Dire conditions in WA prisons will have consequences for everyone

Australia Broadcast Center

6 days ago

Most Western Australians are within driving distance of human rights abuses.
That's the confronting reality brought into sharp focus by the prison watchdog this week.
Few would expect prisoners to get an easy ride, but what is going on behind taxpayer-funded barbed wire fences at Hakea Prison is much worse — both for those inside, and the rest of us outside.
Days without fresh air, sleeping on the floor next to a toilet, having to block your ears so cockroaches don't crawl in, extremely limited access to phone calls and almost non-existent education and support programs.
"The conditions are still in breach of international human rights," Inspector of Custodial Services Eamon Ryan said on Tuesday, noting he'd raised similar concerns more than a year ago.
Those concerns were especially significant, he said, because almost everyone who goes into prison will one day come out.
How they are treated while locked up, he said, is what decides who you might be standing next to in the shopping centre or driving alongside one day.
"And right now, the conditions in Hakea just simply don't provide any sort of rehabilitation, any sort of possibility for men to improve themselves so they don't return to a life of offending when they're released," he said.
That's not good news for anyone, especially because the rest of the prison system is also in a pretty poor state.
These issues are almost certainly not intentional.
But they are an entirely predictable outcome of two key choices made by successive governments of both stripes.
The first part of the problem is that WA's imprisonment rate has been increasing recently from an already high base.
It rose 16 per cent between 2022 and 2024, mainly due to the rate of prisoners on remand exploding by 41 per cent.
The Justice Department has said those increases can at least be partially attributed to a rise in family and domestic violence offences.
Few would argue against those laws — but prison pressures would indicate they were introduced either without understanding the impact they would have on prison populations, or without regard for that impact.
The same can be said of other laws which have been introduced over recent years to make it harder for some people to get bail, or to increase the length of their sentence.
Hakea is particularly vulnerable to increasing remand rates because it mostly houses prisoners who are yet to be sentenced.
Looking across the state though, all but two prisons are either over capacity or above 95 per cent.
"The prison system is full and there is no spare capacity for more prisoners," Inspector Ryan wrote.
"Likewise, there is no infrastructure capacity available should the need arise in response to a major incident."
That squeeze is also raising the risk of a major incident — as shown by a riot at West Kimberley Regional Prison at the weekend.
An increasing population isn't a problem in and of itself though.
The problem is that sufficient capacity hasn't been built to avoid the situation where three or four prisoners are being crammed into cells designed for one or two people.
And this isn't new, with Inspector Ryan's predecessor Neil Morgan calling for urgent funding for new prisons in 2016.
No new prison has since been built, just additions to existing facilities.
The government has begun work to turn things around at Hakea and more broadly.
A state-wide infrastructure plan has been prepared by the department and is currently sitting with government.
Corrective Services Minister Paul Papalia told Parliament earlier this month it "seeks to address the challenge of more prisons".
Then staff will need to be found and trained to run that prison — a challenge when the WA Prison Officers Union estimates the state is about 1,200 officers short already.
And Papalia has said the Corrective Services Academy is running at capacity.
"We need to be encouraging people to come into the job," secretary Andy Smith told ABC Radio Perth this week.
"People don't go through high school thinking 'I'd love to be a prison officer' [like] they do for police, ambos, teachers, nurses, doctors.
"But we've got to do something to get people into this job."
Similar resourcing issues plague emergency services, education and health.
All are just as important to a well-functioning society. The difference is how they affect a government's chances at the ballot box.
As the family member of one recent Hakea inmate said this week, he couldn't have cared less about conditions behind bars until he personally knew the person experiencing them.
Regardless of how prisons impact politicians' fortunes though, there's no excuse for a system which breaches human rights.
Western Australia does not have poor finances to blame.
Instead, the reported human rights abuses — which will only result in angry prisoners more likely to reoffend — are the result of choices by those in power.