Prisons

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (14:28): Supplementary question: how are prisoners assessed when they enter prison and how often are they reassessed over their term?

The Hon. P. MALINAUSKAS (Minister for Police, Minister for Correctional Services, Minister for Emergency Services, Minister for Road Safety) (14:28): I thank the honourable member for her question. Naturally, when prisoners come into the custody of the state, there is an initial assessment that is performed to determine their respective classification and rating. My advice is that all people, when they come into the system for the first time, do go through a maximum security facility. Typically, people come through remand, but that isn't always necessarily the case. Obviously, as I said, the Adelaide Remand Centre and the Yatala Labour Prison are two high-security facilities, and, almost always, those offenders go through one of those facilities first.

A process is gone through in terms of initial interviews and screening to determine how the prisoner will be graduated through the system from that point onwards, and then reassessment occurs on a regular basis. There might be a number of reasons why someone's reclassification, in terms of the security rating, will vary over the course of their time within custody and it is also not uncommon for people to regress in their assessment during their time in custody. For instance, if they commit another offence while they are in custody or if they are involved in an altercation or an incident or if they demonstrate bad behaviour, they can escalate back up to a high-security before coming back down again. There are periodic reassessments that occur during the term of one's period in custody, and naturally it varies, depending on the individual, the incident, how long their sentence is and so forth.