The program included other reforms, such as a reduction in the voting age, seats reserved for women and minorities in local councils, and special courts for women. The boys, who rioted before busting out, complained of severe beatings by guards over minor misdeeds such as smoking. Most were quickly recaptured, but police said several hundred who had committed murders, rapes and thefts were still at large. Prison officials then sent around 1,500 boys home for five days so damage to the centers could be repaired, but by week's end 1,100 plus had not returned. Thailand's economic crisis and a steep rise in amphetamine trafficking have vastly expanded the country's prison population in recent years.
All prisons are overcrowded and breakouts are now common.
Two years after signing a cease-fire with separatist rebels on the island province of Bougainville, the government of Papua New Guinea has agreed to the Bougainvilleans' demand for a referendum on independence. Prime Minister John Howard's conservative coalition government has resisted calls for federal intervention, while two federal private member's bills seeking to overturn the laws are still to be debated in the government-dominated House of Representatives. Despite his personal opposition to mandatory sentencing, which automatically sends N.T. teenagers to jail for 28 days upon a second conviction, Howard says the Territory must retain the right to make its own laws. Judges, churches, Aboriginal leaders, lawyers and youth workers have labeled the legislation immoral, while last week a U.N. committee expressed dismay at the laws and at the N.T.'s high Aboriginal incarceration rates. The involvement of General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte in the 1976 assassination of a political opponent in Washington D.C. is being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department.