AKA How the addition of a single word results in a headline that doesn’t provoke the Laura Norder crowd to clutch their pearls.
Assuming, of course, that one doesn’t want to confect a controversy via a plausibly deniable misrepresentation.
Saluzinsky’s article is actually fairly well balanced regarding the proposed privatisation of some NSW gaols, and the objections from both the left and the right to some of the proposals on different grounds. Pity about that headline.
Whichever way the decision comes down on staying public or going private, the idea of allowing prisoners in low and medium security prisons to have duplicate keys to their cells, so that they can have privacy from other inmates as desired, seems to be simply humane; if the experience overseas is that such measures reduce violence as well then all the better.
Unsurprisingly, breakfast TV took the reactionary approach on Sunrise, with Kochy talking about how we are mollycoddling prisoners and why not just give them the keys to the front gate as well? The goal of reducing violence was shrugged aside, as if violence in prisons is only inmate-on-inmate and can therefore be disregarded (eta: an odiously vengeful view). Prison personnel deserve to have the safest work environment possible, you know, even if that means that prisoners aren’t sufficiently brutalised to give the Laura Norder mob their vengeful jollies.
Categories: law & order, media
Media Circus: USA Convention Season Edition 
Friday Hoyden: Gillian Triggs 
Media Circus: Sydney Siege Edition 
Hoyden About Town 
“as if violence in prisons is only inmate-on-inmate”
Even if it were, it wouldn’t be grounds to disregard it.
This is why I don’t watch shows like Sunrise. I can just hear the fearmongering rhetoric without even turning on the tv.
People just don’t realise that very few incarcerated people fit the murdering thug stereotype, and the majority of recidivists are from extremely poor backgrounds with multi-layered disadvantage, who are serving short term sentences for minor offences.
Our prison system has a metaphorical revolving door.
These people deserve any measure of protection we can give them both inside and outside.
What, treat them like humans? What a novel idea. It’s not like they are going to be released back into society. Oh, hang on …
@ P.P.:
I meant to be clearer in my post that I meant exactly that. Thanks for doing my clarifying for me!
Um, perhaps I’m being dim, but is the Laura Norder link supposed to go to the 100 Most Often mispronounced English words/phrases? (If it does need fixing, feel free to delete comment once you’ve fixed)
Yes, it is supposed to go there. It is an alphabetical list. Look under L.
Ahhhh, thanks. 🙂
tigtog, no worries, I figured that’s where you were heading.