AKA How the addition of a single word results in a headline that doesn’t provoke the Laura Norder crowd to clutch their pearls.
Assuming, of course, that one doesn’t want to confect a controversy via a plausibly deniable misrepresentation.
Saluzinsky’s article is actually fairly well balanced regarding the proposed privatisation of some NSW gaols, and the objections from both the left and the right to some of the proposals on different grounds. Pity about that headline.
Whichever way the decision comes down on staying public or going private, the idea of allowing prisoners in low and medium security prisons to have duplicate keys to their cells, so that they can have privacy from other inmates as desired, seems to be simply humane; if the experience overseas is that such measures reduce violence as well then all the better.
Unsurprisingly, breakfast TV took the reactionary approach on Sunrise, with Kochy talking about how we are mollycoddling prisoners and why not just give them the keys to the front gate as well? The goal of reducing violence was shrugged aside, as if violence in prisons is only inmate-on-inmate and can therefore be disregarded. Prison personnel deserve to have the safest work environment possible, you know, even if that means that prisoners aren’t sufficiently brutalised to give the Laura Norder mob their vengeful jollies.
The blithe acceptance of violence (particularly sexual violence) in prisons has long been a bugbear of mine. As far as I am concerned, this is an excellent plan and if it has a positive impact on the culture of violence then it’s wholly justified in my book. Bring it on.
In the spirit of balance, I give you “Sub-editing PASS”
“Flesh-eating horror for TV host”
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/world/794118/flesh-eating-horror-for-tv-host
I didn’t realise Lord Sedgwick of Strathmore was guest blogging??? :p
What about the American private operator of gaols which has had to change its name multiple times in Australia because of the bad publicity re its operation of Woomera, Parklea the women’s prison in Vic when there was unsavoury publicity re rationing sanitary pads, inmates were allowed 3 pads a day for 4 days every 28 days or whatever. Currently its in trouble in WA for killing dehydrated sick aboriginal prisoners transported from one facility to another in vehicles without air con or ventilation
Mind you the vans are Govt owned, and that particular Van was the same type that was also used by WA Police for escorts from the lockup to the courts and back, but have been around since Adam was a boy – but yes they still didn’t look after their charges properly.
And Ironically the Privatisation of Prison Transport was introduced by the Court Liberal Government of which Premier Barnett was a Minister of (though not in the Correctional Services area.
Imre Saluzinsky’s article seems like an attempt to use seemingly ‘bleeding heart’ arguments to provide a smokescreen for yet another scam to rip off the public in order to line the pockets of private investors.
A similar ploy was used in NSW in the 1980′s when the philosophy of ‘de-institutionalisation’ was used as a smoke screen to disguise plans to flog off the land on which mental health institutions were located to property developers and destroy the working conditions of psychiatric nurses whilst dumping mentally ill people in boarding houses and on park benches.
All this was duly aided by touchy-feely leftist social worker types within the NSW Labor Party, of which I was a member at the time.
We should all have learnt long ago that the inherent superior ability of private operators to deliver superior services is a myth. There is nothing that can be accomplished under a private contract that could not be far better achieved under public ownership with proper scrutiny and accountability
To learn some of the truth of the plans to privatise prisons, see NSW Greens MP John Kaye’s media release of 16 February 2009 “Robbo running away from his past on prison privatisation”:
In case anyone has forgotten Imre Saluzinsky’s appalling misreporting of the NSW electricity privatisation issue last year, please read “Media contempt for facts in NSW electricity privatisation debate” of 18 Sep 09.
Under NO circumstances should we be giving monetary incentives to lock people up. Even when the taxpayer still ultimately pays for it anyway.
The reason the sub did not put the word “duplicate” in the headline is because it is redundant.
The objection to giving the only key or a duplicate key is the same.
The prisoner would be able to get out of the cell at will.
It’s LP’s headline that is misleading, not The Australian’s