G,day o sung wo.
I have seen this current seemingly proof the system is not working all my life.
Justice seems very blind.
This morning press tells of a very brutal murder and maximum sentence is 24 years, parole possible after 18.
I think the wrong people sit in judgment.
And that , unknown to us,costs of prisons play a huge roll in our short sentences and early, maybe all parole.
Best quote so far in the ABC womans murder is she was killed by parole, harsh but true.

From my perspective, recent reported issues with the parole system are indicative of a much more basic problem, namely the abysmal lack of accountability at all levels of gubmunt. Whilst there isn't much to like about yankee culture, the policy of public election of at least some members of the judiciary has much to recommend it. The typical judge / magistrate in Australia is a supremely arrogant upstart who obviously believes he / she gives orders to the Almighty. Our present system fails to provide any recourse for idiotic decisions by the ostensibly 'independent' judiciary. Given the propensity for people in power to grow too big for their boots, a major review of judicial appointment & management is well overdue.

Adrian Bayley still has more charges to answer, in addition to the Jill Meagher case he's accused of a series of brutal rapes which were carried out in St Kilda a couple of years ago.

Praxidice,
There have been papers written on the example of "Wild West" societies as the model for a libertarian community, where the sherrif, his staff and the judge are all elected and paid by the town council. Contrary to popular belief towns like Tombstone and Deadwood, though rough frontier communities at their founding were peaceful places once they began to grow, Tombstone went five years without a murder at one point.

Jay of Melbourne

I don't doubt that story in the least. Mind you there wasn't such a concept as corporatization back then. Actually those 'wild west' towns had more in common with anarchy than democracy, however despite claims from contemporary 'experts' that a political system based on anarchy could never function, I suspect it would indeed prove a considerable improvement in many cases over our quite obviously rigged so-called democracy.

Prax,
Islamic Law, for all it's bad press is a similar polycentric system, the point is though that even where two nominally "free" communities might start of from a different ideological perspective over time their legal systems are going to develop along similar lines, just with slight cultural differences. So even if say, the people of Bendigo decided on some form of Anglo Saxon law as their system and the people of Dandenong adopted Sharia the basic legal code will be the same, a man from Bendigo visiting Dandenong is still going to know that he shouldn't steal, rape or kill anyone while he's in that area.
If we're going to be forced to live in a "multicultural' society then a polycentric approach will have to be adopted to ensure harmony, so say if a miscreant from Bendigo did offend community standards in Dandenong he'd be dealt with under Sharia law. The question of parole would also be dealt with since there would be no universal standards for judges and jailers to comply with, no sensible community would allow early release without rehabilitation and in all likelihood a life sentence would mean spending the term of one's natural life in the city/shire jail or prison farm.