• Twitter
  • Facebook
News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

The good life down under

Think I'll go to Canberra and rob me a bank:

ARCHITECT-DESIGNED self-contained cottages with roomy kitchens, lounge rooms complete with flat-screen LCD televisions and mountain views through floor to ceiling windows.

Welcome to the Alexander Maconochie Centre, the ACT's first prison, where the cost of a room is your liberty and more.

[. . .]

The cottages have been designed to promote "normal" living, with inmates responsible for their own cooking, cleaning and laundry.

Each has a spacious wood-look kitchen, lounge/dining area with television, individual bedrooms with shelving and a combined share laundry/bathroom.

Inmates can enter and leave the cottages by swipe-card security which can be disabled by prison staff when necessary, such as at night.

[. . .]

There are computer rooms, classrooms, a medical facility, trade rooms, a large commercial kitchen and laundry and a women's community centre.

There are also barbecue areas, paved courtyards, art rooms, basketball courts and a sports oval.

There are also "normal" cell blocks, and an inmate can work his way up to the plusher life by good behavior. Wow. Rehabilitation! That's never been tried before.

Comments

Bob G.
Tue, 03/04/2008 - 12:45pm

The pundits can talk until the cows come hiome, and no one will be able to convice me that the old Philadelphia System of incarceration (first instituted at Eastern State Pen) does not have a place in today's world.

That's why it was called a PENITENTIARY...for those who NEED to become PENITENT...FIRST (choice wasn't much of an option).
THEN, we can go from there, and decide on some form of rehab.
Not before.

B.G.

Quantcast