The Northern Territory government has reversed its decision to withhold the bulk of a highly critical report into the corrections system, after it was leaked to media.
The review into the NT’s department of correctional services, known as the Hamburger report, found the $1.8bn Darwin correctional precinct (DCP) was “not fit for purpose”, did not meet the needs of Indigenous prisoners, was “unsuitable” for women prisoners and provided “humiliating and degrading” conditions when the sewerage broke.
The report was delivered to the government this year but the previous CLP government reneged on its promise to release it amid national controversy over abuse in juvenile detention centres.
In October, during the first sitting week after the election, the new Labor government released only the executive summary of the report, citing privacy and security advice. The summary itself was highly critical of Darwin’s 1,000-bed prison, commissioned by the former Labor government in 2008 and opened in 2014 by the CLP.
After a full version of the 205-page report was leaked to the media on Thursday, the attorney general, Natasha Fyles, sought new advice and released it with some light redactions, to keep Labor’s “commitment to Territorians about being open and transparent”.
“My initial approach to this request was based on caution given the advice I received,” she said late on Thursday.
“That approach may have been overly cautious. I have now reviewed a redacted version of the full Hamburger report and believe it to be in the best interest of Territorians to release it.”
The report questioned whether the DCP should have been built in the first place.
More than 85% of prisoners in the NT’s adult correctional facilities are Indigenous, but the report said the facility did not meet their needs.
“How did the construction of a 1,000-bed correctional centre in Darwin emerge as the most effective solution to unacceptable imprisonment outcomes when these outcomes are driven largely by extreme social and economic disadvantage in indigenous communities?” the report said.
The prison did not support the facilitation of therapeutic intervention and culturally specific programs “necessary for successful community reintegration”, and it isolated workers, the report found.
It found the accommodation of women within the confines of the prison to be “unsuitable”, overcrowded at the time of the review, and providing inequitable access to medical services, programs and industries, a situation the government says is no longer the case.
“The review team is also of the opinion that the accommodation of resident children with their prisoner mothers within the secure perimeter of DCP is unsuitable for a number of reasons,” the report said.
It also found the Immediate Action Team to be “of concern”.
The prison operations manual describes the rapid security response team as a “visible deterrence” to prisoner misbehaviour, but the review found its presence alone raised tensions among the prison population “which can in and of itself lead to incidents within the centre”.
Specialist groups such as the IAT could often become elitist and unresponsive to management directions, it said, and the DCP operations manual “unashamedly” fostered this attitude.
It said staff deskilled as they relied on the IAT to deal with situations they might otherwise have calmed or preempted.
“It is the belief of the review team that this attitude is fostered unashamedly by the section on the security group in the DCP operations manual.”
The report said its team was told prisoners’ showers were time limited and men and women were rationed to three or four toilet flushes a day, which it labelled “humiliating and degrading”.
On Thursday, Fyles said the rationed flushing was during a two-week flood and sewerage problems had been rectified.
She defended the initial commissioning of the facility, and said that in hindsight “there might be things you tweak” but building the prison was “the right thing to do”.
Fyles said the problems stemmed from operational issues under the CLP such as not adequately enacting or funding programs, including a work camp in the Barkley region and a low-security centre in Katherine.
The government had acted on some recommendations, she said, but did not yet have a timeline or costings for those that remained.
