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INSTRUCTIONS:THIS LETTER IS A SUGGESTED LETTER ONLY. PLEASE NOTE THAT POLITICIANS WON'T PAY MUCH ATTENTION TO LETTERS THAT LOOK LIKE THEY ARE WRITTEN FROM A FORMULA SO USE YOUR OWN EXPRESSIONS. HERE ARE SOME QUESTIONS TO GET YOU STARTED. WE HAVE ALSO PROVIDED SOME BACK GROUND MATERIAL WHICH YOU CAN SELECT FROM TO CONSTRUCT YOUR LETTER. IT DOESN'T MATTER IF ITS NOT TYPED, IN FACT POLITICIANS TEND TO NOTICE HANDWRITTEN LETTERS.
Victorian Government Ministers
Victorian Government Backbenchers
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A. Start your letter by saying:
B. Some facts which you can choose from to include in the body of the letter ,in your own words:
The State Government are about to decide whether to spend extra millions of dollars locking up more young offenders.
Locking up young offenders costs at least $80,000 per year. Locking up young offenders makes them more likely to commit crimes when they are released.
Community services for young offenders have been very successful in Victoria but now have too few resources to do the job properly.
Money which should go to these community services would go to private companies instead of these community services.
Current community services for young offenders do more than prevent young people breaking the law they also are an important factor in reducing youth suicide and the drug problem and developing their sense of social responsibility.
Very few young offenders are violent offenders and the majority respond very well to supervision in the community which trains them for taking responsibility for themselves. Institutions have the opposite effect.
Many young offenders, especially those under sentence of detention used to be abused and neglected as children.
Responsibility for vulnerable young offenders should remain the direct responsibility of the government. Privately operated centres are less accountable than public facilities to young people, their families and the residents of the suburb where the centre is placed. Critical information about the operations and safety of private adult prisons is not publically available due to (select any of the three terminologies:* Freedom of Information (FOI) or* Commercial in Confidence or * Secrecy Provisions) and the same would be true for private youth detention centres. Just as private adult prisons came before this proposal for private youth detention centres, the next step will be privatisation of care and custody of even younger teenagers and children - thin end of the wedge.
If more youth detention places are needed it would be more cost efficient to add to the existing public centres than build a whole new private one.
More money needs to go to the community services for young offenders than youth detention facilities.
C. How to finish your letter.
Young people are our future (elaborate), vulnerable and still capable of learning from their mistakes.
We need to commit more of our time and public moneys into making young people constructive members of our community rather than putting them into brutalising facilities.
Write about what you want the government to do:
Your Choices may include:
a) To keep direct responsibility for young people in youth detention instead of putting them in a detention centre run by a private company.
b) Stop plans to build a new private facility and put money into more services for young offenders and special services for those most at risk of being sentenced to detention.
c) If the government is really committed to reducing youth suicide and reducing the drug problem it will not adopt the proposals to build private detention centres and instead will redirect funding to integrated community services.
d) If the government proceeds to choose incarceration over changing young people's negative behaviour it will create an environment more likely to lead young people into further crime, self harm, drug abuse or suicide. Ultimately, our community will pay the price for the lack of early intervention with an increasing crime rates and fatalities.
.