minister admits this may continue for several years.

When a person is first remanded in custody is precisely the time they need contact with loved ones the most, and yet there are no family visits allowed. No proper access to exercise or to education. Correctional services has even had to resort to handing out nicotine patches.

The details are covered in the 2007 Correctional Services Annual Report (2.3Mb pdf).

With the new gaols not due until 2011, and a Government that seems intent on imprisoning more people and for longer periods, something will need to be done soon.

"Rehabilitation has failed," they cry

With the media reporting a number of very nasty crimes over the last week, there are increasingly vocal advocates of harsher penalties, so called "three strikes" policies, and dumping any focus on rehabilitation.

You only need to follow the comments on AdelaideNow, run by "The Advertiser," to see the depth of the feelings this issue is producing.

Those who claim that rehabilitation has failed ignore the fact that rehabilitation has never really been tried in a properly funded way. They also ignore the fact that harsh punishments have been tried for centuries and have failed. Hanging did not prevent murders, and people still stole loaves of bread in England when the penalty was transportation to Australia!

Those who would like to see the "Gang of 49" locked up need to think about this; at $65,000 per prisoner, per annum, locking up 49 people will cost us - the taxpayers of SA - nearly $3.2 million EVERY YEAR, for as long as we keep them locked up.

As an added problem, little rehabilitation occurs in gaol, so those people are still likely to offend when released.

Rehabilitation is not about a bag of lollies and a pat on the head, it is about fixing the problems that lead people to offend.

Who watches the Watch-house?

We have such a problem with overcrowding in prisons, that remand prisoners are now being held in the City Watch-house. This is a facility designed to hold people only for short terms, following their arrest, and until they go to Court.

People held there do not get family visits, and often the time they need them most is when they are first remanded in custody. For a while, it was even difficult for them to get a visit with a lawyer, but that problem seems to have been fixed after I contacted the Minister for Correctional Services, Carmel Zollo, and her staff fixed the problem fairly quickly.

A number of my clients have described their feelings of isolation and helplessness, while held here. The continued imprisonment of the innocent in these harsh conditions must stop.

Prison Overcrowding

One of the results of the current government's view that "Tough on Crime" is the same thing as "Longer Prison Sentences," and the higher rates of remands in custody in South Australia is the overcrowding of our prisons.

One of my sources at Yatala Labour Prison has told me that 60% of the inmates there are on remand. Most people think that the Adelaide Remand Centre is where all remand prisoners are housed, and that the high security Yatala is only for sentenced prisoners. This means that remand prisoners are in the same prison as some of the State's most hardened criminals, no doubt learning all the wrong lessons!

With moves to change the law to make it harder for many accused to get bail, this situation is only set to get worse.

We might even get to a situation like the UK, where the government has asked the Judges to consider only sending the worst offenders to prison.