Gunnai, Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung independent Victorian Senator Lidia Thorpe secured Senate support on September 19 to require the Attorney-General to provide quarterly reports on deaths in custody, coronial inquests and incidents of self-harm, miscarriages and stillbirths in prisons.
Labor Senators, including the new minister for Indigenous Australians, voted against the motion.
Thorpe said “human right abuses [in prisons] are kept hidden from public view.
“People are dying preventable deaths, women are being denied proper care during pregnancy and childbirth and self-harm is widespread.
“We need a strong federal response and nation leadership on these critical issues. Transparent reporting and oversight is a crucial part of this.”
Thorpe said she expected Labor will come up with an excuse to not table quarterly statements in the Senate, adding that it would be easy as the Attorney-General meets regularly with states and territories and can request the data.
“This is not about a few bad jurisdictions or a few bad facilities. This is a national human rights and public health crisis. It needs national attention.”
The reports would detail the number of: deaths in custody, including breakdown by age groups and cause of death; ongoing coronial inquests; incidents of self-harm in custodial settings; and miscarriages and stillbirths in custodial settings.
While deaths in custody are reported by the Australian Institute of Criminology, there is currently no publicly available systematic data on self-harm, pregnancy, childbirth, or pregnancy-related outcomes including live births, stillbirths, and miscarriages in prisons.
In July, authorities discovered evidence of a pre-term miscarriage at Dillwynia women’s prison in Sydney. A recent Victorian review of the corrections system heard that women have frequently been handcuffed while in labour. In 2018, after an Aboriginal woman was left to give birth alone in a prison cell.
Similarly, incidents of self harm, are not publicly reported.
Thorpe has been pushing government to take a lead in reforming the criminal legal system. In March she gained crossbench support for stronger federal action on deaths in custody.