Acting Commissioner of Prisons, Dane Clarke has acknowledged that the passage of the Bail (Amendment) Bill will impact the prisons, which are already crowded with criminals.
The House of Representative is set to debate the Bail (Amendment) Bill today.
“Once the persons are not outside on bail it adds to the population and once you have an increase in population...you know most of the facilities are already overcrowded...so we have to manage the population very carefully,” Clarke said.
He recognised, though, that the law is a good move by “the powers that be” to address spiraling crime.
Clarke noted that most of the people likely to come into the prison system under the amended law, will be gang members, which, he said, will pose another problem.
“It is always a challenge trying to allocate these people among the population because we have to be careful how we strengthen or weaken the gangs (within the prisons). What we’ve been trying to do with the police is to get the classification of those persons coming to us so we are aware of who they are, where they come from and so forth,” he said.
He added: “So we are working with the police on that so on entry we would know and be better able to assess the risk nature of the individual and therefore be in a better position to allocate them within the system.”
He said the influx of prisoners will have to be met with a better functioning Judiciary.
“What we will hope for is that the Judiciary itself is in a better place to deal with some of these matters quickly so that even if we add to the population at least, on the other side of the coin, we could get persons out of there who probably have no right being in the system – either out on bail, or be sentenced differently, or even electronic monitoring and so on, that it could help with the prison population,” Clarke said.
The bill requires a three-fifths majority of the House of Representatives to be passed.
