http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-02-15/bess-price-jail-is-good-for-you-nt/4521152 A Northern Territory Government politician says some Aboriginal people support imprisonment because jail gets the younger generations sober, fed and keeps them safe. Overnight, the Legislative Assembly passed amendments to the NT Sentencing Act, allowing for mandatory sentencing of violent offenders. Good to see someone taking a common sense approach to the problem. Oh and before you racists go frothing at the mouth....she is an aboriginal.
There is always a problem when a legislature mandates sentencing like this. Bess Price makes sense on one level but on another not so much. Why should prison be the option for cleaning people up? That means that only those who go through the system get the alleged benefit. Using Bess's logic and taking it to the extreme, if all aboriginal people were locked up they'd all be better off. No, the beneficial effects of three meals and a bed aren't what prison is supposed to be about. The NT Govt is going back to its old redneck ways now the LNP are back. One term for them, they're in a shambles and this shows it yet again.
Must EVERYTHING be taken to extremes??? It gets these people off the grog and drugs, gets them the treatment and ONLY THE ONES COMMITTING CRIME need to worry about it...
The paternalistic approach hasn't worked, nor has the completely hands-off approach worked. Imprisonment may have beneficial side-effects, I know that. I worked in a few outback stations here in South Australia in the early 1970s and I suppose the establishment would be appalled to learn that police and the local justices of the peace recognised that a short-term of imprisonment (under 14 days so they could be held locally and not sent to a corrections institution) was sometimes necessary to either break up a cycle of continuing drinking and violence (usually domestic violence) among aboriginal people addicted to alcohol. It was always seen as a short-term crisis intervention, nothing more. But I think it may have saved lives. However it wasn't mandated and as I said if the authorities at the time knew about it there would have been hell to pay. But this is something else, this is institutionalised. Allowing for the fact that things such as I've just mentioned did happen (and still might for all I know although with modern communications being what they are and more intrusion into isolated areas by capital city based bureaucrats it has probably stopped) actually mandating imprisonment and justifying it by pointing to the side-benefits is sidestepping the problem and making the corrections system do something it wasn't and isn't intended to do. Bess Price is a breath of fresh air for indigenous people and politics in the NT. Being in the LNP was a shock for the ALP which had previously thought indigenous people were locked-in supporters. That's okay, they needed the shake-up. But Bess needs to think about her longer term strategies to ensure indigenous people get some sort of benefit from putting her into the legislature and also putting the LNP into government because it was the outlying indigenous-populated seats that won it for the LNP in both the northern areas and the southern areas of the NT. Do you see my point? This is not me being pc. This allows the NT government to get off the hook when it comes to actually doing something substantive about substance addiction in the NT - and that's among Europeans as well as indigenous people. Check this out - http://www.ntnews.com.au/article/2013/02/16/317677_ntnews.html - see what I mean? When the LNP government got into power I was living in Darwin and one of the first things the new government did was abolish the banned drinkers register. Did they try and do anything else? No, too hard. So what happened was the straight away the big problem drinkers were able to go straight into a bottle shop and get as much packaged liquor as they could pay for. Big problems ensued. I was living just next to Fannie Bay, which if you know Darwin is the dress circle suburb, and at night a small park a short way from the foreshore at Fannie Bay which had a nice small shopping centre, was infested with problem drinkers causing a hell of a ruckus. Bess needs to get the LNP to focus on the causes of the problems, not wiping up the mess in aisle 3.
To look at the big picture, the problems of Aboriginal welfare, depravity, crime. is beyond the scope of government.
