Acute inmate boredom, poor educational opportunities and the fundamental need for an entirely separate prison for female detainees are the three key priorities which the ACT government must address at Canberra's troubled jail to slow the revolving door of reoffending.
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Neil McAllister, the ACT's first independent Inspector of Correctional Services, completed his five-year term this week and handed over the reins to the incoming Rebecca Minty.
The highly respected and experienced inspector assumed the role back in 2018 in the wake of the damning Moss report into systematic failures by corrections, police and justice health which contributed to the death in custody of Indigenous prisoner Steven Freeman.
The 25-year-old was discovered dead in his cell in the south wing at the Alexander Maconochie Centre about 11am on May 27, 2016. He was admitted to the prison methadone program two days before he died, despite no record he was ever using heroin.
The independent Office of the Inspector of Correctional Services, reporting to the ACT Assembly, was created thereafter.
Mr McAllister's office has since delivered two exhaustive investigations - Healthy Prisons Reviews - into conditions, procedures and issues at Canberra's one-size-fits-all minimum-to-maximum jail, the second and most recent 2022 report finding some of the recommendations from three years previously remained unaddressed.
With unfettered access to AMC, OICS has interviewed staff, surveyed prisoners and assessed critical incidents in a way which has led to a number of important changes which Mr McAllister said "may not be apparent to people on the outside" yet has significantly improved the lot of those working inside.
But much important work still remains.
In a forthright interview with The Canberra Times as he departed his role, Mr McAllister said many of the intrinsic issues at the jail could be traced back to the planning processes long before it accepted its first inmates in 2009, with a "footprint" far too small to allow for appropriate expansion as the territory's population grew.
Allied to that was the philosophy Canberra's prison should focus on rehabilitation, yet at the same time failed to deliver programs which lift their education standards, engage in meaningful work, give them fresh skills and better equip them for life outside the chain link fence.
"They [the detainees] are bored shitless, frankly," he said.
"We're not the only ones to observe that; they [the detainees] tell us, the staff tell us. The staff would like them [the detainees] to have something to do.
"And having a job which is called cleaner is not meaningful work but it is ... recorded that way for the purposes of the Report on Government Services.
"We've consistently maintained that jobs inside the prison should be expressed as FTE, or full-time equivalent jobs."
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He offered the example of access to assigned work in other prisons such as Victoria's Fulham Correctional Centre, opened in 1997.
"We have recommended having a large multi-purpose, open-sided shed like a small aircraft hangar where they [detainees] can do a range of different contract jobs concurrently; in one part of the shed they could be building wooden pallets, and assembly work in another area, using very basic tools," he said.
"This offers the potential to attain some certification or basic trades skills.
"One of the big dangers with prison industries is if they compete with outside industries. They [detainees] have to do something which is fairly unique and doesn't compete. But even the most boring job is better than doing nothing."
The need for a structured day for AMC inmates has been raised time and again, not just by the inspector's office but other independent bodies, such as the committee which produced the ACT Blueprint for Change report some 11 months ago.
At the Ravenhall private-public prison partnership project in Victoria, for instance, every cell has a digital screen which shows the structured day ahead for each detainee.
"It tells them what they [the detainees] are doing: 0900 attend this program, 10.30, attend this education program, 11.10 attend this [program], 12 to 1pm, lunch, and so on," Mr McAllister said.
"All the studies show how important this type of structure is."
Since suspension of the rudimentary education programs at AMC during the COVID pandemic, the restart has been painfully slow.
He said that all the basic life skills people on the "outside" take for granted, like how to use the internet banking or interpret a rental contract, are poorly understood by those serving lengthy terms in prison so they "flounder" when they leave, often with no place to stay, no job and the temptation to reoffend.
"There's no continuum for detainees, no proper preparation for them when they leave," he said.
"The Transitional Release Centre was meant to do that but to get in there, the bar is set so high to qualify that it's almost impossible to achieve."
He said a completely separate facility for women was vital because the current mixed arrangements are skewed against giving women detainees the entitlements they deserve.
"Keeping women in the same prison environment, with shared needs and facilities like the gym and the oval and the visitations is a major problem," he said.
"This issue needs addressing quite urgently. But is there the genuine appetite to do so? I'm not so sure."
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