Justice Action launches newspaper

BY LUCAS BAIRD
A prison advocacy group launched their national election- themed newspaper in Sydney last Friday night, 10 June.
The Justice Action paper, named Just Us, is aimed specifically at prisoners and their issues; the paper will be circulated to prisons around Australia and will be exclusive to these premises.
The paper contains statements from the Greens, Labor, Liberal, Palmer United, Socialist Alliance, and Australian Sex parties aimed at incarcerated voters. The paper also encourages inmates to send content to include in future issues.
Coordinator of Justice Action, Brett Collins, was pleased with the turnout to the event and said that everyone there recognised the importance of Just Us.
Mr Collins explained that this paper was needed because prisoners were not fully informed. He said this was because politicians and society viewed inmates as “disgraced” and “less of a human being”.
“Just Us is an attempt to draw a line in the sand, which says: on this line, there are residual rights remaining for these people who are excluded,” Mr Collins said.
Mr Collins said that Just Us will only be around for the election season due to difficulties with distribution and costs. Mr Collins said that in NSW alone, they were sending Just Us to 32 different prisons; totalled at around six thousand copies.
A panel discussion on prisoner rights accompanied the launch. Editor of The New Daily, Quentin Dempster, hosted the discussion which was attended by federal candidates for the Greens, Socialist Alliance and Australian Sex Party.
The candidates were the Socialist Alliance’s Peter Boyle, the Green’s Sylvie Ellsmore, and the Australian Sex Party’s Ross Fitzgerald
One topic the panel discussed was the privatisation of prisons in Australia.
Mr Boyle said that the American case study of privatising prisons should be enough to ward off Australia from doing the same.
“We don’t have to have a crystal ball because we can look at what is happening in the United States,” Mr Boyle said.
He said that private prisons in the United States that put prisoners to work was “slave labour” on the account of their low pay.
Mr Boyle also issued displeasure with the economic incentives incarceration provides for businesses once a prison is privatised.