You can’t throw away the key
Rapists and rights. Many readers will struggle to understand how one has much to do with the other.
That’s an understandable reaction, particularly when the former is represented by two men serving time for multiple brutal attacks.
However, the United Nations disagrees. Its human rights committee has sided with wellknown lawyer Tony Ellis in declaring that even the worst of the worst, the serial rapists deemed dangerous enough to be sentenced to preventive detention, have rights that must be honoured in this country.
Whatever your view, let’s agree to disagree, because the committee has highlighted something possibly of greater concern: the apparent facade of our rehabilitative justice.
The UN forum does not take issue with the preventive sentencing itself but rather the prisoners’ access to rehabilitation and treatment programmes that might give them the opportunity to turn themselves around and have a legitimate shot at being released through the parole process.
Preventive detention is not about locking them up and throwing away the key. Inmates still have the opportunity to appear before the Parole Board and plead a case around their progress, remorse and minimised risk to the community.
That’s a key pillar of our process of punishment. Even for serial rapists.
Even if that parole hearing is many years away, it’s the responsibility of Corrections and other agencies to give the offender the opportunity to attend rehabilitation and treatment programmes. To make that progress and prove that case.
Otherwise the parole hearings are a cruel facade, dangling the possibility of freedom before a person who has not been given the tools to earn it. And it likely reinforces the idea that there is little need for self-improvement or setting things right. Little need for hope. Which potentially makes for a dangerous, depressed inmate.
The UN committee believes this has been the case for the two men represented by Ellis, Michael John Carroll and Allan Miller, both serial rapists who have spent the best part of the last 30 years in jail.
It says that neither has received sufficient treatment for his violent and sexual offending. Neither has been given the opportunity, enshrined in the legislation, to make a bid for freedom.
That is a major concern, especially given Corrections believes it has made major strides over the past few years in providing more rehabilitation and reintegration support.
This would suggest that the department still has some way to go.
It appears Carroll has done little to rehabilitate his violent tendencies. That has to be a concern given that both he and Miller have been released on parole previously.
They will likely come up before the Parole Board again. When they do we need to know that they have had access to appropriate rehabilitation and treatment programmes. So if they are released, they will not transgress our rights.