Dumb, dumb, dumb

Go-ahead for waist restraints
The Corrections Department is to begin introducing waist restraints into jails from next month, despite concerns from prison officers and the Howard League for Penal Reform. Last year, in the wake of the killing of North Shore teenager Liam Ashley in the back of a prison van in August 2006, the Ombudsman released a damning report on the transport of prisoners, labelling current methods inhumane. The Government's proposal to trial waist restraints was made at the same time, prompting a threat of legal action from civil libertarians if the measure was eventually introduced. Under prisoner transport regulations Liam Ashley's killer, George Baker, should not even have been in the van with his victim. Baker is serving a life sentence for battering the young man to death.

Chaining people up like animals is something that should be reserved for the worst criminal, I know the prevailing winds from our sensible sentencing friends is for every second within prison to be as excruciating as possible, but to use a restricted method of transportation as a blanket process for all transported prisoners is made that much more despicable when one finds out the reasons for this decision are because lazy security staff couldn’t bother reading and applying the existing transport rules. This review has come about from the misery of the Liam Ashley case where his idiot parents thought throwing a boy with behaviour problems into prison would account for any positive thing at all, if the security guard had applied the existing rules, George Baker would never have been on the van, so the decision by Corrections only goes to humiliate and debase every transported prisoner rather than enforcing the existing rules that would have prevented Liam’s death.