Editor, The West Australian: Sir, I respond to your report ‘Overcrowding to blame for jail assaults’ TWA 16 Dec 09 p18.
It goes without saying that overcrowded prisons where prisoners are forced to share a cell with other prisoners will always be open t…
Information within government is the people’s information. The starting point for access rights and openness must be that the people are entitled to see and hear everything, with very limited exclusions. Currently, the reverse is true, certainly in WA, s…
Tasmanian Police Commisioner Jack Johnston, recently cleared by the High Court of a serious charge, for 16 months suffered the ignominy of being strip searched, swabbed for DNA, the subject of possible listening devices and liable for phone-tapping. CLA…
A new research paper from the Australian Institute of Criminology highlights how crime in Australia and in western nations is down over the past decade, and declining.
The paper indicates how wrong and self-servingly tendentious are the caterwauling…
The Rudd Government is about to pass laws which are ‘…diluting basic criminal justice principles’ and ‘jeopardis(ing) the most fundamental individual rights’, according to the Opposition, which still plans to vote for the unconscionable legislation. It…
In the USA, the Administration appears determined to continue charging alleged terrorists with non-existent crimes, even though President Bush has given way to President Obama. Moving Guantanamo prisoner trials to Manhattan Island, NY, won’t turn charge…
Police in WA want metal detectors to line the streets of Perth. They also want the power to stop, scan and body search at will, without reasonable suspicion of an offence. Will it be a case of Perth WA this year, then Adelaide SA, Sydney NSW, etc next ye…
A correspondent has lashed out at people like us for supporting convicted pedophile Dennis Ferguson, out of jail after completing his sentence but being hounded from pillar to post. Here’s the reply, by CLA CEO Bill Rowlings, to the writer Lenny who…
The Supreme Court has ruled that a critical part of the “bikies law” in South Australia is invalid. The ruling forces immediate cancellation of charges against seven bikies, and calls into question similar extraordinary, draconian laws in virtually every…
Will Australia continue complicity in an international cover-up, or at last help Indonesia to examine the decades of brutality by its armed forces, evidenced by the deaths of Australia’s Balibo Five journalists? The AFP, by deciding to investigate formal…