40... with thanks
The day that the work of Justice Action becomes redundant will be a day of celebration - although the Department of Corrective Services, the NSW Police and the Courts have kept us as busy as ever in 2001.

We have seen so many explosive and vital issues this year that have kept our core group of committed volunteers active in different areas: Forensic DNA testing of NSW prisoners, the proposed new womens jail and prisoners awaiting deportation are a few. Currently Justice Action is focusing our energies on campaigning to stop the proposed new womens prison from being built.

Last year the Queensland minister for prisons refused Framed access to Queensland jails on the basis that “this publication does little to foster crime prevention or rehabilitation skills such that prisoners’ risk to the community upon release is minimised”. After intervention by Alice Tay of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) and the Prisoners Legal Service, Queensland Corrective Services recently agreed to allow Framed in. It will now go into all Queensland prison libraries and to individuals. We see this as an important victory against prison censorship and have written to ministers of all states asking for their similar permission. We eagerly await their replies! Meanwhile, welcome to all our new Queensland readers.

We are constantly receiving mail from prisoners, and it has always been our commitment to reply to all mail in a way which supports prisoners and others to drive their own cases and seek to bring about change for themselves. In this sense we are always happy to provide support and referral to people who need help. This year, a significant proportion of letters from prisons have been complaints and enquiries about DNA testing. There is currently an Inquiry into the Crimes (Forensic Procedures) Act, and research and advocacy in this area continues to make up a large amount of Justice Action work.

I’m sure that all readers will find something of use in Framed #40. Justice Action and Framed are sustained by a group of volunteers and CSO’s who all deserve big pats on the back but especially: Lydia, Michael, Peta, Brett, Renee, and Kay. Special yahoos to Brett and the Breakout team that keep the beat alive but especially Rob and John. YAY for Ceel and Chris, designers who make Framed JA look so damn good; and to Che (our beloved office dog) for help with the subbing. No thanks to DCS or NSW Police, except for giving us something to do.

But the real credit should go to all the prisoners who make our work possible with their information, contributions and moral support. Special thanks to Tony S and John D for their help in the forensic DNA campaign, to Fiona and Lee P for assisting the Stop the Womens Jail campaign and Noel H, Craig R, Craig C and JV for ongoing APU excellence.
Keep at ‘em!
Noha

Framed would like to thank all contributors for their time and knowledge!

To all those on the inside, be sure to stay in touch and keep us informed of what is going on in the jails. Without your information and correspondence, we can not possibly be effective in monitoring and fighting the many injustices of the criminal system.





Goulburn Acts
In late 2000, Justice Action received a letter of complaint from Goulburn Jail, signed by 53 prisoners. The letter outlined a range of problems with the management and administration of Goulburn jail including poor hygiene and lack of cleaning resources, work conditions and wages, mail including legal mail being intercepted and censored, inadequate courses, the extra application forms needed to make a complaint and the complete dismissal and ignorance of prisoner concerns on the part of the governor and prison administration.

The prisoners called for a delegation of representatives from Justice Action, Legal Aid, State Parliament, Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission and other community groups to visit the jail and meet with the prisoners to hear their concerns. This call for a community meeting was a strong APU statement and call to action which fell upon the deaf ears of the Minister and Department for Corrective Services. While many of the organisations mentioned expressed their desire and willingness to visit the prisoners, the Department seems loath to allow any contact between prisoners and their support community that might be able to address the failings of their own administration.

However the petition was not a failure by any means. It brought about an increase in the awareness of those issues amongst the community groups and parliamentarians whom the letter was forwarded to. The issue was picked up in the media by the Canberra Times, which ran a story outlining the prisoners’ complaints - a great victory for the collective voice of prisoners which so rarely makes it to the mainstream media.

The complaints drew the attention of the Select Committee on the Increase in Prisoner Population and the Inspector-General of Corrective Services, who has sent an investigative team to Goulburn for inspection. Justice Action is waiting to hear the results of that inspection. We are also still awaiting a response from the governor of Goulburn jail.

It is our understanding that problems in Goulburn have not been alleviated, and that the most recent attempts to draw up a petition have been stifled by the jail administration. We encourage prisoners at Goulburn to keep us in touch with what is going on, and ensure you that we are still monitoring these problems.
Other complaints that Justice Action has received so far this year - most detail is omitted to protect the privacy of prisoners - are:
• Mail not being received, particularly DNA information and Framed
• Officers and management at (a particular jail) preventing prisoner access to DCS policy and procedures manual
• Personnel shortage at (a particular jail)
• Programs not available
• Transfers just before prisoners are due to finish courses
• Counselling not available
• Prisoners unable to see doctors on request
• Lock-ups
• Sentencing discrimination with relation to drug offenders
• Racism at Goulburn
• Access to “blue forms” (complaint application forms)
• Withholding of sugar as punishment for an entire unit
• Property not returned by DCS
• Missing property during transfer
• Prisoner unable to access money held as evidence in police station after being found innocent on that charge.
• No access to floppy disks for computer use
• Mother and Childrens program - high restriction on interfamily visits
• prison officers withholding information on prisoners’ rights
• complainants being discriminated against
• Framed difficult to access; found in rubbish bins; not available
• Toxic waste at Mulawa
• No access to computers when education officers take leave
• library never restocked
• expensive phone calls
• inadequate blankets and heating in (a particluar jail)
• families being forced to buy tracksuits and bedding for prisoners at inflated prices at some jails

If any of these sound familiar (!) we encourage you to write in and confirm your situation. Every prisoner that writes to JA is placed on the APU contact list, with the option of having their name removed at any time. This means that you will receive Framed, and any updates that may be mailed out. Any prisoner can request that APU letterhead be sent to them at any time. We rely on communication with prisoners on the APU list to keep us informed with what is going on inside and to let us know whether Framed is making it into the jails. We also ask that where possible prisoners write to tell us when they receive our mail, so that we can monitor whether mail is being intercepted and be sure that our information is getting to you. Spread the word!

Australian Prisoners Union
The Australian Prisoners Union (APU), launched in 1999, is an organisation of prisoners formed in the knowledge that outside groups will support their actions and advocate on their behalf. It liaises with the community in such events as the 1999 Drug Summit, the Senate Inquiry into prisoners voting, the Inquiry on the Increase in Prison Population and the most recent Inquiry into the Crimes (Forensic Procedures) Act, as well as on a range of prison issues including:
• lack of legal aid
• communication with the community including media
• re-introduction of remissions
• payment of proper employment entitlements
• freedom of association for prisoners
• visiting rights including contact visits
• biometrics identification
• invasive searches of visitors
• entitlement to computers, and legal material
• prisoner control of prisoner services, including post-release services,
• improved education and rehabilitation services, and
• prisoners’ right to excercise choice over their medical and psychological treatment





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Stop the Womens Jail

Stop the Womens Jail has been working over the past nine months to raise awareness about the issues facing women in prison and promote alternatives to incarceration. We consist of activists, community workers, students and ex-prisoners throughout Sydney, Western Sydney and Blue Mountains.

We demand a halt to the increasing expansion of the prison system and a redirection of funds into early intervention programs, welfare services and community based sentence programs. We support the trialing of long sighted approaches to the problems of crime, poverty and drug abuse in our society.

At the centre of our campaign is our opposition to a recent government decision to build a new womens prison in South Windsor. We believe stopping this jail is an attainable first step which will set a precedent for future transformation of the prison system for both men and women. The government argues the new prisons (both South Windsor and the proposed 350 bed male and female prison in Kempsey) will help address the problem of overcrowding in Mulawa and Emu Plains womens prisons. While overcrowding at Mulawa is a problem we don’t believe the solution is to build more prisons but rather the government needs to address the complex reasons why more women are being sentenced and held in remand, and provide opportunity for the women currently in Mulawa to help design solutions to the problems of their own incarceration.

As reported in Framed #39, the NSW government decided to build the new womens jail despite extensive community opposition and despite a report on the Increase in Prisoner Population by an Upper House Select Committee, consisting of members from all major political parties, which unanimously recommended that a moratorium be placed on the number of prison beds available for women in NSW and that the new prison project be reviewed before tendering started.

The Minister for Corrective Services, John Watkins in March 2001 issued a response to the report of the Select Committee. It essentially dismisses all the suggestions of the Committee and reiterates its plans to build a new prison. To consolidate this we have seen Bob Carr publicly promise that he will build more and more jails to deal with the prison overcrowding that his war on drugs in the South Western area of Cabbramatta will create.

There has been a great deal of community support for the Stop the Womens Jail campaign in the Blue Mountains and Hawkesbury-Nepean Area, the region to be affected by the new jail. Many organisations including the Richmond Womens Cottage, the Blue Mountains Community Resource network, the Hawkesbury-Nepean Legal Service and others have been raising awareness in the local area and protesting about the new prison in the context of lack of funding for community and support services in the same area.
For example:
• The Richmond Women’s Cottage has had a very successful one-year Aboriginal Women’s project. They have been unable get funding to continue employment of the worker despite appeals to many NSW government departments. And yet the Government wants to spend $42 million on new prisons, of which 25-31% of the women will be Indigenous.

• The Blue Mountains Aboriginal Culture and Resource Centre has tried for seven years to get funding. They have met with representatives of state government on numerous occasions. They continue to operate with voluntary labour, doing cake-stalls to keep afloat and to pay their basic administrative bills.

• A lack of secure accommodation for women leaving prison is one of the factors in a 55% recidivism rate amongst women prisoners in NSW. Yet Statewide there is a housing crisis for low-income members of our community and there was no increase in public or community housing funding in the Wentworth Area in 2000- 2001.

• 50% of women in prison are the parents of young children - the long term effects of this are enormous. Family Support Services in NSW are starved for funding. It costs $47,000 a year to incarcerate a person in a low security jail; this is much, much more than the wage of one family support counsellor.


The Community has Spoken - “We are the people who on a daily basis deal with women who will ultimately end up in prison and we know how the money needs to be spent”.

Stop the Womens Jail will continue to protest and make ourselves heard. On May 17, we demonstrated outside a Victims of Crime Conference at the hypocrisy of Bob Carr and Bob Debus’ presence. We also raised the issue at the World Heritage Celebrations at Govett’s Leap on May 12, peacefully holding up banners, talking to people, giving out information and yelling out comments. We did this successfully despite the police (on Bob Debus’ order) escorting us out numerous times for “breach of the peace”. (When we asked whose peace we were breaching, we were told “the Queen’s’’. Actually, most people we spoke to were really supportive of the campaign and were glad we were there.)

Building relationships with women inside prison is important in this campaign to increase our understanding of the real issues faced by women prisoners daily and to find out what prisoners’ needs are. There are a number of women involved in the campaign who have histories of incarceration who have taken prominent speaking roles at forums and have been invaluable with offering experience and advice on campaign content and direction.

We encourage any women currently imprisoned to write to us at Justice Action, either to simply make contact or to write a letter of support or a personal story to be read out at forums (anonymously if you wish). We’d particularly like to hear any ideas for the improvement of Mulawa that you might have.

The next month of the campaign is crucial as the contracts for the construction of the new prison are scheduled to be signed by the end of May/June.

GIVE WOMEN WINGS NOT BARS!





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International Workers' Day

May 1st, International Workers’ Day, saw a protest in Sydney at Australasian Correctional Management against the worldwide prison-industrial complex. This is a report from one of the legal observers at m1:
When protesters refused to move from their peaceful picket outside the office of Australasian Correctional Management (ACM), about twenty Tactical Response Group (blue overalls) officers forced their way through, punching, pulling, using wrist holds and throwing people to the ground. I witnessed a particularly violent officer pull someone from the crowd and then lift them by the collar and literally slam them against a wall. Many of the officers were not wearing I.D. badges and refused to give verbal identification.

The next incident I witnessed was back at the main protest when the police forced the crowd, which had occupied Pitt St, back in to the “designated protest-zone” of Bridge St. Over the next hour or so that it took the police to force people back, I witnessed many violent acts by police; including a man being lifted by the throat by a police officer, police horses charging into crowds of people, and an officer punching someone in the face. One of the most frightening scenes I witnessed was when a group of about 30 people was crushed between the wall of a building and a truck, while being forced back by police. People were screaming and crying, and one woman had to be lifted out. It showed a complete disregard on the part of the police for the safety of the public.

Throughout this time, the police were using the tactic of arbitrary arrest to clear people one by one from the scene. By breaking one person away, they are often able to break a line or large group, and it became clear that they were unlawfully arresting people, in order to do just that, not because they had committed a crime. When I asked one officer why he had arrested a particular person, he replied “We’re working our way through the crowd.” He basically admitted to me that the arrests were arbitrary - just a way to clear the crowd.

As legal observers, our task was to record police behaviour during the protest. What we saw showed us that the police will not be intimidated by large numbers, nor do they feel restricted to act in accordance with the law.


Reformation and Rehabilitation
Justice Action has been fighting for years for prisoners’ rights. JA took a leading role in the successful 1998 campaign to stop the Howard Government from removing prisoners’ right to vote. Our current campaign to get Framed into every prison library in Australia (see page 2) is essentially a campaign for the human rights enshrined in Artilce 10 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (see box next page) and in Article 19 (the right of everyone to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds).

There has recently been an upsurge of interest in Sydney in prisoners’ rights. Last November the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) hosted a workshop entitled Prisoners as Citizens. JA members attended and took part in the workshop on Capacity Building (where else would we be?), developing a list of problems in the exercise of prisoners’ rights, and a second list with possible solutions. Now it’s time to put the words into action! HREOC is also working on a book on prisoners’ rights.

On 14 May the Young Lawyers Association held a seminar on the same topic at the NSW State Library. One of the speakers was Dr Tim Anderson, who spoke on struggles over the formal and effective rights of prisoners in NSW. Tim put forward not only that prisoners have rights, but that society as a whole has a right to have a prison system that serves no end but reformation and social rehabilitation.

This is a much abridged version of his talk:

With prisoners, as with other minorities, formal rights are particularly important and collective rights are also very important. This is because prisoners do not have the resources, or the social or market power to enforce their interests, as do many other groups - like bankers, media moguls, and even lawyers. Effective rights are also critical for prisoners.
The failure of a legal system to properly define or give effect to prisoners’ rights will help build the outlaw culture where prisoners will pursue their interest through ‘other means’ - in other words the only means available to them. This is perfectly understandable. After all, the lessons of the rule of the gun and the rule of the uniformed bully who barks orders are in prisoners’ faces every day. They may not respect police (seen as corrupt and effectively above the law, sometimes formally above the law) or prison officers (seen as “too lazy to work, too scared to steal”) but they understand how power works.

Common law - and legislation
There is a very sad recent history of prisoners attempting to gain law rights through the courts. But what is even sadder is the legislative response to this history.

Two court cases set the tone for the denial of prisoners’ rights in common law. In the High Court case of Flynn (1949) a prisoner claimed the right to regulated remissions. However Chief Justice Latham said the regulation created a power for jailers, not a right for prisoners. Then in the NSW case of Smith v Commissioner for Corrective Services (1979) the right to a private visit with a lawyer, though in the Regulations, was found unenforceable - following Flynn.

There have been, however, some small victories in the courts. In 1977 prisoner Ian Fraser went to the Court of Criminal Appeal and won the right for prisoners to appeal against a decision on prison discipline by the Visiting Justice. Previously, there had been no right of appeal.

In 1981-1982, following a murder at Parramatta Jail, a number of prisoners complained to the Ombudsman about the police use of section 29 orders (under the Prisons Act) to forcibly remove them to a police station for questioning over a crime. No other citizen may be forcibly removed to a police station for questioning, unless they have been arrested. Section 29 had been designed to allow temporary absence from a jail, for such purposes as works release, study leave or to attend a family member’s funeral. The Ombudsman decided that this was an inappropriate use of Section 29 and said that the practice should cease. A departmental circular stopped the practice.

In 1984 prisoner Bobby Maybury had the Supreme Court strike down a prison rule that allowed Jail Governors to hear and determine charges without any due process or even a right to be heard.
What was the response of Parliament to these small gains in prisoners’ legal rights? All those three cases were reversed.
• The Labor Government, when introducing its parole legislation in 1983, inserted a new Section 29(f), which specifically allowed prisoners to be forcibly transferred to police custody.

• In 1986 the Labor Government rewrote sections of the Prisons Act to give substantial power to Superintendents to punish without observing rules of evidence or procedure, and to act with “as much expedition” as possible.

• In 1989 the Liberal Government removed the right to appeal any punishment imposed by a Visiting Justice, except for penalties which lengthened a sentence.


The Future
Could there be a test case on the High Court decision in Flynn? This might be worth trying. But even if it were successful, the High Court still has no power to interfere with constitutionally valid state legislation that represses prisoners’ rights -- eg the statutory denial of appeal rights.

This of course brings us to the question of a Bill of Rights - an important issue for prisoners. Any state or federal Bill of Rights would most likely be built on the International Bill of Rights, ie the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two subsequent covenants: the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). After all, the International Bill of Rights has been agreed to and ratified by successive Australian Governments.

But although the International Bill of Rights is the best thing around, it is not enormously progressive on prisoners’ rights. A right to vote for prisoners may be there; and there is room for more argument about cruel and unusual punishment; but there is not yet any real protection in formal rights, for prisoners, from forced labour.

However one so far unexplored avenue seems to be the collective right to a penal system which operates only for the purposes of “reformation and social rehabilitation” (ICCPR Article 10-3) - that is, not to serve the aims of retribution, of hairy-chested political posturing, of satisfying some revenge constituency, or meeting the needs of the latest jail tariff or grid sentencing system.

Arguments against the new women’s jail at Windsor, for example, could follow this line, making use of the international standard. A “political” demand to cap the capacity or an expanding prison system, or to stop new jails, could thus be seen as being, really, a demand for a collective right: a demand that all citizens be permitted to enjoy a society where the penal system is restricted and defined in that internationally accepted manner.




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