We act as though people in prison deserve everything they get. They don’t
The child torture we witnessed on Four Corners is part of a continuum that allows sexual, psychological, social and physical violence as a matter of cours.
It was a hot summer’s night and my mother was in tears. My brother had been assaulted by four men, the third time he had been attacked, each time with multiple assailants. The previous battering had left him with a mouthful of dead teeth, loss of vision in his eye that still hadn’t returned, and, I feared, lasting trauma.This time, for almost two hours, Nick had pushed the duress button again and again, but no one came. It was the night before his release from Port Phillip prison, his fourth time in prison, and the last.He wanted my mum to help, but he didn’t want her to contact the prison. He was scared what they would do to him. Following the previous attack, with significant advocacy from my brother, our family and tireless work from prisoner advocate Charandev Singh, he had been transferred out of Port Phillip.Ten days before his release, he was told he was going back. Nick told the prison officials he would not be safe. They told him if he did not get on the bus they would kick his arse. He had already spent many days in solitary confinement. He got on the bus.
With the choice between ignoring my brother’s cry for help and ignoring his request not to contact prison officials, I rang the prison. My brother had been beaten under their care, I told them, for the third time. “Why was that?” I was asked. “You tell me,” I replied. “Was he on methadone?” came the response, and when I said yes, he was on buprenorphine, the prison officer said “Oh, well then”.
The comment echoed the constant response I got in the months my brother was held at Port Philip prison. If there was a belief at Port Philip that using prescription medication to help combat drug addiction should not make you an inevitable target of threats and assaults, I saw no evidence of it. But bupe was just one of many excuses. There were countless reasons a prisoner could be brutalised, I’ve learned, all of them his or her own fault.
For the months my brother was in prison (including on remand), we had walked a fine line between advocating for his rights and imperilling him by daring to challenge the prison. But this was his last night, and I was furious. He would be out in the morning, and they hadn’t even bothered to keep him safe on this last day. I work in the community sector, I told them, and if we had this level of violence against our clients, we’d have to change something.
“This is a different world,” I was told.
Of that I was clear. It was a world without human rights.
Monday night’s Four Corners report demonstrated – like the terror camps on Nauru and Manus Island – the very worst of the brutal rights-devoid prison world.
The torture and terrorising of children is profoundly distressing. It is right that the prime minister has called a royal commission. But it is clear that this violence is not an aberration in the prison system; not something confined to the Northern Territory alone. It is intrinsic to the prison system across this country.
The child torture we witnessed on Four Corners is part of a continuum that allows sexual, psychological, social and physical violence as a matter of course and from all directions, against children and adults, men and women, and that beats down most brutally on Indigenous people.
Indeed it could be argued the prison system requires this violence. In the absence of a real commitment to human rights and an ambition for rehabilitation, the prison system uses violence to control prisoners and in doing that is happy to break them.
In the absence of genuine social acknowledgement that prisoners are disproportionately and overwhelmingly themselves, first, victims of crime, society elects to look the other way when prisoners are brutalised. This is a system that intentionally maligns and silences prisoners, that says that any harm they experience must be their fault or their due. And we buy it.
It says everything that the gassing of children exposed by Four Corners was first described as a riot. How many prison “riots” are the desperate attempts by brutalised prisoners – whether asylum seekers or remandees – to resist state violence against them?
When my brother was in jail for assault, theft and credit card fraud, on regular visits I constantly wondered what happened to the prisoners who didn’t have family, whose families were struggling too much just managing to keep things together to get to visit much, who couldn’t navigate the journey to prisons which were hard to get to and with poor public transport, who had learned that pushing for human rights led to a worse backlash, or who were just broken hearted by the situation they had found themselves in.
What happened to the prisoners who had no one to back them when they stood up for themselves, no one to ring when they feared they would be beaten to death? We act as though people in prison deserve anything they get. They don’t.
But even if they did, do we really think if we are willing to look away when the victims are adult criminals, this systemic violence will not crash down on children too?
The prime minister’s announcement of a royal commission might be welcome but exposure is not enough, as we have seen in the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse.
We cannot get systemic change without public knowledge of the violence perpetrated in our name. But fixing systems for the future doesn’t do enough for those who have already experienced the devastating harm of unacknowledged violence and abuse.
Survivors of institutional child abuse are more likely to be poorer and sicker than the rest of the population, and more likely to be criminalised. This penalty must be reversed if we are to say justice has been done.
Acknowledging violence against them may give survivors more space to heal and help them make sense of their lives, but it does not, as my brother points out, make up for the thirty years of superannuation that you didn’t accumulate because you never really worked, for the financial support you can’t give your kids because you’re poor yourself, for the teeth you lost because you couldn’t afford the dentist.
For this new royal commission, and the one already going, we need restitution and compensation for survivors. It isn’t fair to ask survivors to help us fix the system to avoid future violence, without materially fixing the impact past violence has had on them.
That restitution must include a transformation of our prisons, not just to avoid further torture of children, but because many children and adults abused and tortured in the past are in adult prisons now.
Contrary to the lie the prison manager told me, prisons are not a different world. They’re part of our world; they hold our children and brothers, our daughters and our dads. We can’t continue to let our prisons so brutally ruin their live
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