For Mary McNish, secretary of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties, the "frightening thing" about the recent escalation in law-and-order hysteria "is that the government sees that it's their right to interfere with the hard-won justice system we've built up over the years."
"It's so important to the running of this community", she added. "We believe very strongly in a separation of powers, that it's a person's right to receive a trial by jury, for the jury to decide on guilt and innocence and for the court to sentence. When that prisoner has completed their sentence they should be allowed out."
McNish referred to the Fred Many case, in which Many, a convicted rapist, received remissions for providing evidence about other prisoners which turned out to be false.
"In the Many case there was a legitimate argument about the remissions that he got through providing shonky information, but I also don't believe in the current government's attitude to prison sentencing legislation that 'life means life'."
McNish said that the Council believed that it was "extremely dangerous" to lock people up with no guarantee that they would ever be released. "It is looking for murder and mayhem in the prison system."
The media furore around such cases as Many's were also making their own contribution to undermining the independence of the judiciary with some radio pundits like Allen Jones and John Laws "feeling that they are the ones deciding someone's guilt or innocence. They put on the black hat and decide whether or not someone should be hanged and to hell with the community."
"Both political parties are running scared because these populist no-hopers have whipped up such a ferment", she said. "They want to get elected and so they are doing what they think popular opinion is telling them. In fact it's just a vocal minority stirred by a few dangerous people."
McNish stressed that the really insidious thing is that people are accepting greater intrusions, and "it's so much easier when you've this little bit, to accept the next little bit until you get to capital punishment. The John Laws and Allen Jones of this world will not be satisfied until capital punishment in re-introduced."
How can the law-and-order push be reversed? McNish stresses that there has to be an explanation about "what this so-called crime wave and their attitude to it is costing the community."
"They're going to build all these jails, they're going to keep all these people for all this time without any possible hope of rehabilitation. These serious offenders start in the juvenile justice system and they get into the adult system with a small crime that they've committed. Jails are universities of crime and by the time they leave they're graduates in really heavy stuff. What we should be doing is working out ways to keep them out of jail, to stop them from getting into that system."
Critical for McNish is "a whole new rethink of our attitude to drugs. The majority of women who are in prison, are there through some sort of drug-related matter. We've lost the war against illegal drugs. If we removed that illegality, we would get rid of the major source of criminality in our society."
Finally, McNish stressed the need for a Bill of Rights as part of the fight against law-and-order frenzy. "We have the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which we vaguely give credence to, but there's nothing written into our Constitution that guarantees these rights."
"A lot of people would feel a darn sight happier if they knew they had an overall kind of protection of their basic liberties and rights", she concluded.