On 8 March 2015 the NSW Attorney General announced that extreme high-risk prisoners in Supermax at Goulburn on terror offences will be banned from speaking Arabic during visits and phone calls.

The ban covers just 13 prisoners.

If I was responsible for security and the good order of Goulburn's Supermax gaol, I'd want all communications in English.  It's an immensely dangerous and difficult job to manage high-risk terrorists prisoners at the best of times - allowing them to communicate in a foreign language makes the job that much harder.   Supermax is an Australian prison, with Australian prisoners and the language we speak is English.

But to sections of the Islamist movement the requirement for 13 Australian prisoners in an Australian gaol to speak Australia's language is broadly oppressive of Muslims.

Here's how the global Islamist injury/insult/compo website "Document Oppression Against Muslims"- http://www.doamuslims.org - sees it:

(Note the High Risk classification is in quotation marks, as if there's some doubt about whether these prisoners present a heightened security risk.)

One day later the website reported this escalation - calling on all Australian Muslims to get active and protest the Arabic ban.

Muslim inmates in supermax Goulburn prison in Australia have gone on hunger strike and have given up their only hour of outdoor time, after their cells were raided, abused and property taken. The Gouldburn prison have passed a new rule that denies inmates to talk in Arabic.

‘High risk’ terror inmates banned from communicating in Arabic at Australian jail

The families of the inmates have informed Alansar Newsoz that the inmates from today are going on a hunger strike refusing to eat any meals after the prison commissioner past a new rule denying the speaking of Arabic to visitors on the phone and to other inmates. This is a concern for some inmates who don’t speak much English but a greater concern as this means recitation of Quran, Hadith and Dua in Arabic could be stopped and made punishable by prison guards.

Alansar Newsoz calls upon the Australian Muslim community to spread this information so as it may reach people of reason in order to have this rectified. We also call upon the Muslim community to show your support by any way possible to highlight the breaches of human rights which Australia claims to have.
The Brothers have asked for your support and Dua.

Will the prison guards start force feeding them just like what they do in Guantanamo?

 I hope Brad Hazzard and the NSW Government stand firm - the guards and other staff deserve nothing less.

ENDS

And in 2013 we wrote about then NSW Attorney General Greg Smith who wanted fewer people in gaol and a much nicer time there for those who still went in.

NSW Attorney General Greg Smith replaced the NSW Corrective Services Commissioner Ron Woodham last year (2012).  Attorney General Smith said he wanted to focus more on rehabilitation and reducing re-offending rates - and to introduce "culture change" into NSW prisons.

The home page of the NSW Prisons department says quite a lot about the culture the bosses are after.

Here are the first words you'll read there:

Corrective Services NSW

Our Statement of Purpose- Corrective Services NSW delivers professional correctional services to reduce re-offending and enhance community safety.

Our Values - Justice and Equity, Accountability and Transparency, Collaboration and Communication and Responsibility and Respect

When Joshua Dukes pops back for a chat about his rehabilitation progress I hope he'll be reminded of those values and his little values-violation by going home early last Saturday.

Mr Dukes is not alone out there in the community - as the new Commissioner proudly tells us.   When a CEO writes a letter of welcome on a webpage, he or she generally writes about the things he or she thinks are the driving force for the business or department.   So I thought these few words from the new NSW Corrections boss on the prisons service welcome page spoke volumes about focus:

The public may be surprised to learn that there are nearly twice as many offenders in the community than in our correctional facilities.

We place great emphasis on diversionary programs with the effect that less people come into custody. Resources have been shifted from correctional centres out into the community where a growing number of offenders are serving Intensive Correction Orders.

I have a very good confidential source who has explained to me the culture of maximum security gaoling for persons like Joshua Duke.

Here's exhibit one - the NSW Corrective Services official public record of wanted prison escapees.

One prisoner recorded as being wanted after an escape - Stephen Jamieson who is recorded as having escaped from Glenn Innes Gaol in 2010!

That's it for the official record.   Maybe they just stopped counting.   Which jars a little with this report from the Sydney Morning Herald this week:

Eight prisoners have escaped in the past three months, and five are still on the run despite a state-wide manhunt.

The latest to abscond is 30-year-old Joshua Dukes, discovered missing from Nowra's South Coast Correctional Facility on Saturday afternoon. He had been refused bail on charges including an alleged armed robbery.

Police officers, the dog squad and police helicopters all searched the local area on Sunday night but he has yet to be recaptured.

So back to my source and a description of Duke's escape.   

This criminal is still on the run.

He climbed up onto the wall, ran along the top, and jumped down outside. He then ran off into the bush. How much money do you think he will cost us on this spree before he is recaptured?

South Coast Correctional Centre is a new maximum security correctional centre.   When I started this job, a lot of my time was spent in a tower on top of a wall carrying a rifle. A rifle is an effective tool used to prevent inmates climbing over walls. It is also really good at attracting wanted attention.

In the last 10 years or so to save money, CSNSW has removed most armed towers from most centres. Nowra is new, and doesn't even have a tower. Cameras are cheaper. I have seen the video footage from 3 seperate cameras. The inmate climbed onto a rubbish bin, jumped and climbed onto the wall. At this stage, he was seen and the alarm was raised. About 20 seconds later he was picked up on an external camera as he dropped down more than 4 metres, and ran off into the bush. Less than a minute later, a patrol vehicle and response staff had arrived to where the inmate had been. Cameras are great for watching, and collecting evidence. They don't do anything else.

From memory, this is the second escape over an unmanned maximum security wall is the past 10 years. All the electronic equipment could do was watch.
There is a scapegoat hunt, sorry, investigation into this escape. The blame will be allocated to a fellow correctional officer.

This is part of the reason why I am still in a union. We are all taxpayers. We want to save money. The bean counters reduce staffing and security to save money. Then they will spend a million dollars on legal aid and other legal expenses on this escapee. This cost cutting is reducing the number of workmates I have.  I would like to try and relate this to a situation you may have been in yourself as a copper. Have you been in a situation when s#!£ has gone real bad? You can never have too many blue shirts. The officer involved was supervising about a dozen inmates, when this incident occurred.

Here's the NSW police report which shows at least a 20 minute delay from when the prisoner escaped to the first notification to NSW police.   That seems inordinately long for a report of an alleged armed robber with priors for violence who's escaped from a gaol near a major centre, Nowra.

I think a lot of this comes down to the culture and attitudes at the top.   When the culture of gaols is predominantly on security, keeping prisoners in and contraband out then all of that stuff gets measured, reported and done.   When the focus from the top is on rehabilitation and kumbaya - that's what you see being reported on and focussed on in glowing terms.   

The fact of the NSW Corrective Services website still carrying no report of the Dukes escape speaks volumes about what's important to the people who run our gaols.