Throughout Australia, jails are riddled with drugs. In virtually all prisons, inmates emerge after their sentence more hardened, completely un-rehabilitated. The drugs and jail infrastructures are not the problems: it’s the policies, Brian McConnell say…
The issue of right to die has hit the front of Australia’s metropolitan daily newspapers this silly season, with the Canberra Times featuring a call by Professor Ken Hillman to respect people’s wishes. Also featured is the story of CLA member, Adele Ste…
Ken Davidson, editor of Dissent magazine and also a leading columnist on The Age newspaper, has analysed in straight economic terms why the current approach to drugs is wrong. He supports a switch to low-cost, high-impact programs.Time to start think…
Every police patrol in the NT will carry at least one stun gun by Christmas, with 100 new weapons taking the NT Police total to 230. In 2009, Kwementyaye Rubuntja, 39, died from heart failure after being stunned twice in Alice Springs. The NT coroner fou…
Despite adequate resources and general goodwill, ‘significant improvement’ continues to elude Indigenous Australians, even in the national capital, Aboriginal Justice leader Brendan Church writes. He provides a 10-point list of ways improvement is possib…
Around Australia, drug testing of drivers takes places with no proven benefit to society and great penalty to people’s civil liberties. In WA, the accuracy of the tests is declining, research in SA shows (see CLArion newsletter July 2010). Here, Bill Bus…
Victoria is one of the more enlightened states in looking after Indigenous people…but still the statistics are appalling, as this analysis by Keith McEwan (pictured) points out. “Life is not so good for an Indigenous person living in Victoria…or, for…
Australian drug policies are not working: criminals are getting richer, prison populations are swelling and there are major national health problems, including deaths from overdoses in every State and Territory. Surely, CLA says, it is time for the new N…
You’d think, from all the posturing by Law & Order (LO) politicians through Australia, that crime was up, but it is down. But what’s really up is the prison population, by 36% (or 7759) from 21,358 to 29,317 over the past 10 years. At nearly $100,000…