The Law Report: 2 March 2004 - Part 1: The Nagle Report - 25 years on
[This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/rn/talks/8.30/lawrpt/stories/s1055943.htm]
Damien Carrick: ...how New South Wales prisons have transformed since the violence of the 1970s.
It’s 26 years since the release of the Nagle Royal Commission Report exposed violence inside a number of New South Wales prisons. And last week in the New South Wales Parliament House, a seminar was held to commemorate that event and the reforms enacted as a direct result.
Back in 1976 the New South Wales government invited Mr Justice Nagle to head a Royal Commission into the State’s prisons. His report blew the lid on a culture of institutionalised violence against prisoners in some jails, and ushered in a period of energetic reform.
Today we’re going to hear from the man who implemented the changes demanded by the Nagle Report, Tony Vinson, a former prisoner-turned-activist and also from prison expert Professor David Brown, about the conditions which led to the Royal Commission and how far the system has moved on since then.
David Brown says the Royal Commission helped end the violence against prisoners which existed in some jails.
David Brown: Well a good example was the systematic flogging of all prisoners in the Bathurst Jail in October 1970. That was actually led by the then Superintendent Pallot, and prison officers went round cells systematically, one at a time down wings, in cell blocks, four or five, six of them, bursting into cells and flogging prisoners with batons and prisoners could hear the mayhem, the screams, the shouts on the way round the prison as they waited for their turn. So that was a bit of an indication of the kind of immunity I suppose enjoyed by the regime, by prison officers and the reliance on physical, systematic violence as a standard practice.
The other example of that I suppose was the so-called Reception Biff regime at Grafton Jail which had been set up in 1943 and ran right through until the eve of the Royal Commission in 1976. And that involved again, floggings of prisoners who were seen as being troublemakers in other jails who had then been transferred to Grafton, and on arrival at that jail, they were handcuffed, they were then flogged to the ground by large burly officers, in many cases sustaining very serious injuries, and thereafter were flogged quite regularly and intimately during their stay in that jail. That reliance on physical brutality is perhaps the best indicator of what the system was like at that particular time in the 1970s.
Brett Collins: I was battered many times. I was moved as an intractable into Grafton Jail and then I was battered really badly and so they tried to terrorise me. At times I lay on the floor of the cell concerned that what they said would happen, which would be that they intended to kill me. And in the middle of the night they would constantly walk past my cell door and kick the door. So they what they were doing was actually breaking people, they were just making sure that there was a sense of fear amongst the people in there. So it was torture, it was terrorism on a State level. It took me years and years to get over the experience of being in jail.
Damien Carrick: Brett Collins, an activist with Justice Action, a criminal justice advocacy group.
A convicted bank robber, Collins spent ten years in New South Wales jails between 1971 and 1980. David Brown says present conditions like those, not surprisingly, inflamed a sense of grievance amongst prisoners.
David Brown: Then there was a really major riot in Bathurst Jail again in February of 1974 where half the jail was burnt to the ground. After that riot had been put down, prisoners were locked into yards, and then as they were released, they had to run a gauntlet where further bashings took place, and they were then taken off to other jails. So the roots of the Nagle Report although it wasn’t actually announced until 1976, actually lay in a combination of the 1970 bashings, the 1970 riot and the constant stalling and prevarication on the part of the Department and the government, denying that these events had taken place.
Damien Carrick: Following the handing down of the Nagle Report, Tony Vinson was appointed in 1979 as Chair of the New South Wales Corrective Services Commission. David Brown says Vinson implemented a raft of reforms aimed at ending the violence and giving prisoners meaningful rights.
David Brown: Previous to that, internal disciplinary charges could be brought by prison officers or prison administrators against individual prisoners. They were heard by what were called visiting justices who were magistrates from outside, and came in to hear those charges. Those courts were openly acknowledged to be kangaroo courts; the findings were often made quite independently of the evidence; prisoners were sometimes assaulted in front of the magistrates; there was no right to legal representation. They were a farce, basically. And Nagle helped end that farce. After that, legal representation was introduced into those hearings and so in some senses the jail was kind of legalised. The unlawful physical violence and brutality as a form of control was phased out, and the sense of prisoners as subjects possessing certain legal rights and so on, was introduced.
Damien Carrick: While immediately following the Nagle Royal Commission, prison reform was widely popular. But over time, support eroded. Tony Vinson only lasted in the job about three years. David Brown again.
David Brown: Vinson was forced out after a relatively short period of time after the kind of political momentum changed. There was a strong counter-attack by elements of the media, especially The Daily Telegraph, trying to play up the very dangerous status of the prisoners in Katingal, the Prison Officers Union in many cases was very resistant to some of the changes and the reform. There was a resistance to the idea that inmates could have any say through inmate committees and so on. And eventually the government in a sense, started to backtrack away from reform as the kind of political media tide started to turn against prisoners after the initial wave of support following the revelations of the Royal Commission Report itself.
Damien Carrick: Looking back, Tony Vinson says his greatest achievement during his time as Chair of the New South Wales Corrective Services Commission, 1979-1981, was stamping out violence by prison authorities.
Tony Vinson: A great deal of energy was expended driving home to all staff in the system that there was to be no more of that, and more inquires were instituted to deal legally with those who continued to infringe that principle, and indeed the law, until I think it could fairly be claimed that the extraordinary brutality of the past was expunged from the system, at least at the level of officer upon prisoner.
Damien Carrick: What weren’t you able to achieve?
Tony Vinson: Well we weren’t able to achieve anywhere near as much as Nagle had recommended, and certainly as much as I desired in the realm of finding of alternative forms of punishment for prison. We did introduce community service orders, we diverted young prisoners away from the maximum security and reception prisons and so on, but a number of very concrete proposals that were put forward, including one that I’d love to see revived today, and that was that in all cases, or most cases, prisoners would serve part of their sentence under supervision in the community, not as a parole arrangement but as a standard part of the prison sentence. We weren’t able to develop the probation hostels that might have afforded that measure of stringent control that the courts would require to match the offences, but without using what I now consider, and considered at the time, toxic institutions like prisons. I think that was the most frustrating part of it. It wasn’t for want of trying and bringing forward proposals, but we weren’t allowed to implement them.
Damien Carrick: And indeed your successors haven’t been able to implement them either.
Tony Vinson: Not to any great extent. Indeed just recently the Upper House in New South Wales had an inquiry into the ever-escalating size of the prison population, and with a colleague, Dr Eileen Baldry, we put forward a very carefully prepared submission indicating the numbers of people who could, according to their records and the scale of their crime, have been dealt with in some other way. But there still isn’t anything like what I would regard as adequate interest in finding those alternatives. Indeed when I was in charge 25 years ago, we talked the size of the prison population down by simply making the community more aware of what prisons were about, that they offered only punishment and isolation and nothing else, not to think of them as centres of rehabilitation and so on, which I’ve not found them to be. We talked it down to about 3,500 and here we are 25 years later, all up including periodic detainees, we’ve got a population of 9,000 in New South Wales.
Damien Carrick: Professor David Brown shares Vinson’s dismay about the jump in prison numbers over the past 25 years.
David Brown: The prison population has doubled. For women prisoners it’s trebled. For the proportion of indigenous prisoners has increased threefold, they comprised 7% of the New South Wales prison population in 1976, they’re 20% now and were in 2003. So there’s been a massive increase in the number of prisoners, contrary to Nagle’s expectation, and particularly indigenous prisoners.
Damien Carrick: So post the Nagle Report, presumably prisons are a much safer place.
David Brown: One of the terms the prisoners use, they say that blue on green violence, they mean officer on prisoner, has been replaced by green on green, they mean prisoner on prisoner. And in particular jails like Goulburn jail for example, there’s been quite significant violence between different racial and ethnic groupings, and that has been I think, accelerated by administration practice of grouping prisoners on racial and ethnic lines. So that’s a really major worry I think within the system.
Damien Carrick: David Brown from the University of New South Wales, who says that in most jails, prisoners tend to gravitate into ethnically based groups. But he says, the division of prisoners along racial lines is more formal at Goulburn maximum security prison. It’s a policy implemented by prison authorities for security reasons, and to allow prisoners to mix with those with whom they share language, cultural and recreational interests, and preferred foods. It’s a policy that Brown says has both positive and negative consequences, but Brett Collins takes a harder line. He says dividing prisoners along ethnic lines serves to increase racial tension and erode any sense of prison solidarity.
Back in the 1970s and ‘80s, film maker David Goldie made a series of extraordinary documentaries about life inside prisons. They were called ‘The Big House’. Never before or since has a film maker had such access to Australian prisons. Goldie’s interviews with prisoners reveal starkly the violence, the boredom and the squalid conditions experienced by prisoners during this period.
Man: They’re supposed to be motel conditions. How are they motel conditions when you wake up once a week and there’s sewerage floating around? What motel has sewerage floating down the hallway? What motel would lock people in there for 18 hours a day, and I’d like for people outside to go and lock themselves in the bathroom overnight, they can take their television set in there if they want, they can take a bottle of wine. But they won’t like it. And I’d like them to see if they could perceive doing that day in, day out, for nine years, eight years, five years. They won’t be able to do it for a week.
Damien Carrick: Since the Nagle Report there’s been a major prison building program, a development that Professor Brown applauds.
David Brown: Particularly in some of the newer jails, certainly the physical conditions are better than they were then. In those days there were some cell blocks say for example in Goulburn and in Bathurst that were unsewered where people still had to slop out. I think certainly conditions have improved in terms of some medical health services and access to those. On the other hand, prisoners’ legal status has been going backwards really some areas. Nagle recommended they get the right to vote; in New South Wales anyone serving more than 12 months doesn’t get the right to vote in State elections. Prison watchdogs have recently been curtailed so the Inspector-General of Prisoners has been abolished. Prison litigation has tailed off, courts tend to defer to the expertise of correctional administrators. As a result of that there’s been significant overcrowding. Currently the New South Wales prison system runs at over 100% occupancy which is clearly overcrowded.
Damien Carrick: So what would you say is the biggest change in the last 25 years?
David Brown: Probably the biggest change really in the prisons over that is the impact of drugs. If we look at the Nagle Report we find that there were only six entries in the index in the Nagle Report on drugs. A recently Legislative Council report in New South Wales put the figure of prisoners with a history of drug use at 60% of males and 70% of females so that drug use, dealing, and attempts at regulation have really significantly affected prison life and culture in all sorts of ways. For example, in a violent enforcement of drug debts incurred in prison, in informing, in breaking down solidarities in oppositional cultures, and in the administration drugs are now the major official justification for a battery of new technological identification and surveillance devices, urine testing, dog squads, strip searching, cell ramps, lock-down, harassment of visitors, and increases in the powers of search outside the confines of the prison.
Damien Carrick: Former prisoner turned prison activist, Brett Collins, says the drug epidemic of recent years has corroded life in prisons.
Brett Collins: Inside jail in New South Wales, over 60% of women prisoners inside jail actually have hepatitis C, and rising, and there’s no way of preventing people from actually continuing to contract it.
Damien Carrick: And presumably that’s tied to rampant drug use inside the prisons.
Brett Collins: Of course, and drug use of course talks about morale, it talks about no attempt at all to combat the drug problems, that actually is the cause of most of the people in jail.
Damien Carrick: Prison activist, Brett Collins.
Just recently the New South Wales Premier announced plans to create Australia’s first compulsory drug treatment correctional centre, for repeat male drug offenders. According to the New South Wales Department of Corrective Services, 70% to 80% of offenders are now serving sentences for drug-related offences. We did approach the Department but they declined to be interviewed for this program.
These days, Tony Vinson is an Emeritus Professor at the University of New South Wales. Next week he’s releasing a report which pinpoints the markers of poverty in Australia. There’s an interesting criminal justice twist to this research.
Tony Vinson: Yes I’ve done this sort of thing before, but this time looked at another aspect and that is just where you find the high volumes of particular forms of disadvantage and social problems in Victoria and New South Wales. And although I’d long suspected that in fact that big increase in the prison population has been attained not by a wider spread or wider catchment area, but by more intensive mining of the same areas it yielded a much smaller number 25 years ago, I think there’s evidence for that in the fact that 25% of Victoria’s admissions to prison in a year will be drawn from 2.1% of the postcodes of Victoria, and in New South Wales it’s not much more, it’s about 3.1%. So the question that follows is why wouldn’t a society that’s paying upwards of $65,000 a year to hold people in prison, but also from a values cost point of view, almost distorting thereafter people’s lives, and the lives of their children and families, why wouldn’t we be putting much more emphasis on prevention upstream from the whole business of people becoming involved in juvenile justice and then going on to the adult sphere.
Damien Carrick: And those postcodes presumably were pretty low down on the socioeconomic stats?
Tony Vinson: Oh yes, yes, and in fact one of the defining characteristics of multipally disadvantaged areas both in Victoria and New South Wales is of course, getting into trouble with the law.
Guests on this program:
Professor David Brown
University of NSW
Brett Collins
Justice Action
Tony Vinson
Emeritus Professor University of New South Wales
Presenter: Damien Carrick
Producer: Maria Tickle