“Red flag after red flag has been raised in warning of the inexorable decline of the AMC and its current status as almost certainly the worst performing prison in Australia,” writes columnist JON STANHOPE.

I have followed with interest the series of articles published in CityNews, and other media, which lament the imprisonment of David McBride in the Alexander Maconochie Centre (AMC). 

The articles focus not only on the inherent barbarism of the jailing of Mr McBride for having the temerity to blow the whistle on the possible murder of Afghani civilians by Australian Defence Force personnel, but also on the patently poor management of the AMC where he is to be detained for the next five years.

My interest in this issue is, on one level, personal in that I was responsible for the decision to build the AMC. 

I recently dug out the speech I delivered in 2008 at the formal opening of the prison. In that speech I outlined its intended operational plans and philosophical basis.

I named the prison the Alexander Maconochie Centre honour of the 19th century Scottish prison reformer. I first encountered the work of Maconochie (1787–1860) as a law student at the ANU. By a quirky coincidence, I later encountered his work during the years I spent as the deputy administrator of Norfolk Island in the early 1990s.

My wife Robyn and I and our family lived, in fact, immediately over the road from the site of the Norfolk Island convict prison that Maconochie oversaw and the residence he occupied.

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Before the opening of the AMC, I introduced the ACT Human Rights Act, which codified an important philosophical conviction that I hold, namely that even those who offend against the law retain an essential humanity and the human rights that accompany that state.

In my remarks at the time, I noted: “Society has a responsibility to treat those who have been punished, by being deprived of their liberty, with humanity and with respect for their dignity. Whatever they have done. However they have offended. Whoever they are.” 

I was also driven in my determination to build the AMC by a deep commitment to the importance of rehabilitation as a fundamentally important means of reducing offending behaviour; encouraging detainees to seek self-improvement, fulfil their potential and ultimately lead successful lives in the community.

I have commented previously that considering the appalling reputation which the AMC has accrued in recent years, exposed again in CityNews in the last weeks in an excruciating expose by Andrew Fraser, that Alexander Maconochie is surely spinning wildly in his grave at the insult his spirit must sense in having his name associated with such a debacle.

A very brief summary of the philosophy which Maconochie pioneered, which is based on the possibility of redemption, is in his words: “My experience leads me to say that there is no man utterly incorrigible. You cannot recover a man except by doing justice to the manly qualities which he may have – and giving him an interest in developing them.”

For those of us committed to the importance of rehabilitation and the possibility of redemption the last 10 years of the operation of the AMC have been excruciating to behold. 

Sadly, it is also the case that it is not as if there has not been red flag after red flag raised in warning of the inexorable decline of the AMC and its current status as almost certainly the worst performing prison in Australia.

It did not, of course, have to be like this. For example in 2015 the auditor-general released an excellent 200-page report titled “The Rehabilitation of Male Detainees at The Alexander Maconochie Centre.” The report provides an excellent summary of almost every aspect of the operation of the AMC with multiple recommendations designed to ensure that the prison achieved its potential and met the ACT government’s original plans for the prison and the communities’ expectations.

However, from a recent re-reading of the report, sadly, my assessment is that not a single recommendation of the auditor-general has been fully implemented. 

There can, I think, be only two possible explanations for that, namely there is simply no one in the government who cares or alternatively the ACT’s finances are so stretched that prisoner rehabilitation has been dismissed as of no importance.

But back to David McBride and his imprisonment. Truly, we really do need to have a hard look at ourselves and ask is this who we are, locking up for five years an honourable man driven by the horror of the alleged murder of innocent civilians to blow the whistle on the possible cause of their death.

Jon Stanhope was ACT chief minister from 2001 to 2011 and the only chief minister to have governed with a majority in the Assembly. 

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