Vaccines earmarked for New South Wales prisoners were redirected to HSC students in Sydney despite inmates, who were meant to be prioritised under the rollout, making persistent requests to be vaccinated.
Guardian Australia can reveal the state’s prisoner vaccination program stalled, as doses were redirected in late July, as part of the government’s plan to vaccinate year 12 students.
A Delta outbreak inside Parklea correctional facility rose to almost 100 cases on Friday. There are also cases in Bathurst prison.
Kylie Hughes’ 24-year-old son, Jordan, a prisoner at Silverwater jail in Sydney, has been asking to be vaccinated for several weeks. While prisoners were classified as part of the federal government’s phase 1B rollout, meaning they were eligible for from 22 March, Jordan was not vaccinated despite making “at least four” requests for the jab to nurses at the prison.
“He’s been asking for about five or six weeks, maybe longer, and I have sent emails requesting for him to be vaccinated,” Hughes told Guardian Australia this week.
After receiving a new cellmate from Parklea jail shortly before the outbreak, she says her son is now in lockdown and unable to be contacted.
“No one will tell me what is going on, as far as he knows he hasn’t been moved to the isolation wing so I hope that means he has tested negative, but we can’t get any information out of there,” she said.
Jordan is Indigenous so has vaccine priority status in two categories.
Kylie Hughes is not alone. This week Guardian Australia spoke to family members of several prisoners inside Parklea, who are among the 96 to have tested positive since last week.
They all painted a picture of confusion inside the state’s corrections system, with contact to inmates largely cutoff since jails across NSW were plunged into strict anti-Covid measures.
Sheree Regan last received a phone call from an officer at Parklea, where her 18-year-old son is an inmate.
It had been five days since she had heard from her son, Jayelem, and the officer told her the news she’d been dreading since she learned about the Covid outbreak in the privately run prison in Sydney’s north-west.
Her son was one of dozens to have tested positive and was being held in an isolation cell. Regan was told someone from the jail would be in contact with her if his condition worsened – but she could not speak to him.
“I freaked out, I was going off,” she said. “I’m his mother and they won’t let him tell me how he is going. We need to know if our kids are OK.”
At least 11 of the 96 cases are Indigenous, including Jayelem.
Dani Benson last spoke to her partner, Stephen Grant, on 26 August when he mentioned having a sore back. Three days later, the facility’s management informed the family he had tested positive for Covid. Benson has not spoken to him since.
The facility appears to have suspended phone call privileges for inmates.
Details of daily life under lockdown in Parklea are unclear, but families report their pleas for updates have gone unanswered.
Virtual visits – which involve prisoners organising a time to use one of the video-call enabled tablets set up on the prison’s visiting tables – have also been cancelled.
A spokesperson for MTC-Broadspectrum, the private operator of Parklea, told Guardian Australia on Friday evening that phone access had resumed – but families had still not yet heard from loved ones.
“We’ve got four kids, one has special needs, one’s got the HSC right now. All of a sudden, dad’s got Covid and now he’s not calling,” Benson said earlier. “There’s no way I can find out if he’s OK, and there’s no way we can get a message of support to him.”
Grant, who entered the facility in July for a short term after a drink-driving offence, is not vaccinated. In his 40s, he was not eligible for the Atagi-recommended vaccine for his age group for most of the year. He was not able to organise an appointment before entering custody for a year-long sentence.
Now, it has emerged doses earmarked for prisons were diverted to Sydney students at the end of July.
A spokesperson for Justice Health, the section of the NSW health department in charge of healthcare for inmates, did not directly answer a question from Guardian Australia about whether any vaccine doses for prisons had been diverted.
Instead, they said “unvaccinated inmates and detainees currently in custody will have another opportunity to get vaccinated with a targeted vaccination program over the next two weeks”.
But a source familiar with the vaccine rollout in prisons told Guardian Australia doses intended for inmates had been diverted “particularly to hotspots of Sydney for HSC students” at the end of July, in the same way allocations for NSW regions were also redistributed to Sydney.
Multiple sources told Guardian Australia at least part of the reason NSW was lagging behind when it came to vaccinating prisoners was doses being diverted.
Data released by Justice Health this week revealed that the rate of vaccinations in both staff and inmates in the state’s prisons was substantially below the general population.
Only 21% of inmates in government-run prisons in NSW had been fully vaccinated, while 42% had received one dose. About 41% of the state’s 9,000 prison staff are fully vaccinated while only 54% had received one dose. That compared to 39% and 72% respectively of the general public above 16.
NSW appears to have fallen a substantial distance behind other states.
In Victoria, a justice department spokesperson said 55% of inmates in both public and private prisons had received their first dose, while 37% were fully vaccinated. That compared to 59% and 37% respectively of the general public.
In Western Australia, vaccinations began at Bunbury jail on 1 July, and the rollout has reached substantially higher rates than the general population. As of 30 August, 7,577 doses had been administered in the prison system and 66% of prisoners had received their first dose. About 50% of prisoners in WA were fully vaccinated, the state’s corrections department said. That compared to 52% and 33% respectively of the general public in WA.
At the NSW Covid update on Friday, the deputy chief health officer, Dr Marianne Gale, said an “intensive effort” was currently under way to vaccinate inmates and staff at Parklea, after vaccines were delivered after the outbreak.
Other families told Guardian Australia they had been told about the redirection informally when seeking vaccinations for their loved ones. Joanne’s partner is an inmate at Junee prison and first requested a vaccine two months ago, when a list was circulated in the prison for inmates who wanted to be vaccinated.
They never heard about it again, until this week, when a list was again circulated asking the same question.
“We don’t know whether that was about confirming they still wanted the vaccine, or whether the first list was just put in the [bin],” Joanne, not her real name, said.
“They were first told it would be done in August and obviously that has come and gone and nothing was said about it until this explosion of cases at Parklea.”
The outbreak has led to calls from justice advocates for low-risk prisoners to be released early using powers introduced in the state last year as part of emergency legislation passed at the beginning of the pandemic, something Gale seemed to suggest had support from health authorities. At Wednesday’s press conference Gale said that “fewer people and the less overcrowding in the prison system is certainly useful in reducing the risk of transmission”.
Sophie McNeill, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said this week that the NSW government had “failed to prevent vaccination rates for prisoners from lagging well behind the general population even though prisoners are at a far greater risk of contracting Covid-19”.
“Once this starts getting in among what we know is a vulnerable population it’s quite terrifying thinking about the consequences,” she said. “I can’t think of any more urgent focus for the government right now.”
Corrective Services NSW, which manages state-run prisons, and MTC-Broadspectrum said inmates were tested before being transferred between prisons and were given face masks when transported.
St Vincent’s hospital has been contracted to provide health care within Parklea. Unlike state-run facilities, where Covid-positive inmates are transferred to a special section at Silverwater prison, Parklea must treat its positive cases internally.
