Discovering Balance
Abstracts - Prison policy & management stream
Session 10 Breakout 11, 9.45-11.00am, ECL2 - Chair: Dr Tiffany Bodiam.
Question time is included at the end of the breakout session
Marngoneet Correctional Centre - working towards reducing re-offending and community integration
Mr Andrew Lourey (General Manager - Marngoneet CC)
Marngoneet Correctional Centre is a 300-bed medium security correctional programs centre located near Lara, approximately 70 kilometres west of Melbourne, Victoria. The Centre name, Marngoneet, is taken from the local Wathaurong community language and means 'to make new', which reflects the prison's rehabilitative focus. The Centre has been purposefully planned to achieve the objectives of the Corrections Victoria Service Delivery Model. It provides an intensive level of treatment and offender management activity, including sex offender, drug and alcohol and violent offender treatment programs, vocational training and support services, to prepare prisoners for community reintegration. Prisoners are accommodated in one of three 100 bed Neighbourhoods, comprising of four housing options, that encourage an emphasis on community living and individual responsibilities. The physical design maximises normal living conditions and minimises institutionalisation by shaping social interaction, providing small living units and promoting significant levels of personal and social responsibility. Where practicable, prisoners are empowered to work within the environment to achieve responsible self-representation, self-determination and conflict resolution.
Session 10, Breakout 11
Date & Time: Saturday 4 October (9.45am)
Location: ECL2
Punitive Penal Policies
Mr John Paget
Punitive penal policies in Australia continue to ensure a substantial growth in the prison population and a concomitant expansion of the prison estate. While these policy outcomes have rightly attracted criticism, the architecture of the expanded prison estate has attracted little attention, and is often accepted as a given. While there are some examples of innovation in the architecture of new prisons, much remains barren and bleak, in some cases deliberately so. Impoverished, prison-built forms reflect an absence of analysis of the interaction between prisoner needs and behaviours and the environment and the role of architecture in this relationship. Drawing on the international treaties, human rights law and jurisprudence, international prison standards and guidelines, domestic human rights legislation and its application to prisons will spur improvements in the quality of confinement and in the nature of the custodial experience in Australia.
Session 10, Breakout 11
Date & Time: Saturday 4 October (10.05am)
Location: ECL2
What Works: Implementation on an organisational scale
Mr Michael Airton
The correctional debate used to be about whether rehabilitation of offenders can work. Sufficient evidence exists now that it can and indeed a considerable body of work about this topic is now collectively referred to as the "What Works" literature.The new debate for correctional administrators is about how to implement these findings. Most jurisdictions can point to examples of successful rehabilitation programs utilising the 5 key principles of "What Works" but these examples are often isolated and most organisations struggle to extrapolate them to an organisational scale, thereby delivering the significant benefits to government and society required to reverse current trends towards increasing incarceration.This paper examines some of the attempts to implement "What Works" in correctional jurisdictions in Australia, New Zealand and the UK. In each case Integrated Offender Management was the vehicle for trying to achieve this organisational change. The analysis of these initiatives will examine a number of features that appear to be common: Business drivers; Integration of case management across custodial and community based corrections; Development of assessment tools to provide data on risk, needs and responsivity factors; Implementation of technology solutions to enable the organisational change. The results of these initiatives have not always lived up to expectations and the complexity of these undertakings ensures that consistent and measurable benefits are difficult to achieve. What lessons can we learn from these experiences and how can we improve the chances of successful correctional reform based on these approaches?
Session 10, Breakout 11
Date & Time: Saturday 4 October (10.25am)
Location: ECL2