Crime and prevention

Alice Springs Jail: overcrowded

Newly elected NT Criminal Lawyers Association president Russell Goldflam has outlined three ways in which the Northern Territory can reduce its imprisonment rates,  which are four and a half times higher than Australia’s overall rate.

Mr Goldflam says he will lobby the NT Government to introduce a floor tax on alcohol, create alternatives to prison for fine defaulters and create special facilities for people being kept in jail with brain damage or a mental illness.

Speaking on ABC radio, the Alice Springs lawyer said  the high rate of alcohol consumption in the NT – twice the Australian rate and greater in Alice Springs –  was driving high levels of violence and  consequent imprisonment rates.

Mr Goldflam said local, Territory and Federal Governments had adopted about 22 measures to deal with alcohol in the past over the past five or six years, including some that had been counter-productive.

“When you have that many governments trying to all muck in and do something about a very big problem all at the same time without any co-ordination some of it’s not going to work,” he said.

But he praised supply restrictions brought in in October 2006, which he said had seen an 18 per cent reduction in the amount of alchohol drunk in Alice Springs over the following years and an 18 per cent reduction in the level of serious violence as well.

“In 2004/2005 there had been nothing short of an epidemic of homicides in Alice Springs, and the court cases that issued from those horrible deaths went on for years,” he said.

“We’ve just about cleared the decks from them now and since then there have been far fewer such cases.”

Mr Goldflam said the banned drinkers’ register and other elements of the recent Enough is Enough package of alcohol laws brought in by the NT Government, also seemed to have been effective, with a 15-20 per cent reduction in assaults in the months since it was introduced.

In a statement he made earlier this week, Mr Goldflam called for  a minimum price on grog “so that nothing alcoholic is cheaper than the current price of beer.”

“And let’s have a tax based on how much actual alcohol is in the product, to wipe out the ridiculously unfair advantage cheap and nasty cask wine producers have over all their competitors,” he said.

“Do that, and we’ll see an immediate, substantial and sustained reduction in grog-fuelled violence.”

Mr Goldflam has called for action on the plight of indigenous people in jail who were unfit to plead or were mentally impaired at the time they got into trouble for their behaviour.

“There should be appropriate facilities for people like that who need therapy,” he told the ABC’s Tatjana Clancy. “In some cases they may need to be kept in a secure location, but it’s an appalling indictiment in this day and age that we simply warehouse those people in jails.”

Mr Goldflam credited the NT Government with the work it was doing to  develop alternatives to prison for people who have committed minor offences such as traffic breaches, “all of whom just about at the moment get locked up”.

“There’s a huge number of traffic offenders in our jails, unlike anywhere else in our country and the Government is starting to move towards having community-based supervised orders for those sort of people, and to help them get licences so they don’t reoffend when they’ve completed their order,” he said.