Rights of prisoners cast aside
By Monique Hurley, Associate Legal Director,
Human Rights Law Centre
Recently, a report tabled in the Victorian Parliament by the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission uncovered serious and systemic wrongdoing in Victorian prisons.
The Andrews government should be horrified by IBAC’s Special report on corrections, which paints a shocking picture of what goes on in prisons and how human rights are disregarded behind closed doors.
Several of the report’s findings centred on events at Port Phillip Prison – a maximum-security private prison – where prison guards deployed excessive force and assaulted two people; used inappropriate strip-searching practices; and deliberately tampered with body worn camera footage.
The strip searches were inconsistent with the right of people deprived of liberty to be treated with dignity, and the conduct towards one of the men who was assaulted, who has an intellectual disability, amounted to cruel or degrading treatment.
The report highlights Victoria’s skyrocketing prison population – doubled in the last decade largely due to the Andrews government’s ‘tough on crime’ bail reforms – as a factor that increases the risk of wrongdoing behind bars.
While those bail reforms were intended to target men who commit violent offences, they have caused a mass imprisonment crisis impacting women experiencing poverty and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women the most.
Victoria now has some of Australia’s most draconian and dangerous bail laws that regularly fail to uphold the most basic tenets of a fair and equal justice system.
Recent Corrections Victoria data shows that over half the women in Victorian prisons are unsentenced. Many have not been found guilty of the alleged offending they were arrested for.
More people are being denied bail not because they pose a risk to the community, but because they themselves are at risk – of family violence, homelessness, economic disadvantage and mental illness. This makes it harder to put forward a case in favour of bail, which makes imprisonment the default setting.
Abuse thrives behind bars and current bail laws funnel too many people into a prison system that can literally strip them of their dignity.
Rather than address this, the Andrews government has committed $1.8 billion to increase the number and size of Victorian prisons. They have recruited more guards and increased reliance on private prisons.
Now, over 40 per cent of Victoria’s prison population are detained in private prisons where profits too often trump respect for human rights.
Premier Andrews would not need to build more prisons if he fixed Victoria’s broken bail laws.
Locking up more and more people is not what a fair and just society does. Addressing injustice and reducing the number of people in Victorian prisons is the path a brave government would take.
First published in the Herald Sun