I don’t normally think much about prisons and the law courts and what happens if you don’t make it in our systems but they’ve come up three times recently.
1. The Catholic Church has a focus for the whole of this year on the prison systems and fairness for prisoners.
The St William’s Social Justice Group has been considering the policies put out by the Catholic Church on prisons and working out ways to make the parish aware of them and think about them and what they can do.
One thing that stood out for me was how many people are in prison for not paying a fine.
Also how high the rates of imprisonment are for Aboriginal people compared to the rest of the population. I wasn’t prepared to just accept these figures without knowing more about what lies behind them in terms of what Aboriginal people are being imprisoned for compared to the wider population.
I also had an idea that prisoners got out on parole easily and didn’t serve their full terms. The opposite is apparently the case with few prisoners having genuine access to the parole system.
2. At TEDx Brisbane this week David Abrey spoke on justice.
He is a lawyer. He said there is no such thing as a stereotypical criminal.
Most of them are just ordinary people like you or me.
Any one of us could be in the wrong place at the wrong time make a stupid decision and end up on the wrong side of the law.
200000 people went through the criminal justice system in Queensland last year which is about 4% of QLD’s population.
Their case can affect the rest of their lives forever.
Justice is about giving people the opportunity to tell their stories no matter who we are where we come from or what we’ve done.
3. Also at TEDx Brisbane a Catholic woman Jean Madden who invented and makes [url=http://www.streetswags.org]Streetswags[/url] spoke. She makes swags for the homeless people of Brisbane and her swags are now going all over Australia.
There are only 20000 beds for homeless people in Australia and there are far far more people needing them so many many people sleep rough each night in this country. It is very hard on their health.
Once homeless they also fall out of Centrelink because they don’t have a fixed address.
One aspect that shocked me was about how many people who had been renting when the floods hit Brisbane and could not keep paying their rent have now lost their rating as acceptable tenants. She said they will never be able to rent again. This seems so unfair.
Another aspect that deeply shocked me was what is happening to pregnant mothers who are homeless. If they go to hospital to have their baby the hospitals will not let them take their baby. To me this is a ‘stolen generation’ in the making.
This would need checking but if what we were told is true it is very grim.