Clarence Correctional Centre – ABC North Coast 25 June 2020

CPSU NSW Branch Assistant Secretary Troy Wright discussed the new Clarence Correctional Centre and private prisons in general with Joanne Shoebridge on ABC North Coast this morning. Here’s the link if you want to listen to the interview – LISTEN FROM 2:00:57

https://www.abc.net.au/…/progr…/breakfast/breakfast/12371962

Alternatively, here’s the transcript:

JOANNE SHOEBRIDGE: Well, the country’s largest jail, the Clarence Correctional Centre, just south of Grafton, will officially open a little later today. The 700 million dollar privately operated jail will receive its first inmates next Wednesday and then over the coming months, prisoners from the existing Grafton jail and other centres across the state will relocate to the new prison. It’s predicted that over the next 20 years, it will inject 560 million dollars into the Clarence economy with 600 permanent jobs when it’s fully operational.

JOANNE: Troy Wright is the CPSU NSW Branch Assistant Secretary. The CPSU NSW is the union that represents the workers at the jail. Good morning to you.

TROY WRIGHT: Good morning, Joe. Thanks for having me on.

JOANNE: It’s nice to be talking about jobs being created somewhere between 600 jobs for the Clarence Valley. That is good news, isn’t it?

TROY: It is. It’s an enormous economic investment in a region. I’m sure this region dearly needs it. Our concern is that these materialize into real jobs, real jobs that are well-paid and real jobs that are safe. And that’s what we’ll be keeping a very close eye on over the coming months and years.

JOANNE: I guess one of the key issues is that staff to prisoner ratio at any jail. What do you know about the model of a privately run jail?

TROY: There are two aspects to this, and I’ll be out there today having a look and I’m looking forward to that opportunity. Serco, have built a jail that’s very high on technology, which arguably will change that ratio somewhat, but what we do know about private sector jails is this and it’s been an experiment Australia’s conducted it’s been conducted around the world and it’s usually failed and it’s failed for one reason that the profit motive overtakes the safety of prisoners and staff and we want to make sure this doesn’t happen here.

TROY: Private sector jails have been adopted in every state of Australia. What we have seen in recent years, though, is a trend to move away from them. Queensland has two private sector jails and they’ve recently announced they’ll be bringing them back to the public sector. Western Australia the same, but New South Wales has decided to expand its private sector footprint. So it’s going against national trends and we’ve got real concerns about the viability of that going forward.

JOANNE: Serco says one of its key goals is reducing recidivism. How is that done? And do you have confidence that this model will do that?

TROY: Look, it will come down to what the prisoner cohort is and the investment in the programs that operate in the jail. Hopefully they do have a strong in contractual terms, a strong motivation to do that. All of our jails across this state, the vast majority, which are public sector, are usually niche sort of programs within those jails. And so, you know, you might be looking at things for sex offenders, you might be looking at things for anger management.

You might be looking at other programs for other sorts of offences. But it obviously it comes down to investment, it comes down to staff. It’s not just about locking the gate. Forgetting about people. They will be released at some point. And you want that experience in jail to equip them with skills, not take them away. So hopefully Serco have been, you know, contractually motivated to do that.

JOANNE: Do you know if the government has put in place KPIs for Serco regarding, you know, provision of support for prisoners who are illiterate or prisoners who have mental health problems? Prisoners who have drug addiction problems? Those sorts of things that are going to be barriers to them living a productive life after jail.

TROY: Yes, they certainly are. You know, this doesn’t just go for the Clarence Centre at Grafton. It’s right across the entire state, if not across the country, I think jail should be treated with someone receiving a sentence. There’s to be an opportunity to address those issues for them and better equip them for life on the outside rather than strip them away. And hopefully, like I said, hopefully, that both the public and private sector in New South Wales is committed to doing that. It takes more than talk. It takes investment, it takes money and takes staff.

JOANNE: What about the possibility of casualisation of jobs at the jail is. Is that something that concerns you?

TROY: Very, very much so. Very much so. So we have experience of working with the Parklea Correctional Centre, which is in Sydney. It was privatised, taken from the public sector, into the private sector in 2009. A company called GEO took it. And what our experience over the last 10 years with that centre is that the jobs that were provided to people were casualised, they were low paid. The staff turnover was horrific. They couldn’t keep enough bodies on the floor as a result.

Staff that were staying on were working massive hours, massive amounts of overtime burning out. The place was unsafe and ultimately GEO, the company was running that centre for about eight years, lost the contract as a result of that. There were a number of issues of prisoners, security and safety, and the assault rate was horrific. So that’s what happens if you end up on that spiral or cutting costs. And that’s what we don’t want to happen at Clarence.

We want to make sure the jobs of well-paid jobs are secure. They’re ongoing. And most of all, there’s enough of them. There’s enough people on the floor that people feel safe at work. So that will be our project going forward, like I said, over the next months and years.

JOANNE: I can think of at least two examples in the time that I’ve been in this job of people who were committed to jail for relatively minor offenses in Grafton and on the mid-north coast. People from this region who were bashed and died in those jails and there were various inquiries about how the system let them down. How do we make sure that never happens again in this facility? Are there checks and balances in place to make sure that when there are problems, they can be reported and there can be proper scrutiny?

TROY: We hope so. Mean. Unfortunately, this is something that only time will tell. I guess we’ll hope that, you know, I think no one that works in the system wants to see the system increasingly violent. We want to decrease violence in the system because that’s in the interests of both prisoners, staff and ultimately the community when these people are released.

So, look, we hope those systems are in place. They are in place across the state. Of course, you are dealing with a very dangerous cohort of the community in jails. There will be violence. They are violent people by nature, a lot of them. So there are a lot of people, both our members in the public sector and the private sector across the state that work very hard to try to minimize violence in our system all the time. And unfortunately, there are insults. You’re right. It’s how those incidents are responded to and properly addressed going forward that will make the difference.

TO JOIN THE CPSU NSW visit www.cpsunsw.org.au or if you want to find out more about the the benefits and protections of membership, call the Member Support Centre on 1800 772 679.

https://www.abc.net.au/radio/northcoast/programs/breakfast/breakfast/12371962