Winning elections by killing prisoners
Comment by Karen Fletcher
Between 1980 and 1998, the Australian prison population on any given day rose from an average of 9600 to an average of 19,906. The vast majority of prisoners serve sentences of less than two months; tens of thousands more people spend time in Australian prisons today than ever before.
In 1988, Aboriginal people were 14.7% of the prison population. By June 1998, this had increased to 18.8%. In the decade before the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (whose report was released in May 1991), 12.1% of deaths in custody were of Aboriginal people. In the years since, this proportion has risen to 17.2%.
These are just some of the findings of a recent paper released by the Australian Institute of Criminology. Aboriginal Deaths in Prison 1980 to 1998: National Overview (October 1999) by Vicki Dalton, assisted by Robyn Edwards, sets out numerous extremely disturbing findings based on a recent analysis of the data collected by the AIC's Deaths in Custody Monitoring Program.
The report found that Aboriginal deaths in custody have doubled nationally since 1980. The proportion of Aboriginal men aged 20-24 who have died has risen from 7.7% to 27.5% of all Aboriginal deaths in custody.
Suicide accounts for 46.6% of all prison deaths. In each year since 1995, suicide has been the cause of more than 50% of all deaths of Aboriginal people in prison. This is the first time that suicide has overtaken illness as the most common cause of death of Aboriginal people in prison.
The proportion of Aboriginal prisoners who died while being held on remand more than doubled from the 1980s to the 1990s, from 15.4% to 32.5%. More than 40% of Aboriginal prisoners who died in the two decades since 1980 died within three months of admission to prison.
These figures confirm that Australian politicians continue to trade in prisoners' lives in their efforts to win state and federal "law and order" auctions. Harsher sentences, abolition of parole through "truth in sentencing" schemes, campaigns of terror in the "war on drugs", racist anti-youth crusades in the outer suburbs of big cities and in country towns — in short, the "stock in trade" of every aspiring politician — have taken the lives of increasing numbers of prisoners, black and white, in overcrowded and dysfunctional prisons across the country.
As a legal advocacy service for prisoners and their families, the Prisoners Legal Service has tried many times to speak to politicians, both Coalition and ALP, about the incalculable damage they are doing with their populist scare tactics on law and order. We have found that although they have a sophisticated knowledge of polling and electoral strategies in marginal electorates, they have, without exception, displayed absolute ignorance of criminological research regarding violence, unemployment, heroin and alcohol addiction, rehabilitation and conditions of life for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
As a minister for corrective services once said to me when I suggested a few minor, proven, reforms: "What you are saying may well be true, young lady, but I won't do it because I didn't get here by losing elections".
[Karen Fletcher is a solicitor and coordinator of the Prisoners Legal Service in Queensland.]