“Treatment [of prisoners] is a systemic issue,” said Charandev Singh, a human rights advocate and paralegal who has been working with families at inquests for nearly 20 years. “Breaches don’t just happen in isolation. They don’t just cluster around people who have died. They’re ongoing. For every person who does die, there are many more who nearly die.” He points out, however, the root causes of deaths in custody extend far beyond the prison walls. “A death in custody is not just about the micro-conditions of custody,” he told Crikey. “It’s about the macro-conditions of society and the community which perpetuate deaths in custody and the impunity that attends to them. “The resources that are needed in the community to respond to the reasons why people go to prison and are locked into cycles of criminal harm have all been taken away and drained into the prison system. There are fundamental structural and policy and resource issues that we need to question, that underpin why people die in custody.”
Posted on: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 09:06:44 +0000
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