Dignity for People in Prison
Our vision: Governments working towards closing, rather than opening, prisons and all people behind bars are treated with dignity – with prison operators and governments held to account for mistreatment.
Ending routine strip searching
Strip searches involve forcing someone to remove their clothes in front of two prison guards. Routine strip searches are invasive, dehumanising and an utterly archaic practice. Children as young as 10 are being routinely strip searched by prison guards.
In 2019, the Human Rights Law Centre made a suite of Freedom of Information applications which unearthed shocking data on the huge numbers of strip searches that governments are undertaking on women and children in prisons across Australia.
Children in prison are much more likely than children in the community to be survivors of violence and sexual abuse and to struggle with their mental health. But, in one month alone, kids at two facilities in NSW were strip searched 403 times. Only one item – a ping pong ball – was found.
The information we uncovered led to Tasmania changing their policies to stop the practice of routinely strip searching children.This built on the progress made in 2018, with landmark laws ending routine strip searching of children in the Northern Territory and policy reforms in Victoria, which have drastically reduced the use of strip searches in women’s prisons.
The Human Rights Law Centre also joined the WA Independent Inspector of Custodial Services’ call for an end to routine strip searches. The Inspector called them “pointless, repetitive and dehumanising” given the harm caused and the extremely low rates of prohibited items detected. Almost a million strip searches had taken placed in WA prisons in five years, including strip searches of 374 children (half who were four years old or younger) visiting family in prison.
We will continue to push for a swift end to this degrading practice in all prisons, with a focus on women’s and kids’ prisons.
Shining a spotlight on Victoria’s broken mental health system
Increasingly, prisons are becoming warehouses for people living with a mental illness. People experiencing mental health issues are being forced into the quicksand of the criminal legal system, rather than being provided with care and supported in the community.
Fifty-three per cent of young people in Victorian prisons present with mental health issues. Sixty-one per cent of men and 65 per cent of women in prison report experiencing a mental health condition.
In 2019, the Human Rights Law Centre engaged with the Royal Commission into Victoria’s Mental Health System to address this issue. We recommended keeping treatment and support in the community, raising the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 14 years, providing more diversion opportunities at all points in the criminal legal process and reforming bail laws to prevent the criminalisation of people experiencing mental illness.
Shahleena Musk and Ruth Barson of the Human Rights Law Centre’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ rights team.
Stopping solitary confinement in Victoria
Solitary confinement can inflict long-term and irreversible harm on people, from anxiety and depression, to hallucinations, psychosis and risk of suicide. In 2019, our advocacy played a key role in progressing an end to solitary confinement in Victoria. Our team provided expert and practical advice that helped shape a landmark report from the Victorian Ombudsman, which for the first time called on the Victorian Government to prohibit the use of solitary confinement.
The report details harrowing experiences, including cases of young people in Victoria’s Port Phillip Prison held in effective solitary confinement for over 100 days and put into cells described as “exceedingly bleak” and “brutal”, with faeces and flooded floors. At the Malmsbury youth jail, a 16-year-old Aboriginal boy was isolated 45 times in 12 months.
We continue to advocate for all governments to ban solitary confinement in law.
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