New treatment required for dangerous inmates who like to reoffend
NSW has a system to deal with violent prisoners who have no intention of leaving their crimes behind when released from prison, but it is proving to be unfit for service, and a massive rethink is required urgently.
The arrest of the notorious North Shore Rapist, Graham James Kay, has again focused attention on the porous and ineffective controls to keep the state’s high-risk offenders in check after release from prison.
Kay, who was jailed for sexual attacks on eight women and girls while armed with a knife, was released in 2023 and is before the courts over an alleged assault of a Sydney schoolgirl in the CBD last Friday. At the time, he was on his third Extended Supervision Order (ESO), the strictest court order reserved for releasing the most dangerous offenders into the community.
Men guilty of committing repugnant and violent crimes have no get-out-of-jail card.
Last August, the Herald won a court bid to reverse a suppression order protecting Kay’s identity after a judicial decision muzzling the media from publishing his name when he indecently assaulted another young woman two years earlier. It was an important moment in holding courts accountable for open justice principles, underscoring the public’s evolving lack of trust in the operation of the legal system.
Given the number of breaches of ESOs that now blight our state, that distrust is understandable.
In an exclusive report, the Herald’s Perry Duffin revealed data from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research shows the state’s most dangerous criminals breached their ESOs 633 times between October 2019 and September 2024.
The court dismissed a further 150 charges because the person on the ESO was deemed mentally unfit, withdrawn by prosecutors, or dealt with through the drug courts.
Duffin says victims’ advocates claim the court orders are unable to handle former inmates who are fundamentally broken. The high number of breaches supports their contentions.
The system is likely to come under renewed pressure when one such offender, Mark Sturgeon, a rapist with a history of breaching ESOs, is expected to be released soon under another control order. Since his release from jail in 2019 after being convicted of rape, Sturgeon has waged a campaign of violence against his family, police and prison staff that has seen him repeatedly jailed, subjected to an ESO and sentenced to community correction orders.
