NSW: The prison state

If further evidence is needed to show that the NSW government has adopted a "lock 'em up and throw away the keys" approach to sentencing offenders, look no further than a sentence imposed by a magistrate in a NSW local court this week.

An offender appeared in a local court on a charge of driving with a mid-range prescribed concentration of alcohol. Admittedly the offender wasn't a clean-skin, but when a suggestion was made that the offender be sentenced to periodic detention the magistrate was told by a court officer there were no places available in periodic detention so that was ruled out as an option. Result: the offender was sentenced to six months’ jail. Read a report on the matter here.

Also, NSW magistrates have stated that their hands are often tied in relation to mentally ill persons when they appear in court. Those persons often end up in jail due to the lack of proper facilities that would better cater for their situations.

A magistrate said, “You shouldn’t have mentally ill people in jail – (it's) just not the place for them. There are clearly people who I’ve had before me – if you look at the facts and their background – and clearly there is a mental health issue – and yet a lot of the times they are held in custody when they should really be in hospital."

The magistrate's comment concurred with a media statement from the Mental Health Council of Australia which stated that jail exacerbated mental illness for sufferers, making the system counter productive." Read about this here.

But things don't end there.

Now, the NSW Attorney General, John Hatzistergos, is pushing for violent offenders to be kept in prison beyond their sentences if they show signs of being insufficiently rehabilitated by the NSW prisons system. Hatzistergos reckons special categories of offenders should go to prison for indeterminate periods, until the government decides their time is up. Read more about this here.