Sri Lanka Court Officials visit Perth
Magistrates and court officers from Sri Lanka are in Perth this week to learn more from Western Australia’s successful community corrections programs.
The training is being provided by the Department of Justice, in partnership with AusAID, and follows the winning of an AusAID-funded tender back in 1999 for a project to develop a pilot community-based corrections program in Sri Lanka.
Administered through the Illawarra Technology Corporation of the University of Wollongong, the program aims to introduce a community-based corrections system in Sri Lanka to provide alternatives to fines or imprisonment for minor and first time offenders. The new system should help alleviate overcrowding in prisons and reduce the detrimental impact of imprisonment upon the community and individuals.
WA Justice Department Director of Community Justice Services (Regional), Bob Carter, has been the project’s director since its inception.
“Having previously assisted in setting up the administration, we are now developing a design and implementation program to enable the Sri Lankan Ministry of Justice to generate its own training capacity,” Mr Carter said.
“Two officers from Sri Lanka are now in Perth for training as trainers.
“They will then be able to train their own officers in core operational training for community corrections and in drug and alcohol interventions.
“Also, two magistrates and the Commissioner for Community Corrections from Sri Lanka are in Perth to observe the sentencing and administration of community-based orders,” Mr Carter said.
“We will be adopting training materials used in WA and customising them for use in the Sri Lankan context, so they will have a complete package and materials to take back,” Mr Carter said.
The Commissioner of Community Corrections for Sri Lanka, Mr Dharma Hewamadduma, said the concept of giving preference to work orders instead of prison terms, which he witnessed in Perth, was new to modern Sri Lanka.
He said Sri Lanka had 20 million people, including 20,000 prisoners, each costing $3 a day.
“Under the WA Department of Justice system, a government need not spend so much money,” he said.
“If we can divert prisoners to community work, we save on prison costs and get the benefit of the offender labour in the community at a rate of about $5-6 a day.
“In addition, the social benefits are incalculable, as Sri Lanka does not have a social security system and does not provide for families without an income.
“It is the poorest people who commit most of the crimes,” he said.
“If the breadwinner of a family with, for example, six to eight children is imprisoned, the wife is forced to become the breadwinner and go out to work leaving the children unsupervised and without guidance, with the risk that they too will soon turn to crime.
“Offenders on community work orders as opposed to prison still get enough time in the week to hold down a job and remain as breadwinners.
“Where these offenders are parents, they remain a family unit and the wife doesn’t have to abandon the children to go to work,” he said.
Mr Hewamadduma said he had also noticed that vocational training was made available in prisons in WA and he would now look at how it could be provided to Sri Lankan offenders in the community.
“Offenders could learn carpentry, masonry or computer science,” he said.
Mr Hewamadduma said that Sri Lanka had a similar justice system about 2000 years ago.
“Ancient inscriptions in stone tablets tell us that our kings employed offenders to build water tanks and temples,” he said.
“We are very happy that our system is being brought back via Western Australia to Sri Lanka.”