The Belconnen Remand Centre is out-dated, poorly designed and expensive to run. That does not mean a jail should be built in the ACT as recommended by the discussion paper on ACT correctional services issued this week.
There are competing social and economic issues in the question of whether the ACT should have its own jail. As a single polity with its own law making body and judiciary there are arguments for ACT authorities taking full control over the whole correctional process, rather than surrendering control over prisoners to NSW. As a single community there are good grounds for having a jail here where prisoners can be closer to their families where it is easier to maintain the social contact so necessary in any process of rehabilitation.
On the other hand, the ACT could not build a cost effective jail here that could cater for the whole range of prisoners from maximum security prisoners who are a danger to prison warders, the community at large, other prisoners and themselves down to short-term prisoners who pose little risk and other prisoners who are at risk from their fellow inmates. The trouble is that the ACT produces criminals of all kinds from multiple killers with pre-meditation to driving offenders but there might be only one or two prisoners in each category.
The ACT has an average of 130 prisoners, 30 on remand at Belconnen and 80 in NSW. That number is enough to support a prison if only all the prisoners were of a similar type. But they are not. In particular, there are good grounds for not housing presumed-innocent remandees in the same institution and convicted prisoners.
There is a further danger that if the ACT has a prison, the courts will be more likely to send people to it. There is a further question of where to site a prison. It would require about 12 hectares and need to be less than 20 minutes’ drive from the courts.
The costs of building and running a jail have to be weighed against the cost of continuing to send prisoners to NSW. On that score, of course, it would look a little odd if the ACT Government decided to put up its own prison when it has been preaching the virtues of contracting out for some years. In any event, costs also have to be balanced against the social factors and a balance has to be struck between short-term costs and long-term hidden costs.
While the ACT is thinking about building a jail, and wherever that is it will incite a degree of resident hostility, 100 kilometres away the NSW Government has ordered the closure of a prison in a town, Cooma, where the residents welcome its presence.
Any decision made by the ACT should be made in that context. It would be worth the ACT sitting down with NSW to work out a long-term strategy whereby, say, the ACT specialised in long-term remandees and low-security prisoners from the whole region; Cooma took mainly sex offenders and prisoners in danger from other prisoners; and Goulburn took the maximum security cases. That way, ACT prisoners would always have their families within a reasonably day’s trip and NSW would benefit by not having their low-security cases in the region being mixed with maximum-security or sex-offence prisoners in Goulburn and Cooma.
If the ACT had a low-security prison, there might be less objection to running the remand centre on the same site, provided prisoners were not mixed and the remand centre retained a separate name.
In any event, the experience of the Belconnen Remand Centre should be a lesson to ACT authorities.