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

Fine defaulters were not excluded from the body bag tally of Queensland’s killing fields either.

Scott Lawrence Topping, 22, was serving time for $1200 worth of unpaid traffic fines when he was raped and murdered inside Woodford Correctional Centre, Queensland, on September 12, 1997. Topping had three weeks left to serve before his release.

Another fine defaulter, Linda Jane Baker, 28, was found hanged in her cell at Townsville Jail on September 9, 1999. She had been serving 11 days for failing to pay an unlicensed driving fine.

Circumstances surrounding the unnatural deaths of Topping and Baker are symptomatic of the secrecy that envelops the Queensland prison system. A self-serving secrecy the Queensland Department of Corrective Services has persistently fostered by applying censorship tourniquets that suppress politically sensitive information ever reaching the media. The Queensland Corrective Services Act 2000 has been specifically designed to reinforce that process by restricting the media’s access to Queensland prisoners. It is those restrictive practices that have allowed the killing fields of Queensland to flourish.

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 shrouds the entire prison system with a veil of secrecy. The threat of that legislative power is regularly employed by departmental lawyers.

Coronial Inquiries into the murder of David Eames in Townsville prison in 1991 and the death of Mervyn Patrick at Wacol in 1994 revealed how Queensland prison authorities consistently and knowingly covered up failings within the system. Those cover-ups continued to contribute to an increased body count of unnatural deaths inside prison.

Despite those growing concerns the spiralling unnatural death rate continued unabated inside Queensland prisons. The significant impact that deaths in the killing fields of SDLCC had on numerous prisoners was contained in an unpublished report "Unnatural Deaths at SDLCC" by long-term prisoner Greg Clark.

A comparison of the unnatural deaths at SDLCC was made to the death rate of Australian soldiers during the Vietnam War and Clark drew the conclusion that it was far more dangerous to serve time in SDLCC during the 1990s than it was to have participated in the Vietnam War.

Clark also compared the desperation and helplessness that causes many suicides in prison to the Holmes-Rahe Life Events Rating Scale and found that stress in maximum security prisons is far greater than stress experienced outside prison. Similar concerns about the unnatural deaths in SDLCC were contained in a letter sent to the Queensland Ombudsman by lifer Ronnie Thomas.

Another long-term prisoner, Paul Dow, revealed some alarming statistics in his paper "Some Do Listen to the Screams of Help". Dow found that 33 prisoners had committed suicide over a 4-year period in Queensland prisons and 123 had attempted suicide. Dow also uncovered 364 incidents of self-harm during the same period.

Dow attempted to have his investigative report published but Alison Hunter, the then Director of Planning, Research and Offender Policy at the Queensland Department of Corrective Services, refused permission for “ethical” reasons:

In respect of your paper on self-harm or suicide while in Correctional Centres, the only information which can be supplied is that which is publicly available. For instance, the Queensland Corrective Services commission (QCSC) reports annually on the number of deaths in custody that have occurred. This information is published in the Annual Report. A copy of this document should be available through your Centre library.