Systemic neglect and racism are leading to the deaths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in custody, a new study has found.
University of Queensland Law Professor Tamara Walsh spent four years analysing the coroners’ inquest reports of more than 700 deaths between 1991 and 2020. Along with a team of law students, Professor Walsh found that 16 of the 34 women who died in custody were Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander and that only two had been sentenced by a court — the rest of the women were on remand or in protective custody.
In many cases, their deaths were preventable — two Indigenous women died of untreated infections from domestic violence-related injuries, while three others were left unmonitored in a cell while intoxicated, leading to respiratory failure.
In Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women make up 33 per cent of the female prison population.
The rate of imprisonment for non-Indigenous women is 21.9 per 100,000, while for Indigenous women, it is 464.8 per 100,000.
Professor Walsh believes the results from the study expose the underlying racism embedded in the country’s criminal law system.
“Most women in our study shared a range of individual risk factors, such as domestic violence, child protection interventions, and physical and mental illness, and many experienced systemic racism from corrective services officers, police officers, and the medical professionals assigned to treat them,” Professor Walsh said.
“The vast majority of Indigenous women in our study were in custody on remand or in ‘protective custody’ because of public intoxication laws,” she continued.
“In cases where Indigenous women were detained for intoxication, the coroners questioned why police didn’t make more effort to take them to a hospital or contact family members to collect them.”
During her investigation, which is part of the Deaths in Custody Project she started in 2016, Professor Walsh spoke to several coroners who told her that women were being accommodated but not cared for while in custody.
Some coroners told her that police sought medical care for the women in their custody “…but were turned away by health services, who assumed the women were drunk or had behavioural issues, and this resulted in missed opportunities to provide life-saving treatment,” she said.
Coroners’ findings are now leading to a concerted effort by Indigenous activists and scholars to find alternatives to women’s detention and decriminalising racialized offences, such as public intoxication.
“Imprisonment is an inappropriate and damaging response for women,” Professor Walsh said, adding that she wants to see supportive, holistic, welfare-based responses become routine.
“Separating women from their children and criminalising them in the context of family violence and drug use causes further harm to the women, their families and ultimately the community.”
Last month, Victorian Coroner Simon McGregor handed down his findings into the death of 37-year old Veronica Nelson in January 2020 while she was held in custody at Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, in Victoria.
McGregor’s findings criticised the criminal justice, health and corrections systems’ inhumane and degrading conditions that caused Nelson’s preventable death.
“Veronica was loved and respected by those who knew her,” McGregor said, during a four-hour long reading of his findings. “Yet Veronica, while alone in a cell at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, passed away after begging for assistance for several of the last hours of her life.”
McGregor also took aim at the state’s current Bail Act, which he described as “incompatible” with the UN’s Charter of Human Rights and prejudicial towards First Nations people.