Room with a View

The Canberra Times

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. With an operating budget of $24.5 million, the ACT Government anticipates it will cost taxpayers $336 a day for each inmate at the $131 million prison, based on a population of 200 prisoners. At its capacity of 300 inmates, which the ACT Opposition expects it will not reach in the foreseeable future, the cost would fall to $219.

This is slightly less than what the Government currently pays $239 a day to keep an ACT prisoner in a NSW prison. “Objectives with the prison was to make it human rights compliant and in terms of design that means … an atmosphere which is healthy not just for prisoners and staff but for everyone who uses the facility,” he said.

The prison, which has been billed “world first” in design and human rights principles, has a campus-like design including varying accommodation types. Accommodation includes self-contained cottages and traditional cell blocks. 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. The prison has no razor wire, bars on windows or guard towers.

Mr Corbell has hit out at claims the facility was “too nice”, saying that a loss of freedom was a tough punishment. “The punishment for serious crimes in our society is to be imprisoned, to lose your liberty and to be detained by the state and that is what the prison does,” he said.

Somehow, I don’t believe they will have problems with escapees.




  1. bobbo says:

    Be nice to see the Auzzie version of “Oz” — I can see Schiller scheming to get the bungalow with the better view.

    But this does highlight just what the function of prison is supposed to be — punishment, or something else. Mere loss of liberty is important, seperation from society==but where is the rehab, not for rehab sake, but rather so they won’t commit crimes on being released?

    that is the ultimate goal right? To that end, I don’t know how you can be rehabed without regular consensual sexual relations. Will that be part of this program, and when can I join?

  2. AlphaTeam says:

    That sound more like a Utopia society than a prison.

  3. edwinrogers says:

    How very, Australian!

  4. tchamp2 says:

    If I didn’t have a wife and daughter, and could guarantee I’d get into this prison, I’d say goodbye to having to be a workin stiff!

  5. William says:

    I like the Texas way a little better. Hard labor. This is ridiculous!

  6. Li says:

    Hard labor does nothing to reform the inmates. So you get. . . more criminals. I’d rather coddle them into being useful citizens than take vengeance upon them and really just lose them for good.

  7. hhopper says:

    I’ll bet that photo taken in the summer looks just as good.

  8. Mister Catshit says:

    I agree with bobbo and Li. The idea should be to not have the prisoners come back. They need the tools, including education, help with addictions, treatment for mental conditions, and the resources to cope with life after prison.

    The American system largely seems to be lock them up for long periods then dump them off in some large city. Then you come back next week and pick them back up and throw them back in jail.

  9. GigG says:

    Well then Mr. Catshit, bobbo and Li. You guys should invite them all to your place to stay for a few years.

  10. bobbo says:

    #9–Gig==why should we or shouldn’t we do that? I don’t feel the need to invite “any” stranger to stay at my place. Do you?

  11. bobbo says:

    #9–Gig==Let me ask the question another way.

    If you HAD TO have an ex-con live with you, would you want someone who had just spent time in jail in restricted harsh conditions as punishment, or would you rather host someone who had been given a rich rewarding experience meant to prepare him for life in the real world?

    And, assuming the former, just be advised that every convict that gets released does indeed join “us” were we live. Why would you recommend a process to put us all at risk?

  12. Thomas says:

    #6
    That was tried in the 1970’s. It was too easy for prisoners to game the system. By the mid-1980’s, rehabilitation of prisoners was generally abandoned because of lack of success. Now they just “warehouse” them.

  13. the answer says:

    Ha i know a lot of homeless people will commit crimes so they they can go to prison and have a roof over their head and food. If this was my prison i’d turn stick up kid in an instant

  14. aussieskibum says:

    #7, Coming from Canberra, i can tell you that the line “mountain views” is a massive stretch of the truth and that photo is definitely not taken from anywhere near the facility. The place is built by the side of a highway out near an industrial area.

  15. Higghawker says:

    What kind of deterrent is a nice mountain view with basketball in the mid afternoons and cable TV in the evening, maybe a couple of courses during the day on anger management!! We should send most of our elected officials there!

  16. zybch says:

    #15 Its NOT meant to be a deterent. If regular prisons were built to deter crimes from being commited you’d think that we’d live in crime free societies right?

    Take a look at what they do in Norway, it makes this propose prison in Oz look like the slave labor camps in the US.
    The whole point of the prison system is to rehabilitate, not to punish arbitrarily all those who become part of the system.
    You fools in the US now have broken the “1% of your population is behind bars” number, and yet there hasn’t been any sort of drop in crimes has there! Perhaps when its 1% of the US population is OUTSIDE prison it might be different, but you system is about as fucked up as a system could possibly get!
    Open your eyes and realise that if the surrent system isn’t working (it isn’t) then its time to try a new aproach.

  17. JimS says:

    I don’t follow Australian politics. Is there a bunch of politicians or captains of business expecting to get caught for something and sent away soon? I wonder if we’re building any new upscale facilities here in the US? — Just kidding

    Separate rooms? How are they going to learn to cuddle? –Sorry

    #16 zybch you mention 1% of our population in prison, It’s economics 101, as soon as we get to 5%, we’ll have zero unemployment. Just joking there, a bit. Actually, murder rates have fallen since about 1980, Rape has dropped since about 1992. Aggravated assault has declined since 1993. Larceny theft, vehicle theft, property crime and robbery are all down since 1991. Burglary has dropped a little since 1986.

    source:
    http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/

    #14 aussieskibum, Thanks for clearing that up, I suspected as much. The prison in my town, technically has mountain views. It’s located by the highway, next to an industrial park also.

  18. zybch says:

    #17 Well we’ve just had a government change, so what you suspect is quite likely, expecially as the previous bastards were in for over 12 years so you can bet there was a lot of ‘naughtiness’ going on thanks to there being no effective oversight of their activities.

    Even though some people would quite like a 5% prison rate, its just sick that people are getting locked away for 15-20 years simpl for posessing a gramm of pot. Heck, even murderers and rapists don’t get that sort of sentances. The US legal system is truly screwed (not that many others aren’t just as bad), possibly the most malevalent system in the western world.

  19. anonymous canberran says:

    Another Canberran here! 🙂

    Canberra (the ACT) has a small population and most of the crime is break-and-enter/car theft/drugs/assault and so on. The genuinely hardened criminal can rest assured there will still be a bed waiting for them at the Supermax prison located at the nearby town of Goulburn.

    The local newspaper published photos in the print edition – the place looks very nice. Most of the criminals will probably come from public housing anyway, which is often dingy and definitely not as nice as the architect-designed “prison cells” (taxpayer-provided 4-star holiday villas) on offer here – no deterrence effect, that’s for sure (not that the threat of prison time seems effective at that anyway).

  20. Sea Lawyer says:

    #16, I would also think that the type of sentence should dictate whether or not resources should be put into any sort of rehabilitation. If you have been sent to prison for a term less than life, then sure, ideally you will leave better than you entered. But if you are given a life sentence (and I do believe life should mean life, with no parole) then those resources are wasted on somebody who is not expected to be sent back into society.

  21. Ron Larson says:

    You would think that at that price they could outsource the job to a luxury hotel chain for less money. The prisoners would not want to leave. Free HBO and WiFi. Swimming Pool. Buffet.

    Now what would be VERY INTERESTING is if the same reporter then compared this facility to what the average Aussie enlisted soldier or seaman (and their family) get for serving their country. I’d bet a buck it isn’t as nice.

  22. Scargo says:

    I live about 5 miles from the Alexander Maconochie Centre, believe it not it is situated right next door to a heliport.

  23. Rick Cain says:

    Hard to be violent when faced with a view like that. They do something similar in Norway. Their violent offenders get stuck on some idyllic yet isolated island facility, and they have to make their own breakfast, keep their shack clean and fixed up, and have to help out their bunkmates.
    Not a lot of recividity in Norway.


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