WA minister claims Aboriginal people safer in jail
BY ROBERTO JORQUERA
PERTH — The Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia has called for the immediate resignation of the state's Aboriginal affairs minister, Kim Hames, after he told a Legislative Assembly budget estimates committee that imprisonment may reduce, rather than increase, the risk of suicide among some Aboriginal youths.
The legal service's chief executive officer, Dennis Eggington, said Hames "has shown that he is unable to talk about the people he has a duty of care for without denigrating them" and that the minister "cannot represent the interests of Western Australian Aborigines. If he hadn't lost the total confidence of Aboriginal peoples of Western Australia, it is certainly lost now."
On May 26, a 25-year-old Aboriginal man was found dead in his cell at Kalgoorlie Prison. He was the third death in the state's prisons in five days, the fourth in two weeks — three of the four men were Aboriginal.
The justice department immediately issued a statement that there were no suspicious circumstances, even though the death is now the subject of a coronial inquiry to determine whether or not that it is the case.
"Our people are still dying in their jails", the chairperson of WA's Deaths in Custody Watch Committee, Murray Jones, said. "And yet the prisons, the ministry of justice and the minister continue to try to hide the facts surrounding each death.
"If they have got nothing to hide, why have they tried to stop the watch committee's own independent investigation of prison deaths, and why have they so strongly resisted our forensic consultant gaining access to the scene of death and photographing necessary evidence on behalf of the lawyers representing the families?", Jones asked.
The watch committee has called for a royal commission into WA prison deaths and for the prison police unit to be replaced by independent investigators.