By Kath Kenny
SYDNEY — Private security is the second fastest growing industry in Australia after tourism, and Australia now has one of the highest rates of prisoners in private prisons in the world. Last week, John Hannaford, the NSW attorney general, announced that Long Bay jail will be bulldozed and completely rebuilt. The new jail for approximately 1200 prisoners will be put up for tender. This announcement comes in the wake of the less than successful example of the state's first private prison, Junee Correctional Centre, a facility reportedly plagued with violence and budget shortfalls.
Every weekend for the last few months, "Alice"* has been making the 11-hour return trip from Sydney to the south-western NSW town of Junee. Her husband "Patrick", an inmate at Junee Correctional Centre, was recently transferred after serving the first 10 months of his sentence at the Long Bay Remand Centre. Patrick was one of a number of medium security inmates who were unceremoniously shipped off to Junee from Long Bay and other metropolitan jails in what seems to be a purely cost-cutting exercise by the Department of Corrective Services.
Alice informed the Campaign Exposing Frame-ups and Targeting Abuses of Authority (CEFTAA) that on one recent visit, the 14 women and children who used the subsidised bus service were given a military-style greeting by Junee security staff with "dogs and orders to 'get up against the wall'. They searched us, but I refused to be searched until they found a woman officer."
Alice was kept waiting for almost an hour before she could see Patrick, even though the bus was leaving in four hours. She said that the visiting area is a five-kilometre walk over paddocks — there are no roads or buses.
The background to these events appears to be a recent visit by the commissioner of the Department of Corrective Services to Junee Correctional Centre. He was reportedly outraged during a recent visit to find that there were 60 "empty cells" at Junee.
A source at the Department of Corrective Services told CEFTAA that the decision to move prisoners to Junee was a largely monetary one. It is a private prison run by the security company Australian Correctional Management (ACM), and taxpayers pay "whether there is anyone there or not". In other words, ACM is paid for capacity rather than occupancy.
Most of the prisoners involved in the recent round of transfers were given minimal notice (in some cases as little as 24 hours) and no opportunity for any form of appeal.
Twelve months ago, the then minister for justice claimed that "the Department of Corrective Services would not force people who vehemently objected to go to Junee, such as those who were likely to commit suicide or be violent" (Sydney Morning Herald, 17/4/93). This statement was made in the context of a suicide of a prisoner at Long Bay Correctional Centre after he was informed of his impending transfer to Junee. Reports of violent outbursts at Junee are significantly more common than at the more closely monitored metropolitan jails.
The extreme reluctance of prisoners to be transferred to Junee would seem to indicate that, despite its modern facilities, it is a far from attractive option for the majority of prisoners. The Arthur Gorrie Prison in Queensland, which, like Junee, is run by Australian Correctional Management, experiences a "much higher than the national average" rate of deaths, according to David Biles from the Australian Institute of Criminology.
Even though Junee is situated in a region from which 2.5% of the state's prison population is drawn, it now accommodates some 10% of the NSW prison population. One of the major difficulties for many prisoners is separation from families and friends. Much has been made of the all-day weekend visiting schedule at Junee by the Correctional Services public relations arm. However, the only subsidised bus service from Sydney (currently a $25 return fare for adults) operates on Saturdays only, and leaves exactly four hours after arrival.
This service is not even guaranteed to run each weekend. When it is running, the maximum possible visiting period for anyone using it is three and a half hours — at the cost of 11 hours of travel time and $55 for an adult and two children.
Alice also told CEFTAA that anyone who used other forms of transport (in order to be able to stay in Junee overnight) had a choice among three places advertised as "bed and breakfast". Two of these "hotels" did not serve food and the third would not accommodate women.
The current high levels of recidivism and unsuccessful "integration" post-release point directly to the failure of the system to take into account the consensus in the department's own research, as well as that of independent experts, as to the crucial importance of supportive and unbroken family connections during incarceration.
In a recent letter to CEFTAA, Michael Photios, the minister assisting the minister for justice, said that "the need to ensure that all correctional facilities are properly utilised in order to achieve the rehabilitative objectives of the correctional system is a prime consideration of the placement system". In the same letter he confirmed that "most of the state's medium security accommodation is now located in country areas". This sort of double speak only confirms that the department is wilfully ignoring its own stated objective — the "rehabilitation" of prisoners.
Privatisation of state correctional systems raises many other issues: the profits able to be appropriated from prison labour, the contracting out of prison services to local business and political interests (such as a local council member at Junee) and the use of local unemployed populations to fill non-unionised prison staff positions. The fact that contracts are not subject to Freedom of Information — because of commercial confidentiality — intensifies suspicion in relation to the operation of private prisons. [* Names have been changed in order to protect privacy. Kath Kenny is a CEFTAA organiser. CEFTAA can be contacted on (02) 281 5100.]