No home comforts
AUSTRALIA is told what to do by the UN and that involves such things as what are human rights, which extend, it seems, to our gaols and how we must run them. We should get out of it.
On TV the other evening we were told prisoners have television sets and that they regularly smash them ... the government then gives them another one, paid for by we mugs on the outside. It should be the case that if anyone in receipt of government provided items of whatever type decides to destroy that item they do not get another one. With this stupid and indulgent manner of controlling our gaols – we must be nice to them at all costs - methinks the lunatics really are running the asylums.
We see inmates rioting and vandalising government property on prison roofs... hose them off then let them sit in their wet clothes, summer or winter.
The government has learnt nothing from history. In convict days, in Hobart as I recall, a stern commandant was replaced in an experiment by a gentle clergyman...the prisoners were given the proverbial inch and took the mile. With discipline gone the convicts ran amok and it took ages to get the place back to any semblance of control.
I’d prefer to see prisons revert to the way they were in those colonial days, with harsh draconian penalties and treatment and no rights. In the Middle Ages an outlaw was precisely that, one outside the law and denied its protection. Imagine if there were no rights of convicts to receive visitors... if any items of contraband were found in their possession the authorities would know that a guard or some other official had smuggled them in.
Prison sentences should be set not only with mandatory maximums but also mandatory minimums... should the mandatory minimum for murder be 15 years then no liberal minded soft judge could set a sentence of five. There would be genuine justice for offenders and victims.
There should be no “home comforts” in prisons...they should be as they once were, places so harsh in conditions that anyone who found himself released would never want to go back. The laws should also be amended by general legislation that states that three quarters of a sentence must have been completed and not a minute less before parole may be applied for or granted. — ROGER E. DESHON, JP, Toowoomba