March 6, 2007

Get Tough on Crime

Every election the leaders of parties seek public support by declaring in the next Government they will get tough  on crime. Every four years, our nation gets tough on crime . This is always popular because most people can cite instances of judges giving lenient sentences, prisoners continuing to commit crimes upon release and our security and safety threatened.

Consequently, we in putting more and more people in prison. The number of prisons in NSW is increasing with two more being built. There are 29 correctional centres and 1 privately operated centre at Junee (February 2006). A new large prison is due to be opened in Wellington. Currently we have 10,000 prisoners behind bars in NSW. Of these two out of every three were in prison previously, but have re-offended and sentenced again into prison. The total annual cost for adult inmates (2005) was Capital: $91 million, Recurrent expenditure: $726 million, a total of $817 million per year. (NSW Department of Corrective Services, Annual Report.) Each prisoner costs the State close to $190 each day that they are incarcerated.

This year the Labor Party has pledged (even after doing so every election for the past ten years) to get tough on crime. The Liberal Party had Mr. Debnam make the same pledge, except he will have 17 years olds tried in adult courts and extremely bad youngsters imprisoned in a juvenile facility as young as ten years.

For years I worked as probation and parole officer. I have gone in and out of most of her Majesty s prisons every year, have established pre-release work training programs and post release programs getting inmates into jobs. As well, I have provided support for wives and families as a priority.

I would be the only politician in the nation who has actually worked on a tender to design and operate a Private Prison (Junee) upon a Christian casework basis. With a group of other committed Christian architects, prison officials and reformers, I worked on a better plan for detention and rehabilitation. We consulted with experts from overseas.

The Labor Government was greatly interested in letting the tender to Wesley Mission, but the bureaucrats in the Uniting Church had apoplexy! They were of the same lock em up  mentality. They even got Synod to pass a motion preventing me and Wesley Mission from proceeding.

I was again in a prison last Thursday visiting a Christian prisoner. That man told me that of 600 inmates there, over 400 were serving long sentences for the worst sex offences. Later Beverley and I came face to face with 150 of those prisoners walking back to their cells. They all had about them that appearance, that look, that walk that I can recognize among any group of people. Prison warders, the visiting chaplain and the occasionally visiting psychologist have an impossible job.

Over the next few years every one of them will be released back into society, usually without the support of their wives or children. They have already gone. They will lack money, jobs, accommodation, and motivation to change. Three out of every four of these offenders will again sexually attack and abuse some child or adult. Most will be caught and be sent back to prison. The ABC S Four Corners program this week was a close examination of the same problem.

The plan to lockup bad ten year olds may please those who have been terrorized by their behaviour, but those ten year olds will all be raped and continually sexually abused by older teenagers. They will be traumatized for life. They will continue the cycle of offending, being imprisoned and then released. Peter Debnam s promise takes us back into the mid-18th century. We have learned much about changing behaviour, but no party wants to pledge money into preventative programs for socially maladjusted children, dysfunctional families or remedial programs.

I will never promise to get tough  on crime. I will never vote for a bill that will incarcerate ten year olds. None of us want to be violated, our property stolen, and our security threatened. But at great expense, what we are doing now is just making violent and aggressive criminals worse by educating them in crime.

Stand out from the crowd of unthinking people and seek the better way.

REV HON DR GORDON MOYES, A.C. M.L.C.