Paper for Critical Resistance Conference:
University of California September 1998

by Catherine Gow and Donna Williamson
People's Justice Alliance,
P. O. Box 1567, Collingwood 3066, Victoria, Australia

What we now call Australia began with invasion to establish a prison colony. Today we are a corporate laboratory for some of the most brutal expressions and laws of the Western world, and fast becoming a corporate colony, for the largest transnational prison corporations in the world. Australia is being used by the private prison companies as a stepping stone into the perceived lucrative market of Asia where millions of people are incarcerated and where governments are keen to 'import' the prison-industrial complex recognising the interconnection of agendas - private business to increase their wealth at the expense of peoples' lives and governments keen to 'control' dissenting populations!

While there are many things we share in common with other western systems of justice and punishment, there are also things which make our experience unique. No other country can lay claim to beginnings as a penal colony, yet our current approach to criminal justice and prisons gives little consideration to this, and may in fact create an over-reaction in an attempt to further distance ourselves from those beginnings. Similarly we often mimic, adopt and impose the policies of other western countries, particularly the United States, without any consideration of the differences in history and culture. Without that cultural basis as justification of those policies, we can often be more extreme, more rigid, and more punitive in there application.

Social issues such as unemployment and homelessness are defined within a framework of fear - often referred to as 'the ecology of fear' - which promotes a law and order paradigm to express both the causes and solutions. It comes about from an unwillingness to deal with the systemic inequalities produced by capitalism, patriarchy and racism which cause social injuries such as poverty.

Likewise the law and order agenda is promoted by the police, who themselves create high levels of fear. Their media unit busily feeds newspapers with 'stories', and neighbourhood and rural watch signs are everywhere. Recently two police officers were killed whilst on duty. This was the first shooting of police in 10 years and they manufactured a massive out pouring of anger and grief and again pushing their law and order barrow for more increases in police powers and weapons. Yet there was nothing mentioned in the mainstream media of the fact that the Victorian police force has itself shot and killed 38 people since 1984 or that a large number of young people have died as a result of high speed police pursuit and that 18 people have died in custody in 12 months.

If they don't kill you in the community, then you go to prisons which are largely the repository for the unpaid or workless. In Victoria 60% of men and 86% of women were unemployed before being sentenced to prison. To be sure that you are always reminded of your 'place' in society, government regulations have been passed to allow potential employees (and real estate agents) access to your police records, and last month police were empowered to take (forcibly if necessary) DNA from all sentenced prisoners and from all peoples convicted of a 'serious' offences since 1940 - the government has made it law that once you're a criminal you shall forever be one, homeless, and being tracked.

The more frightened society becomes, the more frightening we perceive prisoners. Lost in it all is the fact that the most frightening and abusive things happen in homes, by people who profess love and protection. Sexual assault of children in the street is minuscule compared to the sexual assaults that go on for years of children in the privacy of the home and institutions. Women who are viciously bashed, bludgeoned and murdered are overwhelmingly killed by male partners.

Who are peddling these fears and myths? Who benefits from them?

Uncomfortable with confronting the logical outcomes of a society based on power and powerlessness - where the intersections of gender, culture and class determine the abusers and the abused - what better way to deflect the gaze from our rotting cores than to manufacture a myth of prisons which are barely containing monsters and misfits who we can collectively heave a sigh of relief that they are not amongst us.

The gag has been imposed on the outside too. Freedom of Information requests seeking tendering documents, prison contracts, operating manuals, rules and regulations governing private prisons, rates of strip searches and urine testing, rates of self mutilations and self harm have been denied, primarily on the basis of commercial confidentiality. Private prison operators are gagging freedom of speech using writs and threats of defamation. The damages they claim are for their commercial reputation ie. profits. People's lives and the conditions they are confined in come second to the protection of profits - at any cost.

In the 1980s we were pursuing goals as prison abolitionists. In the 1990s we failed in the long term to keep Fairlea Women's Prison open in the face of a dollar drunk government that was dogmatically engaged in an agenda to hand over 1400 prisoners to private prison corporations and ultimately established the first private women's prison in the world outside of the United States. The prison privatisation agenda of governments has internationally been successful in changing the focus of our activism from what goes on in prison, to who runs them. The debate on what prison is for and what it actually does has been hijacked. Governments are desperately washing and wiping their hands to rid themselves of one of their most difficult tasks: the punishment of citizens who breach criminal laws. By privatising prisons they have turned prisoners into commercial commodities attracting exemptions from all sorts of questions: in parliament, under freedom of information and in courts. Furthermore, now that profits are at stake, not the lives of women and men in prison, anyone who says nasty things about the company can expect to be sued for damaging the corporations "commercial reputation". The only other source of accountability - the media - is also gagged. Mention defamation to most media outlets and all of a sudden the story gets too hot.

Regular weekly prisoner's radio programs are a lifeline of communication between prisons and the outside movement. The move to FM radio and networking of programs in the early 1980's, meant that critical programs were squeezed out in favour of more generalist and populist fare this coupled with a fear inherent to government funded stations that their financial life blood would be severed should they report unfavourably on governmental policy and this led to the axing of a number of prison programs throughout Australia. However, a few still remain (in Victoria, Queensland and NSW) on community owned and funded radio stations, staffed by volunteers and free of government intervention or censorship. The number of course falls far short of what is required to service our vast continent, but prison issues rarely attract the dollars needed to pay for airtime and conservative interests tend to dictate broadcast content.

Protests against raging Indigenous deaths in custody captured the Nation, forcing the establishment of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Pamphlets, broadsheets and posters have been produced as part of specific struggles, waging campaigns against the background of a wider critique of the criminal justice system.

Various voluntary organisations are concerned with the problems faced by prisoners. There are those which provide welfare support systems. Groups such as the Council for Civil Liberties which are concerned with due process, discriminatory treatment, and unfair practices, and organisations which have as one of their objectives, political intervention in the prison struggle (eg. PAG, Women Behind Bars)

Prisoners Action Group (PAG) formed in NSW in 1973 after a split from the Penal Reform Council. PAG is committed to abolition and activism and ex-prisoners having the final say on policy. PAG developed into one of the most active, radical forces in the Australian prison movement. Despite facile attempts to discredit it as a terrorist organisation it has maintained its record as a unrelenting group which has campaigned on many fronts, established a self-managed half way house for ex-prisoners and published a number of journals. PAG's were formed in Victoria, Western Australia, Australian Capital Territory, Queensland and South Australia.

In the past, individual unions have taken supportive stands alongside the prison movement. In 1972 the NSW Builders and Labourers Federation (BLF), some of whose members had done time, put a black ban on the construction of Katingal, a windowless concrete tomb in the Long Bay complex, and were initially supported by the Building Workers Industrial Union. However they were eventually sold out by the NSW Trades and Labor Council; a situation which was to re-occur in 1981 when the BLF, supported by the Federated Engine Drivers and Fireman's Association of Australia, the Federal Plumbers and Gasfitters Employees' Union of Australia and the Water and Sewerage Board Employees Union, blackbanned the building of the Parklea prison. Just 4 years after the Katingal incident, NSW Royal Commissioner, Justice Nagle vindicated the BLF stance, condemning Katingal as an electronic zoo, which should never have been built, and in his subsequent report, recommended it's closure.

All of the campaigns around prison have had a broad focus. This is because the factors that lead to people's incarceration and the assumptions that inform the treatment of prisoners proceed from the structural position that blacks and poor white's are assigned in society.

There is a massive drive from all major political parties for more and more law and order policies and laws directed largely at Indigenous communities, young people and the poor. Since the 1980's Australia has been adopting unthinkingly, law and order agendas and strategies from the USA - zero tolerance, mandatory imprisonment, surveillance equipment, chemical weapons, boot camps, leg irons, hog-tying and the prison industrial complex. In a world terrifying itself by its greed, avarice and hatred, it is no wonder that security and monitoring are the fastest growing industries, second only to tourism.

Those of us who point to the society and ideology that has provided the conditions for the fast breeding of private prisons are seen to be paranoid subscribers to conspiracy theories and unwilling to try new things. These private prison companies started and have bred in the south of the US, with the highest incarceration rates in the world, where the remnants of slavery exist, where unions are weak, with the highest and increasing use of the death penalty, and where now that prisons are full, chain gangs are back. These private prison companies are not apparatus of the State, they have an agenda of their own - the maximisation of profit. They have absolutely no vested interest in running prisons or turning out prisoners in a way that assist them never coming to prison again. This would be corporate suicide.

Australia has the greatest proportion of its prisoners in private prisons than any other country. Almost twenty per cent of all prisoners are held in private prisons. This compares to approximately 3% in the United States and 8% in the United Kingdom. All immigration detainees are held in privatised Immigration Detention Centres managed by Australasian Correctional Management Detention Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation. In addition, private prison companies are increasingly capturing contracts for the provision of prisoner transport, court security, and prison health services.

The State of Victoria, where we originate from, has the horrific notoriety of having the highest proportion of prisoners held in private prisons of any jurisdiction in the world. In the space of 13 months Victoria proceeded from having no prisoners in private custody to having 80% of all women prisoners and 40% of all male prisoners in private prisons. In total 45% of Victorian prisoners are held in three private prisons. Prisoner transport, court security, health education, training, and labour have all undergone similar privatisation and contracting out processes. Profit has become the driving imperative of imprisonment not only in Victoria, but increasingly throughout the Country.

How, in eight years, have three multinational prison corporations achieved such a massive penetration and achieved such a powerful monopoly and stranglehold on the lives (and deaths) of prisoners and governments in Australia?

Australia's first private prison was only established in 1990 in Queensland. Borallon Correctional Centre is managed by Corrections Corporation of Australia (CCA) the subsidiary of Corrections Corporation of America. Borallon was the first prison contract outside of the US. CCA Senior Executives such as Terrel Don Hutto, a founding member of CCA, had travelled through Australia in 1989 attempting to persuade State Governments to move down the private prison route. At the time, CCA was a six year old company with only a handful of prison contracts in the US mainly for minimum security and INS detention facilities. Both CCA and Wackenhut and now Group 4 Corrections Services, the English and European Multinational Security and Prison Conglomerate have been backed by some of Australia's largest and wealthiest construction companies and banking and finance partners. All three prison corporations operating in Australia have formed powerful business consortiums that actively lobby Governments to establish private prisons and enlarge existing private prisons.

In only eight years Australia has seen the building and operation of eight private prison in four states with two other states and one Territory actively pursuing private prisons. Almost no State in Australia is untouched by the mania to commodify prisoners lives as a source of profit. The mass privatisation of prisoners in Australia has also had a profound effect on the public sector's management of public prisons who are now forced to operate on a profit driven model. Public corrections agencies are increasingly becoming corporatised and seeking to compete for contracts against private companies in other States and overseas.

The extent of privatisation and the methods used by the corporations involved has had a profound impact on prison activism in Victoria. Mass privatisation in Victoria has diverted the focus of much of our activism and community education away from the people who are in prison, the reasons why they are in prison and what occurs in prison, towards an exposure of the companies involved and the commercial implications of private prisons. It has been vital that we consciously maintain a focus on both aspects - privatisation and peoples lives.

For the past 210 years, the issue of imprisonment in this country has been fiercely debated and contested. For as long as Prisons have been here, people both inside and outside prisons, have loudly and relentlessly spoken out against what occurs to them and others in custody. Deaths in custody, fires, official brutality/state violence, neglect, rapes are all issues on which prisoners, their families and generations of activists have publicly spoken about. With the introduction of private prisons, the commercial reputations of prison corporations are deemed to take precedents over the right of people to speak out about what is occurring in prison. Prison companies have, and continue to, threaten writs of defamation against critics of their operations on the basis that such criticism, debate and scrutiny is potentially damaging of their commercial name ie. there profits. This legal strategy is known as a strategic law suit against public participation or SLAPP Suit. It has been used extensively in the US mainly against environmental activists and was imported to Australia at the same time as the private prison corporations, and continues to be used against prison activists. The sole aim of the SLAPP suit is to intimidate, silence and punish dissenting voices and any other people who may wish to criticise a company. The intimidatory nature of these suits flow onto media agencies who report our criticisms, who are already overly sensitive to corporate concerns, resulting in them being overly cautious in their reporting of even minor incidents.

We have attempted to counter this intimidation by continuing to speak out, by always saying that what we are saying here today could attract a SLAPP suit - exposing their strategy for the world to see. It is important to say, that the companies have never proceeded to court on a single writ.

In the context of writs, claims of 'commercial confidentiality' to deny access to any and all information related to private prisons and strong media self censorship, stories of deaths in custody, brutality, and inhumane treatment are largely only getting outside prison through prison advocates/activists and families of the women and men inside. As an alarming example, the State Government has attempted to 'hide' deaths in custody, deny problems within the prisons, and to trivialise and normalise the ongoing breaches of human rights occurring on a daily basis.

The Metropolitan Women's Correctional Centre (MWCC) opened in August 1996 and is owned and operated by CCA. It was the first private women's prison in the world outside of the US. This 125 bed women's prison has been overcrowded, resulting in double bunking in management and protection areas, there are no activities nor programs for the children living with their mothers in the prison. There has been two deaths in custody since the prison opened. Incidents of self harm and overdoses average at six per week. The drive for increasing profits have ensured that there are limited educational opportunities, insufficient programs for skills development, poor pre-release support and no adequate detox or harm minimisation programs even though over 85% of women inside have drug and/or alcohol dependencies prior to going to prison. The rate of internal violence within this prison has sky rocketed with regular reports of bashings; both officer on women, and women on women. There have been a number of protests in the prison largely over the degree of violence inflicted on prisoners by officers. On one such occasion (April 1996) there was a 'riot' at the prison resulting in the SESG (Security and Emergency Services Group), the prison paramilitary squad, in full riot gear - helmets, shields and weapons - attending the prison and tear gassing three women who were already handcuffed in a prison van, in the prison grounds. After the gassing (this was the first time that gas has been used against women prisoners in Victoria's history) these three women were placed in wet cells and were forcible stripped of their cloths. Hog-tying has also entered our prison system and has been used at the MWCC by officers.

Issues of medical care and treatment are of major concern, both to the women inside and those of us outside. The medical centre was originally tendered out to the Mercy Hospital but this contract was withdrawn in March 1997 over an alleged dispute between CCA and the Mercy Hospital regarding CCA's desire to see staffing reduced. Within this context ISIS Primary Care were given the contract. Women have constantly reported that nursing staff treat health care as a privilege not a right, resulting in nursing staff using medication as a form of punishment by refusing women methadone, and a range of prescribed mediation. Women often enter the prison with addictions which are often central to the reasons why they are imprisonment. They are then prescribed enormous amounts of psychotropic medications as a management tool. The consequences of this type of abusive practices, results in women developing additional addictions to prescribed medication which compound with their pre-existing addictions and personal health issues. Women are then released, drugged off their faces and do not have access to their medical files to even know what drugs they were given inside.

Our Governments 'war on drugs' strategy has resulted in massive urine testing in all prisons to detect drug use, whilst at the same time, there are no detox programs inside and over prescription of psychiatric drugs. Recently it has come to light that the taking of urines on a number of occasion has been very sloppy, to say the least, resulting in a number of women being identified as 'drug users' when in fact medical later acknowledged that this was a 'mistake', that the nurse involved was "a dill" and that she didn't check their medical files for prescribed drugs. We have to ask the question "how often has this happened?" Of further concern is that if women want to challenge a positive urine, then they have to pay $50 for a second test. This is a financial impossibility for many women. For a 'dirty' urine a woman is fined $100 and lose their contact visits. Women are also fined for breaches of internal rules and regulations at an alarming rate. Subsequently many women leave the prison owing hugh debts to CCA and these fines are translated directly into profits for CCA.

The Port Phillip private prison opened in September 1997 and is operated by Group 4. This is a 600 bed maximum security, remand, hospital and protection prison. Since it opened there have been nine deaths in custody, a number of fires, riots, massive internal violence and again very limited educational programs, no detox and no harm minimisation programs. The experience of MWCC has been only magnified many times over at Port Phillip Prison. The prison was built with obvious hanging points in 580 of the 600 cells in direct violation of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. Prior to the opening of the prison, when activists and lawyers inspected the prison, the company representatives were warned that the multiple hanging points, if not immediately removed, would result in ongoing deaths in custody. Within seven months, four men had died of hanging and countless other hanging attempts had been made. It was only after the fourth death and massive community campaigning that the government and Group 4 announced that they would remove these hanging points. The removal of the hanging points was all done by prisoner labour, so not only were prisoners paying for this outrageous situation with their lives, but they were also largely the ones resuscitating other prisoners, cutting prisoners down who had hanged, and were then used as slave labour to 'rectify' the situation whilst Group 4 racked in the profits. The way in which the cells were modified to remove hanging points was punitive, punishing the men again. Book shelves were modified so that books keep falling off, there is no longer any place to put a towel, the windows have been modified resulting in reduced access to fresh air.

Families of the dead men, have so far been denied access to the facts and reasons to why their sons, husbands and fathers have died. Each families grief is overwhelming and they are forced to relive their tragic experiences after each subsequent death at the prison. Instead of acting quickly to end the mounting death toll at the Prison; the Corrections Minister, Bill McGrath, the Department of Justice and the private operators of the Prison, Group 4 have all sought to normalise, trivialise and conceal this ongoing and profoundly shameful and criminally negligent situation.

One thing, is certain, the pain and methods of control tried out on prisoners inside, ultimately always make their way to the outside, like strip searches, smart cards, chemical weapons and electronic monitoring. What goes on in prisons comes over the wall to capture us all. It is only through the formation of authentic alliances across the walls which separate us from our sisters and brothers locked inside, is it possible to struggle together for our collective liberation. Those of us on the outside have a responsibility to speak out about what happens in prison, how people are treated, and the regular denial of the human rights of the millions of women and men worldwide who are suffering, dying, brutalised, humiliated, raped, and bashed in prisons everyday.

The story of our current struggle began with the election of the conservative Coalition Government in Victoria in October 1992. Within days they had announced an agenda to privatise prisons in Victoria and the first step was to close Fairlea Women's prison and relocate all women and their children to Jika Jika, the sensory deprivation prison located inside Pentridge men's prison. So began the 12 month Save Fairlea Campaign. We recognised the irony of prison abolitionists fighting to save a prison, yet the immediacy of the crisis demanded that we focus at least in the short term with stopping women going to men's prisons. Our experience was that when women were held in men's prisons, that they died at an alarming rate, that sexual assault and rapes occurred and that women were discriminated against.

Key aspects of the Save Fairlea Campaign included the establishment of a vigil outside Fairlea which was personed 24 hours a day and continued for over six months. We also undertook massive community education, with speaking tours around country Victoria, addressing public rallies and demonstrations, forming strong links and networks with other community and union struggles, as well as the production of volumes of written materials, articles and fact sheets. We were able to garnish strong media and community interest in the issue which was enhanced by the support of Somebody's Daughter Theatre Company members who spoke out about what happens to women in prison. The campaign was fought on a number of fronts, including taking a case of discrimination to the Equal Opportunity Commissioner (she was subsequently sacked as a result), organising non violent direct action including plans to blockade the entrance and exit roads to the prison, gathering over 18,000 signatures on a petitions, and developing strong alliances with progressive church groups and women's organisations. The government eventually bowed to community pressure and announced that Fairlea would remain, in the short term, but in the long terms it would be replaced by a private prison. Three years later the MWCC opened and women and their children were transferred to the first private prison in Victoria.

With the victory of the Save Fairlea Campaign there was widespread recognition by prison activists of the need to organise against privatisation and ensure a continuing focus on women in prison. Consequently the People's Justice Alliance formed with the aims of preventing any privatisation of correctional services, to support struggles for the rights of people in custody and to fight for prison abolition. PJA has and continues to employ multi-faceted strategies focusing on mass community education and information, direct action and extensive activist and academic research. Again we have maintained strong alliances with community and legal groups and struggles both locally and internationally. In our resistance to mass privatisation of the criminal justice system, we were extremely conscious of the transnational nature of prison privatisation and what occurs in CCA, Wackenhut and Group 4 prisons in the USA and UK and other Australian States would be imposed on Victorian prisoners. What has occurred in Victoria has far surpassed our worst expectations of private prisons.

The Victorian Government at every stage refused to hold a public open inquiry into the merits and justifications of privatisation, and the entire penal privatisation process was shrouded in commercially secret negotiations. The most important and critical parts of the contracts still remain secret 2-3 years after they have been signed. The relentless denial of information by the Government and the private prison operators to the public and to prisoners, has been unmatched anywhere in the world, this has resulted in massive diminution in the public accountability of the corporations and the Government

One of the few tools to challenge this secrecy, has been attempting to use the Freedom of Information Act. This has resulted in completing 100's of FoI applications all at a cost of $20, 100's of rejections largely argued through Commercial Confidentiality, a limited release of contracts with the vital parts deleted due to 'commercial confidentiality' and a court case scheduled for the VCAT (Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal) in late October 1998 where our one probono lawyer is faced by 17 lawyers representing the State Government and the three private prison companies. This case has taken 2 years and 3 months to be scheduled and the companies and the Government are doing all in their powers to get it adjourned again and again. This case is being run by the Coburg Community Legal Centre; a small non profit, free Community Legal Centre.

Another strategy has been our watch dog role. We have been reasonably successful in making prison issues a media issue. In developing strong relationships with people inside as advocates we have the responsibility to speak out about what is happening, to convince the media that deaths in custody, sexual assaults, self harm and medical neglect are issues of vital importance to everyone in the broader community. With one in 165 adults under some form of criminal justice order, then one in 165 has a sister, brother, child, parent, friend in the control of the State and private profit seeking transnational corporations. We have some contact with families of people inside and work with families of those who have died in prison.

The cost in human lives that has occurred through this privatisation process is horrifically beyond anything that we could ever envisage. In the past 18 months nine men and two women have died in Victorian private prisons. Six other men have died in public prisons in this time. Coronial Inquests into deaths in custody have now become one of the few possibilities of any public scrutiny and investigation, of what is occurring within private prisons. In engaging in Coronial Inquests we do so with our eyes open. We know that the system is flawed and that it has no power. The Coroner can only make recommendations which are not enforceable. We know that laws, rules and regulations are designed by the powerful to control those of us who want to seize power. We know that investigations by the Police Prison Squad leave much to be desired and they often fail to interview prisoners and when they do they argue their statements are "not credible" because they are prisoners.

Recognising this, a coalition of legal and community groups have directed much energies and expertise into attempting to demand that Coroners undertake comprehensive Inquiries at inquests. We are currently involved in the inquest of the first woman to die at MWCC - Cheryl Black died on 30 March 1997, she was a 42 year old intellectually disabled woman on remand. After three days of hearing, the Inquest has been adjourned for further investigation to undertaken and for witnesses to appear. What has become apparent in this inquest into the death of Cheryl Black is the way that her life and death were normalised and trivialised. Immediately the media reported her death, the government and CCA announced that it was "natural causes". At the opening of the Inquest all other parties seemed quite happy to skip the investigation and just accept "natural causes". There is nothing 'natural' about the lack of answers for 'glitches' in prison computer records, in staff not being where they should have been, for conflicting stories between women who say they heard her buzzing, and officers who say no one in the entire prison buzzed for over 4 hours. 1999 will be a year of inquests with 18 deaths in custody already pending Inquests. Deaths in custody are not isolated to Victoria. In Wackenhut's Queensland Arthur Gorrie Remand Prison, there have been three deaths in the past 3 months, a total of 11 deaths since it opened. In England seven men died in the first 2 years of the operation of Wackenhut's Doncaster Prison, and earlier this year a finding of unlawful killing was made against CCA in relation to the death in custody of Alton Manning at CCA's Blakenhurst Prison in the UK.

We have made direct action and community education and involvement central to our campaigning. The issues and concerns articulated by those in custody are primary to our campaigns and advocacy and having this focus and commitment has given us a sense of urgency and militancy, making continued struggle an imperative.

Australia is establishing a role of importance in the world community by being consumed by privatisation and corporatisation. We are going further and fast down that track, relinquishing social responsibilities as we go. Australia has not been able to accept and deal with our history of invasion, colonisation, penal servitude, convict and racial history. Adoption of the model of corporatisation continues our history of the suppression of the minority, powerless groups. Australia is being consumed by private prisons, private monopoly and control of all criminal justice and punishment functions, and worse, allowing the corporatisation of all remaining public services. This sets precedent for the imposition of these models and the ability of government to forfeit responsibility, everywhere.

"We create the society, or allow it to be created for us, and therefore have the power to restructure the society that we really want ... Without community monitoring, (and action) abuses of all types will continue to occur and will be compounded by the arrogance and apathy of the bureaucrats running the system."

* Metropolitan Women's Correctional Centre

** Private arm of Corrective Services

*** An additional two new private prisons are planned for Queensland (one 200 bed woman's prison to replace womens section of Boggo Road Gaol, one men's medium security). The establishment of the first prison for the ACT which will be privately operated and Tasmania is discussing seeking tenders for a private prison.

Australian Deaths in custody in Private Prisons 1991-1998

City footpaths are appropriated by private businesses and public seating is being removed in many areas because the culture of people from boarding houses, homeless people, sex workers and aboriginal people who have always lived there are not good for the new yuppie businesses. We also have witnessed the development of design principles specifically to create public seating impossible to sit for any period of time.

Changing all this public space into private profit making space, creates a need to secure and protect these profits through the policing and protection of this now privately owned property. Protection, surveillance and security become overriding concerns of the new capitalist owners. Private security is the second fastest growing industry in Australia.

A 1990 study by the Victorian Community Council Against Violence estimated that 20 per cent of all serious assaults in the State (NSW) were associated with private bouncers at clubs and hotels. A 1995 report by the NSW Police Force on the security industry complained that a number of security guards with apprehended violence orders against them had been issued with firearms, and of the seven security guard training courses examined by the NSW Firearms Registry in 1995, five were cancelled because of improper tactics. In Victoria, after CCA 'own' the contract for prisoner transport, over 30% of their 'private security' failed their firearm test and the State had to supply escorts for six months whilst they attempted to pass the course.

There have been a number of people who have been killed and injured by the unregulated and unregistered private security hoods - three days before Christmas 1995, Brenda Scott was shot in the back, the bullet lodging so close to her spine that she was permanently paralysed, during an armed hold up. It was never determined if she was shot by security guards or the thieves.

Figures obtained in this study showed that people in prison were three times more likely to be murdered and five times more likely to commit suicide. It was obvious that the government was failing in it's responsibilities to ensure the health and well-being of those in it's custody. Indeed the custodial attitude to suicide attempts or self-harm was punitive; it was usually ignored or punished, and labelled by authorities as attention seeking

The findings of the study were as follows:-

Another significant finding, given the high remand populations in particular States was that "remandees and prisoners unfit to plead are grossly over-represented in the overall sample and even more so in the suicides

It was hoped that this report would pave the way in focusing more attention on suicide prevention and the responsible maintenance of official statistics on suicide attempts and incidents of self harm. However, twelve years down the track and a Royal Commission later, there is still a failure by the government to provide regular, accessible statistics, a situation made more difficult by the introduction of private prisons and accompanying corporate confidentiality clauses.

In the absence of government action it is left to organisations such as the Deaths in Custody Watch Committee to monitor prison policies and procedures and keep the public informed of issues relating to deaths and self harm. Crucial to this is the ability of family and friends to have full access to all stages of the investigation into a death in custody to counter the tendency of inquests to be oriented towards the exoneration of correctional staff rather than identifying institutional regimes and practices which may be the cause. People are not consigned to prison by the state to kill themselves or to be killed by others, yet recent trends indicate that this may be the case.

Australia's history is that of colonisation, and the experiences of the Aboriginal population have been those of dispossession and control. The law has been a crucial instrument in that process. Aboriginal deaths in custody is not a modern phenomenon, but further illustration of our discriminatory criminal justice system. The Aboriginal people of Australia are the most incarcerated populations in the world; the heavy policing which permeates Aboriginal life leading to the widespread individual and communal experience of imprisonment.

The continued criminalisation of drunkenness, detention for fine default, high levels of prosecutions for minor offences, conditions of detention and the policing of young Aboriginal people are still issues to which government commitment remains to be proven.

A number of attempts had been made before 1988, to address the increasing rates of Aboriginal deaths in custody, but none of them were particularly successful. Queensland held it's own inquiry in 1987, which was conducted by two Aboriginal men, one of whom was an employee of the State Minister, and the other a Departmental consultant. The Queensland inquiry reported in August 1987 and was promptly criticised for failing to attack the broader issues. Interestingly, just one week after the report's release, one of the author's joined in the criticism, stating the inquiry had been denied access to coronial reports on the deaths.

In 1988, following a series of meetings of police and justice ministers to address the issue of Aboriginal/police relations, the Commonwealth Government released a Code of Practice, incorporating an agreement for each state to consult with their respective Aboriginal Legal Services upon arrest of an Aboriginal person. However this Code of Practice has been implemented by only two States.

Despite this poor track record, the Federal Government called a Royal Commission after first seeking a parliamentary inquiry and inquiry under the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission. Thus the Royal Commission was a welcome, albeit belated, acknowledgment of the seriousness and legitimacy of the demands and concerns of the Aboriginal people and organisations.

While Justice Muirhead found much to criticise in the way Aborigines were dealt with by society, especially police, courts and correctional officers, he refrained from recommending the laying of charges against seemingly culpable parties. Instead, most of the deaths were explained away, the Aboriginal people painted as being victims of circumstance, whose problems would be solved by time, goodwill and money.

Since the Royal Commission closed its doors, Aboriginal deaths in custody have increased at an alarming rate; ninety six deaths since 1989, half of these occurring within 4 years of the Royal Commission.

It is obvious that there has been a widespread failure to implement the recommendations, and the only significant change is the shift in location of death; more Aboriginal people are dying in prison cells rather than in police cells today. In 1997, Aborigines comprised approximately seventeen per cent of the adult prison population and represented eleven per cent of prison deaths. In contrast, they comprised only one and a half percent of the Australian adult population.

The response to Aboriginal deaths remains the same. The police and prison administration remain reluctant to deal with allegations and issues arising in cases of deaths in custody, and the deficiencies in the legal, organisational and ideological make-up of the coronial system continue to exist. On the whole, coroners are insufficiently independent and impartial when dealing with police and government agencies and many barriers exist to the effective participation in the process by families, friends and other interested parties. Public perception is shaped by media reportage, usually reproductions of the `official' version of events. Most deaths are reported as suicides on the basis of government comment, well before an investigation has taken place. Suicide is seen as a result of an inability to cope with incarceration, a weakness, or "inherent deficiency" in Aboriginal people. By playing on people's prejudices, the media assists in making the deaths seem incidental.