The easy treatment of paedophiles inside Queensland prisons

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.