The easy treatment of paedophiles inside Queensland prisons

Some criminals are ostracised on both sides of the prison wall. In US prisons they are called short eyes; their gaze and mind-set never lifts higher than a child's height. In Australian prisons they are rock spiders; they hide behind the anonymity of darkness while weaving their webs to ensnare victims. Society calls them paedophiles.

Despite the labels, individuals who ruin children's lives rarely receive the maximum penalty. Only three offenders convicted of child sexual crimes in the past seven years have received the maximum sentence in Queensland. Those who do receive custodial sentences are placed in protective custody. Categorised as 'psychologically disturbed individuals' rather than convicted felons, they are kept isolated from mainstream population. This category ensures they receive a cushy ride through the prison system.

Ninety per cent of serious sex offenders failed to complete treatment programs before being released from Queensland jails in 2002. Only six of the 72 sex offenders whose prison terms ended in 2001-02 had completed such a program. 468 serious sex offenders were released into the community since 1999, despite refusing such treatment. 6.4 per cent of sex offenders released in 1997-98 re-offended within four years.

Queensland's $127 million, state-of-the-art male supergrass jail, Wolston Correctional Centre (Wally World), houses rock spiders. They share Wally World with the State's jailyard dogs (criminal/prisoner informers) who serve their time in protective custody under a relaxed regime of incarceration. Although the prison is also segmented to isolate Queensland's female prisoner population it is largely populated by protected male prisoners who regard Wally World as a reward. It is their ticket to lower security classifications, prison farms and parole; guaranteed concessions not available in other maximum security jails.

The exclusion of rock spiders from the predominant criminal class, combined with their former social standing in the community, that makes them compliant and manageable prisoners in protective custody. This guarantees a trouble-free environment for Queensland prison authorities who prefer to handle that calibre of prisoner.

The calibre of Queensland rock spiders can be typified by four people.

Geoffrey Robert Dobbs, 48, a family man, churchgoer and youth worker, preyed upon Queensland children for over 30 years. Dobbs was uncovered when he put his video camera in for repairs and it revealed him sating his sexual aberrations with children. Police later found 500 hours of videos depicting Dobbs having sex with different children. He pleaded guilty in the Brisbane District Court to 116 charges involving 62 children aged from one year to 15.

Colgan Taylor, 80, a former Marist Brother who pleaded guilty in the same court to molesting two girls over a three-year period 20 years ago, had been a well-respected headmaster before transferring into pastoral care work in his late 50s. One of Taylor's victims was intellectually impaired when she was assaulted. She was aged between eight and eleven years at the time of the offences and the other victim was five years old. Taylor had served as a brother for more than 60 years.

Another retired Catholic priest, Michael Joseph McArdle, 67, pleaded guilty to more than 60 child-sex offences when he appeared in a Brisbane court on April 16, 2003. McArdle had been charged with indecent dealing with a boy under 14, between January 1973 and December 1974, together with a number of other offences of a similar nature. The indecent dealing and indecent treatment involved more than a dozen complainants and occurred between 1965 and 1987.

Disgraced former MLA Bill D'Arcy, 63, was convicted of 18 child-sex crimes including the rape of a 9-year-old student in front of the class he was teaching at a Queensland outback school. The youngest of the victims was six at the time of the abuse. The former millionaire MLA and caucus colleague of Queensland Premier, Peter Beattie, was originally charged on 50 counts of child sexual abuse while he was a Queensland teacher.

On January 25, 2000, 18 days after he had received a 10 per cent parliamentary pay rise, D'Arcy was committed for trial on 18 counts of child sexual abuse. They included 3 counts of child rape, 11 counts of indecent dealing with girls under 12 and 4 counts of indecent dealing with a boy under 14. On November 1, 2000, he was convicted on all counts and sentenced to 14 years imprisonment.

D'Arcy's 14-year jail term was reduced to 10 years on August 22, 2001, because The Queensland Court of Criminal Appeal took into account his previous good character and his role as a Queensland MLA. The Court did not take into account that the offences D'Arcy had been convicted for had occurred during those years of "good character". The court rejected an application to have convictions on three charges of rape and 15 of indecent dealing quashed.

Shane Bevan Daines, 45, was a Queensland Police Officer but on April 8, 2003, he was jailed for 13 years by Brisbane District Court Judge Ian Wylie on 38 sex offences against boys aged between eight and 15. The charges included sodomy, deprivation of liberty and numerous indecent assaults. It was revealed that Daines had sexually abused boys in Queensland over a 25-year period with most occurring while he was senior constable of police stationed at Longreach, Goondiwindi and Warwick. The court was told that Daines had used Police Service handcuffs to shackle two of his victims and then sexually assaulted them with a police baton. Other assaults had occurred in the Queensland police barracks.

Another former Queensland police officer, Graham Leonard Noyes, 60, used his position as a volunteer carer at the Enoggera boys' home to molest and sodomise a vulnerable boy who was aged between nine and 11 at the time of the offences. The court was told the boy had been confused and lonely after being sent to the home by his mother in March 1967. He was crying himself to sleep when Noyes, a serving policeman and volunteer dormitory master, took the boy into his own room. After offering the boy a cordial drink as a treat Noyes, committed an indecent act on the boy and sodomised him.

A Brisbane District Court jury found Noyes, 60, guilty on three charges of unlawful carnal knowledge against the order of nature and three charges of indecent dealing with a boy under the age of 14 years. He was jailed for seven years.

Noyes, Dobbs, Taylor, McArdle, D'Arcy, and Daines have become the calibre of prisoner whom Queensland prison authorities regard as the most compliant and manageable within the incarceration process. The compliance and manageability of those 'psychologically disturbed individuals' ultimately results in preferential treatment that puts them back on the streets a lot earlier than the average convicted felon inside Queensland jails.

The pampering and preferential treatment accorded to rock spiders inside Queensland jails has resulted in a contemptuous arrogance towards their victims that can be illustrated by the release of notorious rock spider and child rapist Dennis Ferguson, 54, when he walked free from Brisbane's Wolston jail at 12.30pm on January 9, 2003.

"What do I have to say to my fucking victims? Nothing, because there was nothing ever took place," Ferguson told waiting media as he walked from Wally World after doing 15 years behind bars for sexually abusing three children. "Why don't you get your fucking facts right when you print stuff?"

The fact that Ferguson contemptuously tried to disregard was a conviction for the abduction of three children from NSW whom he held in a motel for three days during 1987. He was found guilty in 1988 of kidnapping, gross indecency, indecent dealing and carnal knowledge of a girl aged six, and her brothers, aged seven and eight. Ferguson had also tried to obtain pictures of his victims while in jail. In 1992, he made a Freedom of Information application to access photographs of the children that were part of trial exhibits.

Prior to Ferguson's release from prison the Queensland Department of Public Prosecutions won a last-minute court bid requiring him to report his address to police for the next 15 years. In making the order Justice Ken Mackenzie told the court he was satisfied Ferguson imposed a substantial risk of committing more child sex offences after documents tendered by the DPP alleged Ferguson bragged to fellow inmates he planned to molest an eight-year-old girl on his release from jail.

The reality that all Queensland rock spiders are criminally deviant should be accepted by Queensland courts and prison authorities. That criminality should not be obscured by a plethora of psychological or psychiatric assumptions. Rock spiders are criminal felons. The preferential treatment accorded rock spiders because of their compliance and manageability inside the Queensland incarceration process has become a ticket to special concessions including early release. That preferential treatment must cease or Queensland's rock spiders will continue to play the system to their own ends. Those ends will invariably result in the ruination of further children's lives.