Harsh new penalties pass for prison guards caught having sex with inmates
PRISON officers will go to jail for two years and face a $2200 fine for having sex with inmates under new criminal laws which passed the NSW State Parliament upper house last night.
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PRISON officers will go to jail for two years and face a $2200 fine for having sex with inmates under new criminal laws which passed the NSW State Parliament upper house last night.
But the wording of the bill — which includes a qualifying statement that the intimate relationship has to “cause a risk or potential risk to the safety or security” of the jail — has been attacked for not going far enough.
During a debate about the new laws — which follow a series of embarrassing revelations about NSW female guards having intimate relationships with jailbirds — MPs told the parliament the wording of the bill amounted to a tacit “get out of jail free” clause for the guards.
Greens MP David Shoebridge said the “ambiguous” extra clause meant it was open for courts to interpret that sex with inmates was fine if a prison officer has “sex quietly in a corner when nobody sees it”.
He said there should be a “zero tolerance approach to that behaviour in prisons”.
“Prison officers should not have sex with inmates,” Mr Shoebridge said. “Full stop. I can’t understand why the government thinks differently.
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“It not only offends community standards, there is also a vast power differential between a prison officer and an inmate which is open to serious abuse
When the scandal first broke earlier this year about a female prison officer having an alleged affair with a convicted cop killer, NSW Corrections Minister David Elliott put his job on the line over the issue, vowing he would change the laws.
Mr Elliott said the string of incidents were “an insult to the victims of crime”.
“As far I’m concerned, if I can’t pull that off I’ve got no business being in cabinet,” he said at the time.
“If I have some smart lawyer or bureaucrat tell me otherwise well then there’s going to be a stand down.”
But on Tuesday night the bill passed in the original form, with government members rejecting the Greens and ALP bid to amend the wording.
Mr Elliott defended the drafting of the new law Tuesday night, saying the very definition of an officer having an intimate relationship with an inmate was a risk to the safety of the prison.
“An intimate relationship which develops between an officer and inmate will always risk the safety, security, or good order and discipline of a prison,” he said.
“This statutory offence is just one way of tackling the issue of inappropriate relationships in prison.
“Taskforce Themis, led by former Assistant Police Commissioner Mark Murdoch, is assessing the investigation and assessment of a number of alleged inappropriate relationships with CSNSW staff and inmates.”
The bill has now returned to the Lower House before being assented.