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Keywords: Jails

  • RELIGION

    Pope warns punishment is not a way to peace

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 27 October 2014
    6 Comments

    Pope Francis warns perceptively that the urge to create peace by punishment leads to the search for more targets. The best way to peace and security is not to wage war on people but to be curious about them – what leads them to criminal acts, and how we can intervene to help them make good connections with society.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Obama's cannabis defence illuminates NSW booze laws

    • Ruby Hamad
    • 03 February 2014
    7 Comments

    In a nation still divided bitterly along race lines, blacks, and to a lesser extent Hispanics, bear the brunt of America's prisons-for-profit program. The perils of mandatory sentencing should serve as a warning to NSW, which has announced mandatory minimum sentences as a response to alcohol-fuelled violence. The question is not which drug is more dangerous, but how society chooses to deal with each one and why.

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  • RELIGION

    Scott Morrison and the power of negative branding

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 24 October 2013
    33 Comments

    Suppose the media, shocked by the cavalier approach to politicians who claim allowances for travel and other perks, unanimously decided henceforth always to refer to our parliamentary representatives not as Members and Ministers, but as Rorters and Archrorters. The stigma that such branding would attach to political life would be reflected in a diminishment of the high level of trust in which they are currently held by the Australian public.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Community sector sickened by managerial mindset

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 15 August 2013
    10 Comments

    Although community organisations are often a burr in the saddle of a managerially minded government, they are important because they represent a humane vision and because they can reflect back to government an intimate experience of what is happening to the people whom they serve. Their advocacy, even when unwanted, keeps governments in touch with human needs.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Liam Jurrah and the Northern Territory's jail-fail

    • Mike Bowden
    • 29 July 2013
    13 Comments

    AFL footballer Liam Jurrah had his prison sentence for an assault conviction reduced to three months. Hopefully he will not be too harmed by his experience, and afterwards may be given the chance to recommence his football career. But the conditions confronting his cousins and brothers will not change. In the NT there is a troubling confluence between harsher penalties and increasing incarceration rates.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Humiliation at the heart of homelessness

    • John Falzon
    • 18 June 2013
    13 Comments

    Recent ABS data reveals NT has both the highest rate of people experiencing homelessness and the highest imprisonment rate of any Australian state. Former Spanish PM Zapatero said 'a decent society is one that does not humiliate its members'. Successive Australian governments have systematically humiliated citizens on the basis of cultural background or health or social status.

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  • RELIGION

    Unlocking Australia's incarceration culture

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 23 May 2013
    6 Comments

    The Commonwealth and the Victorian state budgets this year were marked by a contradiction. Both committed more money to incarceration — detention centres and prisons; and both limited programs to help the people confined there. Such contradictions are usually signs of a bad policy that flows from shallow cultural values.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The end of equal opportunity in Victoria

    • Moira Rayner
    • 28 June 2012
    16 Comments

    In 1978, airline boss Reg Ansett didn’t fancy employing the best qualified pilot because the pilot was a woman. She took him on through the Victorian Equal Opportunity Board and ultimately won. Victoria was a leader in human rights in those days. Sadly the current Attorney General is no defender of the rights of the weak and has gutted the Equal Opportunity Commission.

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  • RELIGION

    Human rights and Christian lawyers

    • Frank Brennan
    • 18 July 2011
    5 Comments

    When I appeared on Q&A with Christopher Hitchens, a young man asked whether we can 'ever hope to live in a truly secular society' while the religious continue to 'affect political discourse and decision making' on euthanasia, same-sex unions and abortion. Hitchens was simpaticao. I was dumbstruck.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    NSW and Victoria's 'tough on crime' confusion

    • Michael Mullins
    • 06 June 2011
    7 Comments

    While Victorian Attorney-General Robert Clark pushes for tougher treatment of young offenders, his NSW counterpart Greg Smith is looking to Victoria's current 'enlightened' model, which favours early intervention over punishment.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Demonising the Greens

    • Michael Mullins
    • 28 March 2011
    21 Comments

    Currently the churches and the Greens have a mostly dysfunctional relationship. More than a few Greens owe their passion for social justice to a strong Christian upbringing. But while they both want values to triumph over pragmatism in government, they regard each other as the enemy.

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  • MEDIA

    Best of 2010: The dignity of Carl Williams

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 06 January 2011
    4 Comments

    When celebrities who have treated people violently suffer themselves from violence, their suffering is approved because it is an expected part of the plot. The death of Carl Williams has been covered as if it were an episode of Underbelly. Williams deserves better than this.

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