When the Queensland Government issued "home confinement orders" under its coronavirus lockdown in March, Tiffany Jager felt a jolt of dread.
Key points:
- Queensland researchers are calling for an end to solitary confinement
- Professor Tamara Walsh says the practice is causing massive harm to prisoners
- A prison officer says it is a vicious cycle that makes disturbed prisoners even worse
"It freaked me at first, I was like, 'I can't go back to that'," she said.
Her experience of confinement had been five months alone in a concrete cell.
That was the result after Ms Jager self-harmed in 2018 while serving time in Brisbane Women's Correctional Centre for a string of minor crimes, including wilful damage, trespass, public nuisance and lighting an unauthorised fire.
She was locked up for 22 hours a day and her fragile mental health went into freefall.
"I started banging my head at one point on the wall," she said.
One of her few lucid moments during a three-day memory blackout was realising she was bleeding from the head.
Ms Jager gave up exercise, her creative writing and her allotted time in the sun.
"I got to a mindset where I would not leave my bed [for a] solid 23 hours," she said.
Now on the outside, the 24-year-old said her depression and anxiety had deepened, and she suffered new panic attacks triggered by loud noises and crowds.
"Mentally, it's taken its toll," she said.
Ms Jager had endured what the United Nations considers a form of torture: confinement with little or no interaction with other prisoners for more than 15 days, 22 hours a day.
But in Australia, prisoners are legally held alone in cells for years.
When Queensland prisons were placed in stage 4 lockdown because of COVID-19, thousands of prisoners were confined to their cells.
Those restrictions were eased in many facilities by Queensland Corrective Services yesterday, but the lockdown remains in place at Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre, Borallon Training and Correctional Centre, Escort and Security Branch Escorts at Wacol, Wolston Correctional Centre and Woodford Correctional Centre.
The dark secret of the justice system
Lawyers often don't know when their clients are in solitary, which is shrouded in official euphemisms such as "segregation", "detention units" or "non-association".
A team of researchers led by University of Queensland law professor Tamara Walsh and the Prisoners Legal Service have called for the elimination of prolonged confinement.
They said solitary confinement was permanently damaging vulnerable prisoners with minor criminal histories and exposing the Queensland Government to future litigation under a new Human Rights Act.
So far, their calls for reform have fallen on deaf ears in government, but have also earned some unlikely allies.
Frontline corrections officers said they had witnessed the violent and psychotic decline of many inmates in solitary, which put them and the community at risk.
The ABC has been told that staff at Borallon Correctional Centre last week reported concerns about a prisoner who was going through a mental health crisis and appeared to be reacting to hallucinations.
A day later, he seriously assaulted three officers. He was placed in solitary confinement in a detention unit.
"None of this is going to make society any safer when he gets out of prison," one officer said.
"It's infuriating that we can see something's mentally off with a prisoner but haven't got the tools to manage him."
'People are literally going mad'
Ms Walsh, a former social worker, said her research on solitary confinement with the Queensland Prisoners Legal Service was the "most harrowing" she had ever done.
"I was astounded by the level of suffering [and] shocked by how little investigation is occurring into these issues," she said.
"There's no doubt in my mind that if people knew the conditions … they would be shocked."
Ms Walsh said documents showed 28 of 30 prisoners in the study suffered a "substantial deterioration" in their mental health conditions because of solitary.
"What that looked like in many situations was that an individual who wasn't experiencing psychotic delusions before was now experiencing delusions, was engaging in obsessive behaviours that they'd never engaged in, was smearing faeces — and that was a very common report," she said.
"People are literally going mad in Queensland's solitary confinement cells."
Prisoners hide mental health issues to avoid solitary
Thai Babarovich suffered in solitary like his father before him.
He has heard stories from the notorious "black hole" at Brisbane's Boggo Road jail, an underground punishment unit that was shut down on human rights grounds in the 1980s.
"My father and another mate said they would play a game where they'd take a button off their shirt, flick it around their [pitch black] cell and then they'd have to walk around on their hands and knees and try to find it," Mr Babarovich said.
A generation on, he said he had been in solitary five times while serving time for arson, assault and breaching domestic violence orders.
"It's a mind-altering head f***," he said.
"There's nothing in there, mate. You got your toilet, you got a water basin, you got a mattress on a bed that is mounted to the wall.
"It scares the f*** out of me going into those f***ing cells — even though there's no-one there to hurt me. I do harm to myself — within my own mind."
Mr Babarovich said prisoners, especially Indigenous inmates like him, learned to hide mental health problems to avoid being put in isolation on suicide watch.
"Well, you get punished for it."
Mr Babarovich is now treated for depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety but remains "fearful to talk to anyone about my mental health status".
His longest time in solitary confinement began as a week in a detention unit over a jail fight.
He said that became three weeks after he was denied permission to go to his uncle's funeral.
"Arrangements were made, I had the escort, but I had no officers and so I couldn't go, and I broke down and cried," he said.
"And they automatically thought, suicide (risk)."
Mr Babarovich said three weeks became nine when on the cusp of release, he attacked a corrections officer he claims racially insulted him.
"I punched him in the mouth and turned around and walked back and lay back down on the bed."
Prison staff attacked, frustrated
Queensland corrections officer 'Thomas', who asked not to be identified, said solitary confinement was a vicious cycle — the more violent or disturbed prisoners became, the longer they stayed.
Some prisoners became "almost catatonic", he said.
Others could lash out or "engage in quite disturbing behaviours such as assaulting staff with bodily fluids or covering themselves and their cells in faeces", he said.
Thomas said prison overcrowding meant vulnerable prisoners were routinely placed in detention units instead of "a more therapeutic environment".
He recalled one prisoner was "quite determined to self-harm" but, when repeatedly thwarted by staff looking after him, "began attacking staff instead".
This earned the prisoner six months of solitary confinement in maximum security.
Another vulnerable prisoner earlier this year wound up in hospital after being goaded into self-harming by a violent prisoner who was within earshot of him in a detention unit, Thomas said.
He said prison staff were frustrated that vulnerable prisoners "end up in solitary confinement conditions simply because we have nowhere else to put them".
The ABC requested permission to visit solitary confinement units but the Department of Correctional Services refused.
'Safety guides decision making'
Queensland's Corrective Services Minister Mark Ryan said in prisons, "Safety guides all decision making, including around the use of prisoner isolation."
"While the Government acknowledges isolation is not always ideal, sometimes it is necessary and justified," he said.
Mr Ryan said the Government was doing "important work to enhance rehabilitation supports", including by investing in prisoner health services.
He said the Government had also committed to building the new $650 million Southern Queensland Correctional Precinct Stage 2, which is "influenced by a therapeutic operating model" and slated to open by 2023.
A Department of Corrective Services spokesman said it would include a "built environment allowing more options for managing prisoners with complex mental health issues".
The Corrective Services spokesman said the reality of operating prisons included having to deal with "the built environment and the extent of the prison population".
This meant "we need to balance the rights of the most challenging and dangerous individuals with our obligation to ensure safety for everyone in the prison environment".
"It is a fact that a small number of Queensland's prison population pose real and significant risk to themselves or those around them," the spokesman said.
The spokesman said decisions to curtail prisoners' rights by isolating them were "not made lightly [and are] regularly reviewed by decision makers".
He said Queensland Corrective Services was "tasked by the community with the humane containment and supervision of prisoners and offenders".
There had been a "recent focus" on human rights legislation, including the state Human Rights Act and UN protocols "which guide the way that we operate".
"These are worthy and important principles, and every day our officers make thousands of decisions, large and small, that take into consideration the rights of the individual to the greatest possible extent."
'We're doing nothing but warehousing criminals'
Human Rights Watch campaigner Kriti Sharma, who visited Queensland prisons for a 2018 report, said there was "no excuse for Australia to be using solitary confinement against prisoners with disabilities in 2020".
"The major issue in Queensland is that it's legal," she said.
But she conceded reform was an uphill battle when "prisons are not a very popular issue [and] not a lot of government spending goes into prisons".
Queensland's prison population has ballooned by 62 per cent in the past eight years to more than 9,000.
But Queensland prison capacity is less than 7,700.
Thomas said new laws banning solitary would "change nothing" when jail overcrowding meant there were no facilities to properly deal with violent and vulnerable prisoners.
"The Government's not only failed present staff in failing to expand facilities… ultimately they're failing the community.
"They'll get out of prison generally worse than how they came into prison, and so ultimately our society is the one that will pay that bill."
Professor Walsh said when prolonged confinement was banned, as occurred in Canada, "suddenly alternatives become available" and segregation did not have to mean sensory deprivation.
She said authorities could provide de-escalation rooms that calmed distressed prisoners by displaying "nature imagery" or playing music or audiobooks.
The UQ report also called for new oversight by judges and independent psychiatrists when prisoners were placed in segregation for more than two days.
Ms Jager said in the age of COVID-19 lockdowns, the public might have more empathy for the plight of prisoners in solitary confinement.
"In their confinement, [the public] get more than what we do. They get TV, they get a private shower and a private toilet where you're not being monitored and watched.
"But I hope they can realise and get a sense of what that's like just being trapped in a room because it's horrible.
"In prison, you're being kept away from family, friends, your life outside; that's punishment enough."
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiXGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvbmV3cy8yMDIwLTA4LTMxL3NvbGl0YXJ5LWNvbmZpbmVtZW50LXF1ZWVuc2xhbmQtaHVtYW4tcmlnaHRzLzEyNTk4MzM00gEnaHR0cHM6Ly9hbXAuYWJjLm5ldC5hdS9hcnRpY2xlLzEyNTk4MzM0?oc=5
2020-08-30 20:03:00Z
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