AUSTRALIAN PRISON INMATES RIOT OVER TOOTHBRUSHES AND SHIRTS

Dorina Lisson sent me the following description of an Australian prison riot:

__There was a prison riot yesterday, in one of the Victorian medium secuity prisons. It lasted some 24 hours and nobody was hurt. A few hot-heads burnt and destroyed some prison property and staged a protest on the prison rooftop. When night time arrived they got cold and asked for bed sheets, which they put over their heads and body - looking like ghosts. Then, they got hungry and asked for pizzas to be delivered. They ate the pizzas. One prisoner stole a prison van and was driving it like a hoon - doing burn-outs within the prison grounds. The prisoners refused to come down from the rooftop and eventually tear-gas was used by authorities. The prisoners surrended.

__Why were the prisoners protesting? Because they don't like the prison-authorized tooth brushes and they don't want to wear the issued shirts. (Australian prison clothing is blue/green jeans and shirt.) The prisoners claim they don't like prison clothing and want to wear their own clothes. Also, they want more television channels to choose from.

__Many years ago, Australian prisoners won a long battle to refuse to display their prison ID's.

I believe the prison authorities handled this riot poorly. When the rioters on the roof got cold, I sure as hell would not have sent them anything to keep them warm. And when they got hungry, I wouldn’t have sent them pizzas or anything else for that matter.

Cold? Come on down and return to your cells. Hungry? Come on down and return to your cells. Otherwise, stay on the roof and freeze your assess off and forget about getting anything to eat. I think that under those circumstances, they would have returned to their cells sooner or later. Despite giving them everything they wanted, the rioters still had to be tear-gassed down.

And what’s this crap about giving in to their refusal to display their IDs? Who in the hell is running Australia’s prison system? It doesn’t appear to be the prison authorities.

Dorina said that all Australian prisons have an elite Security and Emergency Services Group, a highly trained specialist squad developed to quell prison riots, usually by negotiating with the rioting prisoners. The group's main priority is that nobody gets hurt.

As far as I’m concerned, all they did was to give the rooftop rioters everything they wanted. That's not negotiating, that's capitulating. If they had let the rioters shiver in the cold while going hungry, the assholes probably would have come down and gone back to their cells.