The bald facts

WINSTON Churchill said that a fanatic was a person who couldn’t change his mind and wouldn’t change the subject.

According to the dictionary, a fanatic is a person marked by an extreme, unreasoning enthusiasm for a cause.

At times, some of Australia’s prominent civil libertarians sound like fanatics – most recently when defending the rights of odious recidivist sex offenders such as Victoria’s Mr Baldy, due for release from prison in August.

Mr Baldy was locked up for serial crimes of kidnapping and shaving the heads of young boys before assaulting them. Soon after his first release from jail, he attacked a young child again.

I know it’s the job of Liberty Victoria’s vice-president, Jamie Gardener, to condemn the intention of the Bracks Government to introduce electronic tagging of repeat offenders like Mr Baldy. And I know it’s his job to say things such as: “Liberty views with grave concern any adding-on of sentences to people who have served their time set down by the courts, (because this) is not something that is consistent with human rights.”

But what folks like Mr Gardener often seem to forget is that no civil right, no matter how important, is absolute. The rights of repeat sex offenders like Mr Baldy need to be balanced against those of the children to be protected from being his next victim.

Otherwise, when absolute rights clash, impenetrable deadlock is the result, and all chance of consensus are lost.

The question is, does the Bracks plan get that balance right? I think it does.

Mr Gardener’s worry seems to be that tagging offenders punishes them twice ~~– first by incarceration, then by monitoring~~– for the same crime.

But this is not a continuing worry. If the tagging legislation passes, future sentences will include post-release surveillance rather than adding it on at the end.

This means that this problem – technically termed “double jeopardy” – falls away.

The real infringement of electronic surveillance is on a prisoner’s rights to privacy. WHETHER the data from their bracelet is downloaded daily through the phone or transmitted in real time, those wearing electronic tags will be living in the Panopticon – an architectural figure envisioned by political philosopher Jeremy Bentham.

It has a central tower around which is built an annular structure divided into cells that extend the entire width of the building to allow both inner and outer windows.

The occupants of the cells are isolated from one another by walls, but able to be observed collectively and individually by an unseen observer in the tower.

The problem for the prisoners of the Panopticon is that they can be seen – and know they can – but they are unable to see in return. They have no idea of who is looking at them, when, and what – if anything – those people plan to do with the knowledge they gain.0

Even if data on their movements is not to be used against them (something that is not the case with the electronic tag, which will most likely be used to ensure prisoners conform to whatever movement restrictions the courts sets down as a condition of their release), those in the Panopticon suffer a complete loss of privacy and the dignity and personal power that comes with it.

But if the electronic tags actually stop paedophiles from re-offending, then this loss must be weighed against the gain of increased community safety.

According to Don Thomson, Professor of Forensic Psychology at Charles Sturt University, we have reason to think that tagging will deter offenders from committing further crimes against children. If the prisoner knows an alarm will sound if he violates prescribed boundaries, he’s unlikely to do so on pain of either being caught in the act or, if the violation is discovered only later, the certainty of being convicted and locked away, perhaps for good.

And there is some evidence from a handful of studies that electronic monitoring, if combined with effective therapy, does reduce rates of reoffending.

But this is the rub.

While the government is effusive about the benefits of surveillance, there’s been no mention of increased funding for the evaluation and provision of effective treatment for sex offenders. Yet is it critical that such funding be provided, not only to ensure we get value from the money spent on the bracelets, but because treatment is the best way to make the community as safe as we can for children.

According to Professor Thomson, money is desperately needed to both properly evaluate which treatments work and to provide them to convicts inside and outside the prison walls (where the temptation of real children running around provides the one true test of cure).

Until funds to do this work are found, we can’t really look our children in the eye and say we’ve done all we can to make them safe.

Because the best way to avoid released prisoners re-offending is not to track them, but to change them.

Publication history

The bald facts  The Herald Sun
2005-02-03