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Keywords: Incarceration

  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Justice and Hope

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 07 June 2024

    Raimond Gaita insists that there is something precious in each human being. He does not rest this conviction on a particular religious or philosophical grounding. It flows, rather, from a rich reading of human possibilities and questioning of the meaning of life.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Juvenile injustice

    • Julian Butler
    • 22 February 2022
    5 Comments

    Having previously spent time as lawyer working predominantly in the Children’s Court of Victoria, there isn’t too much about the State’s treatment of young people that shocks me. That is, until a few weeks ago when I was drawn to the final item of The Weekend Australian’s editorial column. Under the heading, ‘Hurt boy’s inhuman treatment’, was set out the details of a 15-year-old West Australian boy who had been ‘locked alone in a glass-walled observation cell of a juvenile detention centre in the southern suburbs of Perth for 79 days.’    

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Incarceration in a changing climate

    • Julie Edwards
    • 18 January 2022
    2 Comments

    The images are simultaneously striking and terrifying. A raging grassfire that is shooting flames into the sky and destroying nature around it and lapping perilously close to the fences around Central NSW’s Lithgow Correctional Centre. As local residents were evacuated and highways were closed to protect public safety when the fire raged out of control just before Christmas in 2019, 400 prisoners remained detained.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    A different approach needed for youth justice

    • Andrew Hamilton
    • 11 September 2019
    4 Comments

    The Victorian Ombudsman Deborah Glass has published a damning report of the use of isolation for children in Victorian justice centres. Those acquainted with the administration of juvenile justice in Australia will find nothing new in the report. Therein lies its scandal.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Best of 2017: ATSI custody needs action not just inquiry

    • Kate Galloway
    • 09 January 2018

    The inquiry into Indigenous incarceration in Australia recognises and validates widely held concerns. On the other hand, it also represents the abject failure of successive governments around the country to pay heed to what we do know about the incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Aboriginal custody inquiry means little without action

    • Kate Galloway
    • 14 February 2017
    7 Comments

    The Australian Law Reform Commission inquiry into Indigenous incarceration in Australia recognises and validates widely held concerns. On the other hand, it also represents the abject failure of successive governments around the country to pay heed to what we do know about the incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, including the failure to implement the recommendations of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Family rape victims delivered to a worse hell

    • Madeleine Hamilton
    • 07 September 2015
    8 Comments

    While at Melbourne's Winlaton Youth Training Centre, many became victims of sexual and physical assaults by staff and other girls. This was how the state of Victoria looked after its most vulnerable girls, who following their incarceration were simply expected to get on with their lives. Except many didn't. As the list of witnesses for the Royal Commission hearing was being finalised, I was told: 'There's going to be a lot of very angry and re-traumatised mothers and grandmothers.'

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Best of 2013: Mandela crosses the burning water

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 15 January 2014
    1 Comment

    I said my own private goodbye almost two years ago, when I visited Robben Island on a trip back to my homeland of South Africa. That journey across Table Bay, towards the tiny green cell in which you lived for much of your 27-year incarceration, took me not so much to an outpost of apartheid as to the birthplace of democratic South Africa.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    Mandela crosses the burning water

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 09 December 2013
    13 Comments

    I said my own private goodbye almost two years ago, when I visited Robben Island on a trip back to my homeland of South Africa. That journey across Table Bay, towards the tiny green cell in which you lived for much of your 27-year incarceration, took me not so much to an outpost of apartheid as to the birthplace of democratic South Africa.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Abused girls' institution trauma

    • Madeleine Hamilton
    • 05 August 2013
    20 Comments

    Unlike their male counterparts, 'delinquent' girls who ran away from dangerous environments were frequently incarcerated because it was perceived that they might be sexually active and fall pregnant. Their stories demonstrate the wide-ranging effects of ruptured family life and subsequent institutionalisation, and warn against the future unnecessary incarceration of vulnerable youth.

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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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  • 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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