‘We’re people and we need justice’: Inside the vicious prison cycle - SMH - Ella Archibald-Binge, Nigel Gladstone, Rhett Wyman AUG 24, 2020
Karen Roberts says her younger brother's death in custody in 2001 broke her family.
Karen Roberts was making plans for her brother's 21st birthday, to coincide with his imminent release from prison, when she received the news that would turn her family's life upside down.
Her youngest brother, David, had tried to hang himself in Grafton prison. He died two days later at the Lismore Base Hospital in November 2001.
When Karen speaks about that day in the hospital, she closes her eyes, turns her face up to the sun and lets the tears flow.
"He was breathing and he could hear us, I know he could hear us because he was squeezing my hand. Then they turned the machine off because they said he'd gone too long without oxygen."
Karen says her brother's death broke her family.
"Mum passed away with a broken heart. All we got back from the jail was a box with his things."
The final instalment of
the Herald's investigation
of interactions between First Nations people and the criminal justice system
examines the lingering impacts of deaths in custody, the stark
over-representation of Indigenous people in NSW prisons and the failing efforts
to curb recidivism despite hundreds of millions of dollars being spent to stop
it.
Karen Roberts was taken from her mother's care as a baby. She and David, the
youngest of seven siblings, were raised in foster care on the north coast. Her
brother was in primary school when he first entered the prison system's
revolving door.
This crossover between out-of-home care and juvenile detention is not uncommon. Nationally, young people in the child protection system were 12 times more likely to be under youth justice supervision from 2014 to 2016. In the same period, Indigenous young people were 16 times more likely to be involved in both systems than other young people.
A meeting of attorneys-general last month rejected calls to raise the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 14, despite evidence that young children lack the brain development to manage impulse control and often become trapped in the prison system.
David Allan Roberts died in custody in 2001, aged 20.
During the coronial inquest into David's death, lawyers for his family questioned why he had been left alone in a cell given his at-risk status as a young Aboriginal man. They asked why the hanging points in the cell hadn't been removed, as recommended by the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody in 1991. And they argued that the response of the prison guard who found him, who wasn't carrying the required tools to cut him free, was inadequate.
Former NSW deputy coroner, Carl Milovanovich, found that it may have been a failing not to classify David as a high risk prisoner, in light of the royal commission, and that "perhaps he should have been moved" out of confinement.
He said all hanging points within a cell should be made inaccessible. The coroner said he had reservations about whether the response of the prison guard was inadequate, but while he did not believe the guard was "entirely straightforward with all his evidence," ultimately there was probably little else he could have done.
Two decades on, Karen says her family has never healed. In the intervening years, she has lost her mother and her younger sister. The mother-of-seven has been homeless on and off until recently finding a house in Ballina.
Her sons, in particular, were deeply affected by the loss of their uncle: "He was like their rock, their strength." Two of them are now in prison.
"I worry all the time. I just pray," says Karen.
"When our mob go to jail, the families do that time with the person that's in custody, because we've all got that fear in the back of our head - are they safe? Are we going to get that call?"
In the front window of Karen's home hangs a poster with David's photo, the date of his death and a plea to stop black deaths in custody.
"People need to be held accountable for what's happened, otherwise it's going to keep going. Ignorance isn't an option anymore. It's 2020. We're actually here, we're people and we need justice."
Activists prepare for a Black Lives Matter rally in Lismore
In the main street of Lismore, Black Lives Matter activists are erecting signs in preparation for their third rally in two months. Front and centre is a poster with bold red, black and yellow letters: "Stop killing us."
Several passing cars beep in support. Another driver yells, "Get a real hobby!".
Supporters are signing letters calling on NSW Police Minister, David Elliott, and Corrections Minister, Anthony Roberts, to take urgent action to stop the "abhorrent treatment" of Aboriginal people by the justice system.
Their demands include -
1. the repeal of punitive bail laws and mandatory sentencing,
2. decriminalisation of public drunkenness,
3. raising the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 16,
4. an independent investigation of deaths in custody; and
5. the expansion of Aboriginal-led court programs such as the Koori Courts.
The Herald previously revealed that Indigenous people who live in the Richmond-Tweed and Sydney city areas were twice as likely as non-Indigenous people to go to jail for any offence in the four years up to 2019.
Microphone in hand, she spends a good five minutes reading out the names of hundreds of Aboriginal people who have died in police or prison custody since a landmark inquiry laid out a roadmap to stop such deaths 30 years ago.
More than 400 Indigenous people have died in custody since 1991. There have been no convictions over the deaths.
"That's what this fight is about," Cindy says. "Where's the justice in this country? The system is racist."
As a proportion of all prisoners who die in custody, Aboriginal people do not die at a greater rate than non-Indigenous people. But as a proportion of the Indigenous population, Aboriginal people are 10 times more likely to die in prison.
The leading cause of deaths in custody for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is medical issues, but there are stark differences in the way Aboriginal people have been treated by police and prison staff, as detailed in numerous coronial inquests.
In 2008, a Ngaanyatjarra elder known as Mr Ward cooked to death in a prison transport van in Western Australia. In some Aboriginal communities, the names of the deceased are not used for cultural reasons.
Yamatji woman Ms Dhu died in WA police custody in 2014 after being arrested for unpaid fines. A coronial inquest found the 22-year-old had been subjected to "inhumane" treatment by police prior to her death and suffered a catastrophic deterioration in her health during her three days in custody.
In 2017, Yorta Yorta woman Tanya Day was arrested in Victoria for falling asleep on a train while intoxicated. She knocked her head repeatedly in a police cell and died in hospital 17 days later. The coroner found her death was preventable.
There are numerous other examples of Aboriginal prisoners who were denied pain medication or whose medical symptoms were overlooked.
"There's no words to describe the hurt, all the pain and the suffering since colonisation, and we still suffer today because we're Aboriginal," Cindy says.
Among Black Lives Matter activists in Lismore, there is a sense of unease about a new mega-prison that has just opened two hours down the road, south of Grafton.
The Clarence Correction Centre is Australia's largest prison. Around three in 10 inmates are Indigenous.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up a quarter of the NSW prison population and 39.5 per cent of all young people in jail are Indigenous.
Recidivism in NSW has reached its highest point since 2002 despite the state government spending $330 million on its reduction over four years. Since 2011, successive state Liberal governments have campaigned on a pledge to reduce recidivism by 5 per cent, yet the issue has grown steadily worse over the past decade.
More than half of Indigenous adults who left prison between 2017 and 2018 reoffended within the next 12 months, figures from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research show.
Criminals who were sentenced to an alternative to prison were far less likely to reoffend in the subsequent year, the data shows.
Justice reinvestment advocates say the $700 million spent on Grafton's new jail should instead have been funneled into local programs to find solutions to overcome the drivers of crime and incarceration.
'I couldn't believe my eyes': The thin blue line between race and policing
The prison is privately run by Serco, an international company that operates Australia's onshore immigration detention centres, along with several correctional facilities in Australia, New Zealand and the UK.
The company has a fraught history. Serco lost its Mt Eden Prison contract in New Zealand after evidence emerged of fight clubs within the jail, while two years ago its Acacia Prison in WA was described in media reports as a "powder keg waiting to explode" due to overcrowding and dangerous working conditions.
In the lead up to Lismore's Black Lives Matter rally, two Aboriginal men died in Acacia Prison within the space of a month.
Cindy Roberts doesn't mince words when talking about Serco.
"They don't care about us, they don't care about nobody," Cindy says. "They care about the privatisation and the money-making business in the prisons."
The Herald was granted access to the Clarence Correctional Centre, a 1700-bed complex that general manager Glen Scholes dubs a "catalyst for systemic improvement" in NSW prisons.
There are no bars. Guards wear name badges. Inmates are addressed by their first names, instead of surnames or numbers, and provided with tablets (without internet) to complete educational courses, find work within the complex or call their family. Body scanners reduce the need for strip searches.
Aboriginal cultural and religious advisers Lisa Laurie and Shayne Rawson (far right) with correctional supervisor, Damian Beetson, and general manager, Glen Scholes, at the Clarence Correctional Centre.
"We treat everyone here as a person," Scholes says. "When you walk up to a prisoner and say good morning, it's the start of a different day."
Upon release, inmates will be given an app and 1800 number to call for help if they find themselves homeless or at-risk after their release.
Aboriginal people twice as likely to get a jail sentence, data shows
The operating model, which includes financial incentives for reduced recidivism, is part of the NSW government's Better Prisons initiative focused on prisoner rehabilitation. If successful, it could be adopted statewide.
Scholes says many prisoners end up back in jail because, upon release, they return to the same environment and face the same issues that led to them offending in the first place: "If you change nothing, nothing changes."
He says the last thing he wants to see is a death in custody.
"Can I say it'll never happen? No, I can't. Can I say we'll do everything in our power to make sure it doesn't happen? Absolutely."
For Cindy Roberts, she's waiting to see whether the company's words will translate into actions: "Only time will tell."
These days, Karen Roberts finds solace in nature, gathering plants used for bush medicine.
"If I didn't have my culture after all the trauma that we've gone through, I don't think I would've survived. It's the only thing that kept me strong and kept me sane, made me feel safe."
Lifeline: (13 11 14 and lifeline.org.au), the Suicide Call Back Service (1300 659 467 and suicidecallbackservice.org.au) and beyondblue (1300 22 4636 and beyondblue.org.au).