Aircon refusal reveals Labor’s cowardice

A SOBER look at the facts would find the smart thing to do is to aircondition Alice prison. But this thin-skinned Government can’t bear more Facebook hate, writes HAYLEY SORENSEN >>

Alice Springs Prison has seen riots over forcing the prisoners to stay in hot cells on days reaching more than 45C

IT’s hot in Central Australia.

Stupidly, unrelentingly, surface of the Sun hot.

Graphic images taken near Santa Teresa of dozens of dead feral horses in a dried up water hole shocked people around the country.

In Alice Springs, temperatures exceeded 42C every day for a fortnight. The coolest maximum temperature Alice Springs has had in the past month was 36C and the hottest was almost 47C.

It’s unpleasant but most Centralians have access to airconditioning, Zooper Doopers, swimming pools or a garden hose to stay at least a little bit cool and preserve their sanity.

Not so for the close to 600 blokes in the Alice Springs Correctional Centre.

Instead, they’ve endured every one of those 42-plus degrees and then some from the inside of cinder block cells.

Last month, on a day temperatures reached 45.6C, prisoners at Alice Springs refused to go back to their scorching cells. Chemical spray was used to bring rioting prisoners back to heel.

According to Criminal Lawyers of the NT president Marty Aust, the riot was the act of “desperate people crying out for water and ice and cordial”.

He says guards themselves have described conditions as “inhumane and insane”.

It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out putting a few hundred criminals in an overcrowded prison in face-melting heat is going to end up with punches being thrown.

But Corrections and the Gunner Government have no plans to enact the obvious solution — install airconditioning.

They know that to do so would be to open themselves up to more accusations of being soft on crime from the angry Facebook mobs wielding their digital pitchforks, at a time when Territorians don’t need much encouragement to take a whack at their beleaguered government.

It’s fair to say the comfort of prisoners probably doesn’t rate highly on the agenda of most Territorians.

Wife bashers, car thieves and garden variety low lives aren’t a real sympathetic mob.

There’s been far more sympathy for those few dozen dead brumbies from the public than there has been for the human beings in Alice Springs prison.

So for the sake of political expedience and to spare themselves the wrath of a few Facebook commenters, Labor will leave conditions as they are, even though a sober, disinterested look at the facts would undoubtably find the greater good would be served by being brave enough to do what’s right and weather the criticism.

It’s the same force responsible for Michael Gunner’s slow change in rhetoric on child offenders. Where once they were children raised in terrible circumstances, they’ve become “incredibly hardened, tough young kids”.

On another hot day in Alice Springs soon, there will be another riot.

Next time, someone might get hurt. It could be a prison officer and it’s unlikely they’ll get much comfort knowing they’ve saved Michael Gunner from another awkward situation in which an angry person bails him up at a press conference.

This thin-skinned Government is putting the safety of prisoners and public servants at risk by its refusal to do what is right but which it knows will be unpopular.

Even Texas in the United States — a jurisdiction which has no qualms about executing criminals when it sees fit to do so — has acknowledged keeping people in such temperatures is cruel.

It took a costly and lengthy legal battle, but administrators at the Wallace Pack prison in Texas finally agreed to aircondition the facility in which temperatures routinely hit 100F. That’s a tick under 37C, a full 10C under the hottest temperatures seen in Alice in January.

Sadly, it took the deaths of a couple of dozen of Texan prisoners from heat-related illnesses across two decades for it to finally get to that point.

Let’s hope it doesn’t take the same here.

Hayley Sorensen is a regular Sunday Territorian columnist