A veil of secrecy makes justice in jail a different kind from court justice

The "sleeper hold", which cuts off blood to the brain by exerting pressure on the carotid artery, is a legacy that resulted from practices employed by guards to control unruly children in Queensland juvenile institutions.

The products of state-run juvenile institutions carried the practice into the adult prison system where it is now used as a weapon for murder - a technique employed to render victims helpless before they are strung up to give the appearance of suicide by hanging.

In the pursuit of election issues, Queensland politicians have consistently embraced law-and-order policies but the end result of those policies, the juvenile and adult incarceration process, has been generally ignored because prisoners don't vote. Legislative power that has been routinely bestowed upon the QDCS has allowed that bureaucracy to reinforce and perpetuate censorship policies that restrict media access to prisoners for its own self-serving interest and shroud the entire prison system with a veil of secrecy. The threat of that legislative power is regularly employed by departmental lawyers.

In 1996 former Courier Mail journalist Ella Riggert was fined $1050 for conducting an interview with Tracey Wiggington, the alleged 'vampire killer', at Brisbane Womens Prison. Two other Queensland journalists, Lou Robson and Channel Nine reporter Margueritte Rossi suffered the same fate when they conducted unauthorised telephone interviews with prisoners from the Woodford and Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centres. Both journalists were fined $300 but no conviction was recorded.

If the Queensland government remains steadfast in its determination to support QDCS policies that restrict media access to prisoners then the time has arrived for a Royal Commission to make those tax-payer funded institutions transparent. The unnatural deaths of Scott Topping, Linda Baker, Lee Picton, David Smith, Wayne Woods and Mickey Adams combine with a growing list of unsolved murders inside the Queensland correctional centres that reinforces the proposition.

The families of the victims from the correctional centres of Queensland are owed no less.