A journey through the 'belly of the beast' - Part 2

Additionally, the QCSC has a formal process to approve any research in Correctional Centre. Applications to conduct research must be made through the QCSC Research Committee. For ethical reasons, approval will not be granted to currently serving prisoners to conduct research in relation to Correctional Centre issues.

The Queensland Department of Corrective Services viewed the controversial research as “politically sensitive” and a potential embarrassment to the Department. The extent and the events surrounding the death rate inside Queensland prisons became a prohibited subject forbidden to be ventilated outside Queensland prison perimeters.

Dow made another detailed submission to the Queensland Department of Corrective Services and outlined the significance of his investigative research from a prisoner’s perspective but in a letter dated October 21, 1997, Alison Hunter bluntly refused the request for publication:

In response to your letter of 15 October, 1997, I wish to advise that the Queensland Corrective Services Commission will not grant approval for the publication of your paper entitled “Some do listen to the screams of help.”

As I advised in previous correspondence dated 15 August 1997, the QCSC has a formal process to approve research projects proposed by staff or students. For ethical reasons approval will not be granted to currently serving prisoners.

The report was subsequently smuggled out of the prison and published in a West Australian university newspaper.

Repeated calls for a public inquiry into all Queensland prison deaths have been steadfastly refused. The Queensland Prisoner’s Legal Service first called for an Inquiry in a July 21, 1995 letter to the then Minister for Police and Corrective Services, Paul Braddy, but it failed to motivate the government into action:

The Service is deeply concerned by yet another death at the Sir David Longland correctional Centre. What causes even greater worry is that six (6) deaths have occurred in the Centre in the last ten (10) months.

In 1993 the Service publicly expressed their concern for the five (5) deaths in custody which had occurred at the Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre during its first twelve months (12) months of operation. It appears that we now have the same problem occurring at a State Correctional Centre, however the number of deaths are greater and in a more concentrated period.

Apart from the standard internal investigations which are routinely conducted by the Queensland Corrective Services Commission and the Corrective Services investigation Unit (CSIU), no other attention has been given to what is obviously a major problem within the Centre.

If internal investigations were as effective as what the Kennedy Review had intended, then we would not have the number of deaths presently on record at the Sir David Longland Correctional Centre.

Since 1995 Queensland Governments of both political persuasions have consistently ignored pleas for an inquiry into the rising prison death toll. That inaction continues to contribute to the unprecedented body bag tally that has turned SDLCC into the killing fields of Queensland.

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 killing fields that reinforce the proposition.

The families of the victims from the killing fields of Queensland are owed no less.