The Roots of the Côte d'Ivoire Crisis
James North
This tropical West African nation, once the most prosperous in the region, is sliding even deeper into civil war. At press time, after a weeklong street battle for Abidjan, the commercial capital of 5 million, there were reports of a fragile settlement. But the vicious violence could break out again at any time. Mainstream Western press accounts included depressingly familiar explanations: the stolen presidential election in November, rising ethnic conflict. The explanations were accurate, as far as they went.
Right now, Côte d’Ivoire’s 21.5 million people are living in a terrible human rights crisis, a catastrophe that is being downplayed partly because the uprisings in the Arab world are distracting attention. But several thousand people have already died here, and up to 1 million are refugees. The small United Nations peacekeeping force should be strengthened, and the world pressure to force the election’s loser, Laurent Gbagbo, to give way to Alassane Ouattara must continue. (Right now Gbagbo is still hanging on to power.) But a change in presidents will not end the danger—and the crisis in Côte d’Ivoire is representative of deeply rooted structural problems in many other African nations.
You have to come here, to one of the forest regions where Côte d’Ivoire’s million-plus cocoa farmers live, to find the fundamental reason that fighting is breaking out again: a profoundly unjust international economic order that pays the people who supply our primary products a pittance and leaves their nations chronically ill with unemployment and poverty, and with people who will fight one another over scarce resources. Here, too, you will learn that the giant American agribusiness corporations Cargill and Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) are one part of the problem, even though their names do not appear in the grim dispatches about widespread killings and mass graves.
To read the full article,cut and paste the link below to your browser:
http://www.thenation.com/article/159707/roots-cote-divoire-crisis
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Nuclear Regulatory Commission Report on Japan
US Sees Array of New Threats at Japan's Nuclear Plant
Wednesday 6 April 2011
by: James Glanz and William J. Broad, The New York Times
United States government engineers sent to help with the crisis in Japan are warning that the troubled nuclear plant there is facing a wide array of fresh threats that could persist indefinitely, and that in some cases are expected to increase as a result of the very measures being taken to keep the plant stable, according to a confidential assessment prepared by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Among the new threats that were cited in the assessment, dated March 26, are the mounting stresses placed on the containment structures as they fill with radioactive cooling water, making them more vulnerable to rupture in one of the aftershocks rattling the site after the earthquake and tsunami of March 11. The document also cites the possibility of explosions inside the containment structures due to the release of hydrogen and oxygen from seawater pumped into the reactors, and offers new details on how semi-molten fuel rods and salt buildup are impeding the flow of fresh water meant to cool the nuclear cores.
In recent days, workers have grappled with several side effects of the emergency measures taken to keep nuclear fuel at the plant from overheating, including leaks of radioactive water at the site and radiation burns to workers who step into the water. The assessment, as well as interviews with officials familiar with it, points to a new panoply of complex challenges that water creates for the safety of workers and the recovery and long-term stability of the reactors.
While the assessment does not speculate on the likelihood of new explosions or damage from an aftershock, either could lead to a breach of the containment structures in one or more of the crippled reactors, the last barriers that prevent a much more serious release of radiation from the nuclear core. If the fuel continues to heat and melt because of ineffective cooling, some nuclear experts say, that could also leave a radioactive mass that could stay molten for an extended period.
The document, which was obtained by The New York Times, provides a more detailed technical assessment than Japanese officials have provided of the conundrum facing the Japanese as they struggle to prevent more fuel from melting at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. But it appears to rely largely on data shared with American experts by the Japanese.
To view the complete article, please cut and paste the link below into your browser:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/world/asia/06nuclear.html?_r=2&ref=global-home
Wednesday 6 April 2011
by: James Glanz and William J. Broad, The New York Times
United States government engineers sent to help with the crisis in Japan are warning that the troubled nuclear plant there is facing a wide array of fresh threats that could persist indefinitely, and that in some cases are expected to increase as a result of the very measures being taken to keep the plant stable, according to a confidential assessment prepared by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Among the new threats that were cited in the assessment, dated March 26, are the mounting stresses placed on the containment structures as they fill with radioactive cooling water, making them more vulnerable to rupture in one of the aftershocks rattling the site after the earthquake and tsunami of March 11. The document also cites the possibility of explosions inside the containment structures due to the release of hydrogen and oxygen from seawater pumped into the reactors, and offers new details on how semi-molten fuel rods and salt buildup are impeding the flow of fresh water meant to cool the nuclear cores.
In recent days, workers have grappled with several side effects of the emergency measures taken to keep nuclear fuel at the plant from overheating, including leaks of radioactive water at the site and radiation burns to workers who step into the water. The assessment, as well as interviews with officials familiar with it, points to a new panoply of complex challenges that water creates for the safety of workers and the recovery and long-term stability of the reactors.
While the assessment does not speculate on the likelihood of new explosions or damage from an aftershock, either could lead to a breach of the containment structures in one or more of the crippled reactors, the last barriers that prevent a much more serious release of radiation from the nuclear core. If the fuel continues to heat and melt because of ineffective cooling, some nuclear experts say, that could also leave a radioactive mass that could stay molten for an extended period.
The document, which was obtained by The New York Times, provides a more detailed technical assessment than Japanese officials have provided of the conundrum facing the Japanese as they struggle to prevent more fuel from melting at the Fukushima Daiichi plant. But it appears to rely largely on data shared with American experts by the Japanese.
To view the complete article, please cut and paste the link below into your browser:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/06/world/asia/06nuclear.html?_r=2&ref=global-home
1. Book review of Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India
A Different Gandhi
Anita Desai
Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India
by Joseph Lelyveld
Knopf, 425 pp., $28.95
Even in his lifetime the legend of Mahatma Gandhi had grown to such proportions that the man himself can be said to have disappeared as if into a dust storm. Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography sets out to find him. His subtitle alerts us that this is not a conventional biography in that he does not repeat the well-documented story of Gandhi’s struggle for India but rather his struggle with India, the country that exasperated, infuriated, and dismayed him, notwithstanding his love for it.
At the outset Lelyveld dispenses with the conventions of biography, leaving out Gandhi’s childhood and student years, a decision he made because he believed that the twenty-three-year-old law clerk who arrived in South Africa in 1893 had little in him of the man he was to become. Besides, his birth in a small town in Gujarat on the west coast of India, and childhood spent in the bosom of a very traditional family of the Modh bania (merchant) caste of Jains, then the three years in London studying law are dealt with in fine detail and with a disarming freshness and directness in Gandhi’s Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Lelyveld’s argument is that it was South Africa that made him the visionary and leader of legend. He is not the first or only historian to have pointed out such a progression but he brings to it an intimate knowledge based on his years as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times in both South Africa and India and the exhaustive research he conducted with a rare and finely balanced sympathy.
To read the full review, cut and paste the link below in your browser :
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/apr/28/different-gandhi/?pagination=false
Anita Desai
Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India
by Joseph Lelyveld
Knopf, 425 pp., $28.95
Even in his lifetime the legend of Mahatma Gandhi had grown to such proportions that the man himself can be said to have disappeared as if into a dust storm. Joseph Lelyveld’s new biography sets out to find him. His subtitle alerts us that this is not a conventional biography in that he does not repeat the well-documented story of Gandhi’s struggle for India but rather his struggle with India, the country that exasperated, infuriated, and dismayed him, notwithstanding his love for it.
At the outset Lelyveld dispenses with the conventions of biography, leaving out Gandhi’s childhood and student years, a decision he made because he believed that the twenty-three-year-old law clerk who arrived in South Africa in 1893 had little in him of the man he was to become. Besides, his birth in a small town in Gujarat on the west coast of India, and childhood spent in the bosom of a very traditional family of the Modh bania (merchant) caste of Jains, then the three years in London studying law are dealt with in fine detail and with a disarming freshness and directness in Gandhi’s Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth. Lelyveld’s argument is that it was South Africa that made him the visionary and leader of legend. He is not the first or only historian to have pointed out such a progression but he brings to it an intimate knowledge based on his years as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times in both South Africa and India and the exhaustive research he conducted with a rare and finely balanced sympathy.
To read the full review, cut and paste the link below in your browser :
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/apr/28/different-gandhi/?pagination=false
Thursday, March 24, 2011
Our Asylum Seeker Policy Is Brutal
Our Asylum Seeker Policy Is Brutal
Ben Eltham
New Matilda, March 23 2011
Australia's leaders continue to make political hay from the suffering of asylum seekers. Our system of mandatory detention is morally bankrupt, and must be abandoned, writes Ben Eltham
The asylum seekers at Christmas Island continue to be deprived of their liberty. The laws of our society have been explicitly rewritten against them, and they have been imprisoned against their will by an impersonal and callous bureaucracy that operates under a cloak of legal nicety. Not only do they lack access to justice or a safe environment, they suffer from a corrosive uncertainty, as men and women who have never met them decide their fate according to a set of rules that make no sense, as demagogues rail against them from the soap-boxes of talk radio shows.
And when those who were locked up and oppressed tried to escape, what happened? Squads of riot police shot tear gas and bean-bag bullets at them. Christmas Island looked suddenly like Bahrain, or any other country where an authoritarian regime needs to impose force on protesters.
But, being Australia, the concentration camp at Christmas Island is not even run by the government. It’s run by a private contractor called Serco. In the cosmic wonderland of Australian immigration policy, the incarceration and possible mistreatment of asylum seekers is now a legitimate profit-making activity. Serco is currently the beneficiary of a five-year, $370 million contract to manage seven detention centres.
Serco is not doing a very good job of it. It is under investigation for using unlicenced security guards and a leaked police dossier claims many of its staff have received ‘minimal or no training’. Despite the chronic overcrowding at the Christmas Island centre — thanks to the government’s policy of locking up each and every person who arrives on our shores in an ‘unauthorised’ manner — the centre was ‘typically 15 staff short per day’. Serco has been fined more than $4 million in contract breaches.
And why do our governments keep acting like this? The historical roots of mandatory detention of asylum seekers are complex and run all the way back to the Hawke-Keating government, but at its core, it’s simple: oppressing asylum seekers is popular. As in any society, there are plenty of Australians who are openly and confidently racist and xenophobic.
The harsh reality is that many of us are uncomfortable with people who are different to us. And we tell politicians and opinion pollsters this. Hard-line policies on asylum seekers are very popular in certain sections of the community; every time Labor tries to soften its policies, the Opposition attacks, and Labor’s support drops. As a result, we have absurdly oppressive immigration policies.
After all, politicians make policies which they hope will gain them re-election. It doesn’t matter that both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott immigrated to Australia by boat. What counts was Labor’s election loss in 2001, which the party continues to believe was the result of the Tampa affair. Hence we have a race to the bottom where ludicrous arguments about ‘queues’ and ‘border integrity’ are used to justify what is essentially a kind of exemplary cruelty. Australians seem to like the fact that our government locks up asylum seekers. There’s no getting around it: detention centres are popular.
I know this because every time I write an article about asylum seeker policy, out come the racists and the hate-mongers. Some of the them blame it all on the people smugglers, but most seem quite happy with hating asylum seekers themselves. One commenter on an article I wrote for the ABC even suggested the government shoot arriving boats with machine guns. That would surely deter illegal entries, he wrote.
Opposition Immigration spokesman Scott Morrison takes a frighteningly similar position. Doing anything to alleviate the cruel and unusual conditions at Christmas Island will only send a message that Australia is ‘putting the white flag up’, he said this week. According to Morrison, not detaining people offshore — where they are excised by a special part of the Migration Act from the due process of Australia’s legal system — effectively means ‘all you have to do is get to Australia and you won’t even be detained anymore’.
Can you imagine that? According to Scott Morrison, there is a grave risk that asylum seekers might escape injustice and oppression in Afghanistan or Sri Lanka, travel thousands of kilometres in a leaky boat on the open ocean and legally claim refugee status in this country under a 60-year international treaty that Australia is a signatory to — and won’t even get locked up.
No wonder Immigration Minister Chris Bowen rushed to assure the media that ‘in all cases they are regarded and treated as offshore entry persons’.
Sometimes public policy is a difficult and complex thing to explain. Emissions trading, or tariff reductions, or the operation of the proposed mining tax are like this. In all of these cases, complex technical issues cloud the over-arching moral calculus we might bring to the rights and wrongs of pricing carbon, removing trade protections for local industry or asking mining companies to pay more tax.
Sometimes, however, public policy is easy to explain. Sometimes the technicalities of the issue are at heart quite simple, and the moral clarity of the issue stark. Asylum seeker policy in Australia is like this. The facts of the matter are simple: our government is locking up innocent people. The moral situation is just as clear. It is a great injustice.
The liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin once wrote, ‘everything is what it is’. He meant that liberty was not equality or fairness or justice. It is liberty.
Let’s be just as frank about asylum seeker policy. It’s not ‘border protection’, it’s oppression. It’s not ‘processing’, it’s incarceration. Asylum seekers are not ‘illegal’ or ‘unauthorised’ — they have a legal right to claim asylum in Australia. It’s not about ‘stopping the boats’, it’s about inflicting great harm on innocent people to satisfy the vicious hatreds of racist and xenophobic voters in marginal seats.
Berlin was talking about liberty, and he distinguished two kinds. One was what he called ‘positive liberty’, in other words, the ability of a person to make her own life choices or to attain a kind of self-mastery. Berlin called the other kind ‘negative liberty’, and this is the sense in which most of us understand it today: freedom from coercion or interference by an external body. When Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom, he was talking about this kind of liberty: the liberty of individuals to be free from government control.
It’s seems like a long way from the philosophy textbooks to the situation inside razor wire at Christmas Island. But perhaps it shouldn’t be, because the situation there now resembles almost exactly the 20th century totalitarian societies about which Berlin and Hayek were writing. In the Cloudcuckooland of Australian asylum seeker policy, treating people decently and humanely according to international law is ‘putting the white flag up’. Alexander Solzhenitsyn would have found it all too familiar.
Ben Eltham
New Matilda, March 23 2011
Australia's leaders continue to make political hay from the suffering of asylum seekers. Our system of mandatory detention is morally bankrupt, and must be abandoned, writes Ben Eltham
The asylum seekers at Christmas Island continue to be deprived of their liberty. The laws of our society have been explicitly rewritten against them, and they have been imprisoned against their will by an impersonal and callous bureaucracy that operates under a cloak of legal nicety. Not only do they lack access to justice or a safe environment, they suffer from a corrosive uncertainty, as men and women who have never met them decide their fate according to a set of rules that make no sense, as demagogues rail against them from the soap-boxes of talk radio shows.
And when those who were locked up and oppressed tried to escape, what happened? Squads of riot police shot tear gas and bean-bag bullets at them. Christmas Island looked suddenly like Bahrain, or any other country where an authoritarian regime needs to impose force on protesters.
But, being Australia, the concentration camp at Christmas Island is not even run by the government. It’s run by a private contractor called Serco. In the cosmic wonderland of Australian immigration policy, the incarceration and possible mistreatment of asylum seekers is now a legitimate profit-making activity. Serco is currently the beneficiary of a five-year, $370 million contract to manage seven detention centres.
Serco is not doing a very good job of it. It is under investigation for using unlicenced security guards and a leaked police dossier claims many of its staff have received ‘minimal or no training’. Despite the chronic overcrowding at the Christmas Island centre — thanks to the government’s policy of locking up each and every person who arrives on our shores in an ‘unauthorised’ manner — the centre was ‘typically 15 staff short per day’. Serco has been fined more than $4 million in contract breaches.
And why do our governments keep acting like this? The historical roots of mandatory detention of asylum seekers are complex and run all the way back to the Hawke-Keating government, but at its core, it’s simple: oppressing asylum seekers is popular. As in any society, there are plenty of Australians who are openly and confidently racist and xenophobic.
The harsh reality is that many of us are uncomfortable with people who are different to us. And we tell politicians and opinion pollsters this. Hard-line policies on asylum seekers are very popular in certain sections of the community; every time Labor tries to soften its policies, the Opposition attacks, and Labor’s support drops. As a result, we have absurdly oppressive immigration policies.
After all, politicians make policies which they hope will gain them re-election. It doesn’t matter that both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott immigrated to Australia by boat. What counts was Labor’s election loss in 2001, which the party continues to believe was the result of the Tampa affair. Hence we have a race to the bottom where ludicrous arguments about ‘queues’ and ‘border integrity’ are used to justify what is essentially a kind of exemplary cruelty. Australians seem to like the fact that our government locks up asylum seekers. There’s no getting around it: detention centres are popular.
I know this because every time I write an article about asylum seeker policy, out come the racists and the hate-mongers. Some of the them blame it all on the people smugglers, but most seem quite happy with hating asylum seekers themselves. One commenter on an article I wrote for the ABC even suggested the government shoot arriving boats with machine guns. That would surely deter illegal entries, he wrote.
Opposition Immigration spokesman Scott Morrison takes a frighteningly similar position. Doing anything to alleviate the cruel and unusual conditions at Christmas Island will only send a message that Australia is ‘putting the white flag up’, he said this week. According to Morrison, not detaining people offshore — where they are excised by a special part of the Migration Act from the due process of Australia’s legal system — effectively means ‘all you have to do is get to Australia and you won’t even be detained anymore’.
Can you imagine that? According to Scott Morrison, there is a grave risk that asylum seekers might escape injustice and oppression in Afghanistan or Sri Lanka, travel thousands of kilometres in a leaky boat on the open ocean and legally claim refugee status in this country under a 60-year international treaty that Australia is a signatory to — and won’t even get locked up.
No wonder Immigration Minister Chris Bowen rushed to assure the media that ‘in all cases they are regarded and treated as offshore entry persons’.
Sometimes public policy is a difficult and complex thing to explain. Emissions trading, or tariff reductions, or the operation of the proposed mining tax are like this. In all of these cases, complex technical issues cloud the over-arching moral calculus we might bring to the rights and wrongs of pricing carbon, removing trade protections for local industry or asking mining companies to pay more tax.
Sometimes, however, public policy is easy to explain. Sometimes the technicalities of the issue are at heart quite simple, and the moral clarity of the issue stark. Asylum seeker policy in Australia is like this. The facts of the matter are simple: our government is locking up innocent people. The moral situation is just as clear. It is a great injustice.
The liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin once wrote, ‘everything is what it is’. He meant that liberty was not equality or fairness or justice. It is liberty.
Let’s be just as frank about asylum seeker policy. It’s not ‘border protection’, it’s oppression. It’s not ‘processing’, it’s incarceration. Asylum seekers are not ‘illegal’ or ‘unauthorised’ — they have a legal right to claim asylum in Australia. It’s not about ‘stopping the boats’, it’s about inflicting great harm on innocent people to satisfy the vicious hatreds of racist and xenophobic voters in marginal seats.
Berlin was talking about liberty, and he distinguished two kinds. One was what he called ‘positive liberty’, in other words, the ability of a person to make her own life choices or to attain a kind of self-mastery. Berlin called the other kind ‘negative liberty’, and this is the sense in which most of us understand it today: freedom from coercion or interference by an external body. When Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom, he was talking about this kind of liberty: the liberty of individuals to be free from government control.
It’s seems like a long way from the philosophy textbooks to the situation inside razor wire at Christmas Island. But perhaps it shouldn’t be, because the situation there now resembles almost exactly the 20th century totalitarian societies about which Berlin and Hayek were writing. In the Cloudcuckooland of Australian asylum seeker policy, treating people decently and humanely according to international law is ‘putting the white flag up’. Alexander Solzhenitsyn would have found it all too familiar.
Saturday, March 19, 2011
A PUBLIC STATEMENT by Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish and Hindu faith organisations.
March 2011
Prison Reform in NSW
The twelve religious groups below join the many voices calling for prison reform in NSW in this important pre-election period. We seek to apply the values of compassion, healing and social justice to all members of society, including prisoners, who are often the forgotten ones - ‘out of sight, out of mind’. The measure of compassion and social justice we extend to prisoners reflects on the presence of those values in our society. We are actively involved in the pastoral care of prisoners through the prison chaplaincy programmes.
For too long, NSW has seen an increasing rate of imprisonment, and the highest rate in Australia of prisoners returning to prison after release (43%). These “prisoners” are children of the Australian society, we have a choice to support their rehabilitation and allow them to be constructive members of society, or keep them in this vicious cycle of relapse and recidivism. We believe that many prisoners can be reformed if there is the political will to do the work required. Prisoners should not be used for political gain with some political parties using the fear tactics around crime, and promising more harsh treatment to gain votes.
We recommend the incoming government consider the following measures to improve this situation.
1. To increase the focus on rehabilitation and education programmes and other measures to assist prisoners reintegrate into society, thus decreasing the rate of return to prison. To reduce the current rate of recidivism by 10% within the next 3 years.
2. To reform the bail laws that have been increasingly toughened, causing far too many to be imprisoned on remand. Restore the presumptions in favour of bail in all cases except where there is genuine evidence of harm, if the alleged offender is left in the community.
3. To create strong and independent oversight of the Corrective Services Department to ensure full transparency of their operations. In particular, official visitors should be able to report any concerns about prisoner management to an independent regulatory body without fear of being dismissed or locked out of prisons.
4. To provide a stronger pastoral care resource in the prison system. The government accepted a target of one chaplain per 200 inmates but this has not been met. If that ratio were implemented, pastoral care resources would be improved by 30%. Chaplains should also have better access to inmates in terms of longer visiting hours and better facilities for interviewing inmates and holding religious services.
5. To create a planning and review body to look at all of the ways that the performance of corrective services in NSW could be improved. NSW should be a model of best practice. This would benefit all citizens of NSW through lower rates of incarceration and crime.
It is our role as religious organisation to make a strong stand on these issues by upholding the values of compassion and social justice. We urge the people of NSW to expect and pressure the incoming new government to adopt policies to improve the rehabilitation of prisoners. This will create a more wholesome society for us all.
Supporting Organisations
Missionaries of the Sacred Heart Justice and Peace Centre
Father Claude Mostowik msc
Director,
PO Box 146
Erskineville NSW 2043
Australian Federation of Islamic Councils
Ikebal Patel
President
PO Box 7185 SSBH,
Alexandria, NSW 2015
Justice and Peace Office, Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney
Dr Steven Lovell-Jones
Justice and Peace Promoter
133 Liverpool St Sydney 2000 Federation of Australian Buddhist Councils
Mr Kim Hollow
President
PO BOX 6479
Footscray West (Vic) 3012
UnitingCare NSW.ACT
Rev Harry J Herbert
Executive Director
Level 4
222 Pitt Street
Sydney
The Hindu Council of Australia
Prof. Nihal Singh Agar
Chairman
17 The Crescent
Homebush
NSW 2140
Islamic Council of NSW
Khaled Sukkarieh
Chairman
PO Box 423, Greenacre
NSW 2190
Australia Conference of Leaders of Religious Institutes in NSW [CLRI(NSW)]
Sister Sharon Price rsm
Executive Director
PO Box 259
(72 Rosebery Ave)
Rosebery NSW 1445
Friends of Refugees Of Eastern Europe
Rabbi Yoram Ulman
Judge, Jewish Ecclesiastic Court of Sydney
Past President, Rabbinical Council of NSW
Chabad House Bondi
25 O'Brien St
Bondi NSW 2026 Council Of Imams NSW
(Affiliated with Australian National Imams Council)
Tarek El-Bikai
Secretary
PO Box 145 Lakemba 2195
NSW, Australia
Australian Sangha Association
(representative body for monks and nuns of all Buddhist traditions)
Sujato Bhikkhu
Secretary
P.O. Box 132
Bundanoon NSW 2578
Churches Together NSW.ACT
(NSW Ecumenical Council )
Rev. Paul Swadling
Acting General Secretary
379 Kent St
Sydney 2000
Prison Reform in NSW
The twelve religious groups below join the many voices calling for prison reform in NSW in this important pre-election period. We seek to apply the values of compassion, healing and social justice to all members of society, including prisoners, who are often the forgotten ones - ‘out of sight, out of mind’. The measure of compassion and social justice we extend to prisoners reflects on the presence of those values in our society. We are actively involved in the pastoral care of prisoners through the prison chaplaincy programmes.
For too long, NSW has seen an increasing rate of imprisonment, and the highest rate in Australia of prisoners returning to prison after release (43%). These “prisoners” are children of the Australian society, we have a choice to support their rehabilitation and allow them to be constructive members of society, or keep them in this vicious cycle of relapse and recidivism. We believe that many prisoners can be reformed if there is the political will to do the work required. Prisoners should not be used for political gain with some political parties using the fear tactics around crime, and promising more harsh treatment to gain votes.
We recommend the incoming government consider the following measures to improve this situation.
1. To increase the focus on rehabilitation and education programmes and other measures to assist prisoners reintegrate into society, thus decreasing the rate of return to prison. To reduce the current rate of recidivism by 10% within the next 3 years.
2. To reform the bail laws that have been increasingly toughened, causing far too many to be imprisoned on remand. Restore the presumptions in favour of bail in all cases except where there is genuine evidence of harm, if the alleged offender is left in the community.
3. To create strong and independent oversight of the Corrective Services Department to ensure full transparency of their operations. In particular, official visitors should be able to report any concerns about prisoner management to an independent regulatory body without fear of being dismissed or locked out of prisons.
4. To provide a stronger pastoral care resource in the prison system. The government accepted a target of one chaplain per 200 inmates but this has not been met. If that ratio were implemented, pastoral care resources would be improved by 30%. Chaplains should also have better access to inmates in terms of longer visiting hours and better facilities for interviewing inmates and holding religious services.
5. To create a planning and review body to look at all of the ways that the performance of corrective services in NSW could be improved. NSW should be a model of best practice. This would benefit all citizens of NSW through lower rates of incarceration and crime.
It is our role as religious organisation to make a strong stand on these issues by upholding the values of compassion and social justice. We urge the people of NSW to expect and pressure the incoming new government to adopt policies to improve the rehabilitation of prisoners. This will create a more wholesome society for us all.
Supporting Organisations
Missionaries of the Sacred Heart Justice and Peace Centre
Father Claude Mostowik msc
Director,
PO Box 146
Erskineville NSW 2043
Australian Federation of Islamic Councils
Ikebal Patel
President
PO Box 7185 SSBH,
Alexandria, NSW 2015
Justice and Peace Office, Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney
Dr Steven Lovell-Jones
Justice and Peace Promoter
133 Liverpool St Sydney 2000 Federation of Australian Buddhist Councils
Mr Kim Hollow
President
PO BOX 6479
Footscray West (Vic) 3012
UnitingCare NSW.ACT
Rev Harry J Herbert
Executive Director
Level 4
222 Pitt Street
Sydney
The Hindu Council of Australia
Prof. Nihal Singh Agar
Chairman
17 The Crescent
Homebush
NSW 2140
Islamic Council of NSW
Khaled Sukkarieh
Chairman
PO Box 423, Greenacre
NSW 2190
Australia Conference of Leaders of Religious Institutes in NSW [CLRI(NSW)]
Sister Sharon Price rsm
Executive Director
PO Box 259
(72 Rosebery Ave)
Rosebery NSW 1445
Friends of Refugees Of Eastern Europe
Rabbi Yoram Ulman
Judge, Jewish Ecclesiastic Court of Sydney
Past President, Rabbinical Council of NSW
Chabad House Bondi
25 O'Brien St
Bondi NSW 2026 Council Of Imams NSW
(Affiliated with Australian National Imams Council)
Tarek El-Bikai
Secretary
PO Box 145 Lakemba 2195
NSW, Australia
Australian Sangha Association
(representative body for monks and nuns of all Buddhist traditions)
Sujato Bhikkhu
Secretary
P.O. Box 132
Bundanoon NSW 2578
Churches Together NSW.ACT
(NSW Ecumenical Council )
Rev. Paul Swadling
Acting General Secretary
379 Kent St
Sydney 2000
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
