Floyd du Plessis: Corrections Association President says prisons should have different standards to encourage rehabilitation

New data from Corrections,  reveals more than 3,000 gang members and associates make up the just over 10,000 sentenced and remand prisoners.

It equates to about a third of the country's estimated gang population. 

Corrections Association President Floyd du Plessis says the chances of rehabilitation for these inmates is low. 

He says it needs to be possible for prisons to separate people,  based on their intentions to turn their lives around.  

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
New stats on gangs in our prisons. About a third
of PATCH members are behind bars these days. Apparently we've
got over ten and a half thousand people in jail.
Of those three one and twenty four a link to
sixty four different gangs. Did you realize there were sixty
four of them? Seven hundred and forty two just come
from the mongrel mob alone. Floyd Floyd Duplasy is the
Corrections Association president. Back with us, Floyd morning.

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Good morning, mite.

Speaker 1 (00:22):
Sixty four gangs? I mean, who the hell are they?
Apart from the ones we all know.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
There are a lot of smaller gangs out there that
generally out aligned the majority of the of the numbers
and the offending tends to be in those bigger groups
that everyone knows about. A lot of those are the
smaller numbers are relatively small.

Speaker 1 (00:45):
Those statistics about a third. Does that surprise you if
you've done a quick head count, would you have come
up with that sort of number yourself?

Speaker 2 (00:55):
Actually it does so for those of us working in
the prisons, we would have thought those numbers are higher.
In reality, And the reason I say that is quite
often within those prisons there's people in there that, according
to paper are not aligned, but when they're in the prison,
they are. We're walking alongside and supporting those other groups

(01:18):
for pure survival, and so we feel those numbers actually
higher than what paper suggests.

Speaker 1 (01:24):
Tell us, what's that till about the rehab story, I mean,
the chances of these people being rehabilitated, I'm assuming is low.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
Absolutely, the chances is extremely low. And I know there's
been some commentary from the government that suggests they are
putting effort in there, and they are putting an effort.
The problem is the e if it's far too small.
So if they actually talk to those people delivering that
rehable the staff overseeing it, they'll realize that when you're
putting those getting influences in and amongst the reheab those

(01:53):
influencers influence what is actually meaningfully able to be achieved.
And there needs to be a separation. We need to
be separate the gang members or separate those members that
are saying, hey, we're going to leave, we want to
walk away from this. You've got to separate them from
those influences. Otherwise they're never going to be able to
leave while they're in the prison. So there needs a
lot more effort in there.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
And these statistics that is as a result of the
government law change, the so called crackdown on gangs. So
this is a material outworking at.

Speaker 2 (02:19):
That that's definitely a component. So the more there's a
crack down on the outside, the more we're going to
see the numbers increase in the prisons. That's just a
reality of cracking down crime.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
They're interesting numbers, aren't they. Floyd appreciated as always, Floyd
duplicusly the Corrections Association President.

Speaker 2 (02:35):
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