The first privately run prison to open outside of the U.S. was the Borallon Correctional Centre, in Queensland, in January 1990. It was - and is - run by Corrections Corporation of Australia. There are currently private prisons in Victoria, South Australia, Queensland and New South Wales. Victoria has three private prisons, which hold approximately 48 per cent of the state’s prisoner population. Western Australia has one private prison under construction and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) is considering whether to privatise its first prison.

Two of the three U.S. firms likely to bid for contracts in Ontario, CCA and Wackenhut, and European based Group 4, all run prisons in Australia.

Since their inception, private prisons in Australia have a history of problems.60 But current events in Queensland and Victoria are most instructive for the government of Ontario.

In February 1999, the government of Queensland announced that existing contracts for private correctional facilities will be honoured but they will not be automatically renewed. Mr. Tom Barton, the Minister for Police and Corrections, said on 9 February 1999 that the Government was “allowing existing private providers to continue, but putting a very strong road block in front of a process the previous Government put in place which would have effectively ensured that every prison was in private sector hands within a few years.”

The existing corporatised corrections system will also be scrapped in favour of more direct Ministerial control. A new Department of Corrective Services will be established. Legislation enabling these changes will be introduced later this year. The Queensland Corrective Services Commission (QCSC) was set up in 1988 and Queensland was the first Australian state to contract out prison management. Corrections Corporation of Australia has run Borallon Correctional Centre since 1990. Wackenhut has run the Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre since 1992. In April 1997, the QCSC was administratively split into purchaser and provider organisations.

The Government’s decisions on corporatisation go further than the recommendations contained in a recent review of the state’s corrections system by Frank Peach, a senior civil servant. The 144-page report, published in January 1999,61 recommended 58 changes, including reducing prison numbers and the associated social and economic costs by investigating the potential use of community corrections to prevent crime through rehabilitation.

On corporatisation and privatisation specifically, the report concluded that:

the use of the purchaser/provider concept created inefficiencies, did not transfer risk, prompted job insecurity and the loss of inexperienced staff from the public sector, unbalanced social and economic priorities and created a fictitious profit;

cost efficiencies across the system as a whole resulted from prisoners being doubled up in cells (in public and private facilities), not from corporatisation;

the level of oversight of privately run facilities was inadequate; and

existing contracts did not reflect best practice.

The report’s recommendations included:

abolishing corporatisation while maintaining joint public and private sector provision;

introducing output-based contracts as a matter of urgency;

making tendering processes more transparent;

allowing the Criminal Justice Commission to investigate allegations of misconduct by privately employed staff; and

abandoning universal market testing.

The newly elected minority Labour Government of Victoria is taking legal advice on how soon it can terminate three prison management contracts initiated by the former administration. On 1 November 1999, Andre Haermeyer, the Minister for Corrections and Police told The Age that “our commitment is to extract ourselves from those contracts at the earliest legal opportunity. However, that doesn’t mean we are going to fork out large amounts of money.”

He added: “We don’t care who owns the facilities. We do care who runs them and we basically want the profit motive taken out of running the prisons.”

Corrections Corporation of Australia, Australasian Correctional Management and Group 4 currently own and operate the three facilities. While their ownership appears not to be under threat, the companies are opposed to early termination of their management contracts. The companies have 20 year contracts to provide accommodation services. Correctional services are provided on renewable five year contracts.

Victoria’s three private prisons hold more than half of the State’s prisoners. The contract for the first of Victoria’s three private prisons, CCA’s Metropolitan Women’s Prison, states that the Minister “may at any time” notify the contractor if any of the optional five further three year terms are to be put out to tender.

If bids are to be called for, then the existing operator “may submit a tender” but “the Minister may elect to accept or reject any tender received.” The Government also has the right to terminate the contract if correctional services requirements are not met over a period of time.

One of the legal issues at stake is whether these criteria might apply in any of the three cases. CCA’s management contract for the Women’s Prison expires in 2000. Group 4’s management contract for Port Phillip and ACM’s for Fulham Correctional Centre expire in 2002.

The director of Victoria’s Jesuit Social Services welcomed the minister’s announcement. Father Peter Norden said that the privatisation of Victoria’s prisons had been a “failed social experiment.”

It is also now unlikely that the former government’s proposals for another private adult facility, a new facility for young offenders and the expansion of the Fulham Correctional Centre will be implemented.

Three of the ministers in the former government who failed to gain re-election were responsible for plans to develop a privatised youth detention facility. Two had chosen their respective constituencies as prospective locations for the facility.62

The Victoria government’s decision has been taken after almost continuous problems with the three private facilities.

One of the last acts of the former Government of Victoria was to lose its three-year legal battle to prevent the publication, under the Freedom of Information Act, of the financial details of its contracts with private prison firms. In a written decision on 17 September 1999, the Court of Appeal of Victoria’s Supreme Court upheld the Civil and Administrative Tribunal decision of 20 May and rejected the Government’s argument that publishing the financial details of the contracts would hinder competition.

It also held that full disclosure of the contracts, rather than commercial confidentiality, was in the public interest. Only certain specifications relating to prison security are to remain confidential. The Department of Justice was refused leave to appeal to the High Court of Australia. The legal costs of the Government’s intransigence is borne by taxpayers - another hidden cost of privatisation.

The most controversial details disclosed are the annual performance fees which the companies can earn regardless of whether they meet performance targets. But it is still impossible to determine whether the former Government’s original claims for cost efficiencies can be substantiated as proper comparators do not exist.63

Tear gas was used to quell an incident at Australasian Correctional Management (ACM, Wackenhut)-run Fulham Correctional Centre on 18 August 1999. The prisoners set fires and refused to return to their cells in protest over planned overcrowding at the prison. Damage estimated at A$100,000 was caused. ACM had agreed to take an extra 60 prisoners despite the prison having reached its capacity of 600.

Three staff were injured during a nine-hour disturbance by prisoners at Corrections Corporation of Australia’s Metropolitan Women’s Prison, Melbourne, on 23 August 1999. The Police Special Operations Group was called in to help regain control. According to Victoria’s correctional services commissioner, tear gas was used “as a last resort.” Tear gas was also used on 17 October 1999 after prisoners at the facility protested about overcrowding. Some 35 women were housed in a unit designed for 24. Amanda George of the Federation of Community Legal Centres alleged that using chemical weapons twice in three months indicated that “the prison was in crisis.”

Liberty Victoria has called for an inquiry into the use of tear gas.

A coroner’s inquest into the self inflicted death of prisoner Paula Richardson has heard that she called prison staff on an intercom many times during the hours before her death on 11 September 1998. Ms Richardson was eventually found dead in her cell with a shower curtain around her neck. Other evidence included: Ms Richardson had been forcibly strip searched by male officers two months prior to her death. Company policy was that only officers of the same gender should conduct strip searches; Ms Richardson’s foster mother had warned prison authorities of the risk of suicide; and CCA’s operations co-ordinator, Ms Gaylene Coram, claimed that she was unaware of Ms Richardson’s history of self harm and suicide attempts.64

The Auditor-General of Victoria, the state’s independent financial watchdog, was forced by the Government to omit key financial details about three private prisons from a report on the state’s prison system. Figures such as original comparative benchmark costs, costs per prisoner per year, and a breakdown of payments to private contractors between August 1996 and December 1998, had to be deleted from tables published in the report on the grounds of commercial confidentiality.

But the report raised fundamental concerns about the oversight and operation of private prisons, including: the mix of state managed and privately operated prisons now requires a regulatory framework which features a truly independent Correctional Services Commissioner; contractual service delivery outcomes used to determine the level of annual performance remuneration paid to private prison operators do not encourage service excellence.

The outcomes “were established on the basis of average or, in some cases, less than average results achieved in the outdated prisons which had been identified for replacement.” They are also “primarily quantitative ... and do not address the key areas of qualitative performance such as the results of prisoner rehabilitation programmes and the quality of staff training. These shortcomings, coupled with provisions which enable performance remuneration to be paid even where the service delivery outcomes have been only partly met, are not conducive to achieving the improvements in the quality of services which were expected to flow from the establishment of new prisons.”

He also found that: “the limited range of information dealing with the industry communicated to Parliament to date in the Department’s annual report falls far short of the level necessary to effectively meet its accountability obligations.”

“on the basis of the latest reports issued by the Commissioner, progressive improvement in performance at Port Phillip has occurred to February 1999, but the prison operator is still to satisfy the Commissioner that it is meeting all required service delivery outcomes.”

“financial penalties to the contractor responsible for Port Phillip Prison have been minimal even though serious deficiencies at the prison were not fully addressed for over a year and involved significant monitoring costs to the Government.”

“there is still some uncertainty whether the cost savings expected to flow from the prison reforms [three private prisons] will be realised.”

Self-mutilations and attempted suicides and assaults on prisoners by other prisoners at Metropolitan Women’s Correctional Centre exceeded the specified acceptable limits by 91 and 20 per cent respectively.65

The Task Force appointed by the Government of Victoria to look into 18 deaths in public and private prisons between August 1997 and October 1998 has identified a range of shortcomings that increased the risks to vulnerable prisoners.

Although the Government took six months to release an edited version of the report [presented November 1998, published July 1999], it has appointed a steering committee to consider the 176-page report’s 74 system-wide recommendations for improvements.

The Task Force noted that privatisation had fragmented Victoria’s prison system, making cohesion of policy, procedures and standards difficult. Many of the recommendations are aimed at addressing problems such as inexperienced and poorly trained staff and communication breakdowns. The use of isolation cells was also called into question.

The Task Force found that consultants employed by Group 4 and Corrections Corporation of Australia to produce independent reports into the deaths of prisoners had not met the required standards. Regarding Group 4’s Port Phillip Prison in particular:

“ ... failings that occurred in the events surrounding the first tragedy were repeated in subsequent cases.”

“... the problems that arose in cases of suicide invariably related to failures in the implementation of procedures rather than to the procedures themselves.”

both the Director of Business Development, Group 4, and the director of the prison told the Task Force that they considered that “the delivery of the service is satisfactory and that the care being taken of prisoners is exemplary.”

But the Task Force noted that: “As recently as early September 1998, an independent audit by PriceWaterhouseCoopers concluded that there remain “significant shortcomings” relating to the control of prisoner self harm which included: inadequate training of prison officers; a lack of appreciation by prison officers of the importance of key procedures; and a lack of supervision and quality control of these procedures.”

it was recommended that “the appropriate management training should be provided ... to all first line and other middle managers in team-building, human relations and personnel management” and that “there should be a regular review (at least annually) of the performance of middle managers by the senior executive ...”66

Mr. Graeme Johnstone, the state coroner investigating the deaths of five prisoners at Group 4’s Port Phillip Prison near Melbourne between October 1997 and March 1998, has said that, in each case, information had gone missing or was not documented. Mr. Johnstone also said that guidelines for new cell design needed reviewing and that the overall standard for investigating deaths in custody needed revising.

The inquest into four hangings and a suspected drug overdose began on 7 June and ended on 2 August 1999. Lawyers for all parties have a month to prepare final submissions. Mr. Johnstone’s findings are expected to take several months to be published. During the inquest the coroner heard that:

Patrick Hughes, a part-time prison officer, had not completed his first aid training and was in sole charge of up to 60 prisoners in the Swallow Unit when he found Vien Chi Tu on 4 January 1998;

Mr. Hughes said that, because of staffing levels, prisoners classified for suicide or self harm observation could not be observed every 15 minutes;

prisoner Adam Irwin was showing signs of life when he was found hanging on 16 December 1997. According to a forensic pathologist, Mr. Irwin might have been saved if appropriate procedures had been undertaken when he was first discovered;

Richard Judge was the prison officer in charge of the Scarborough Unit on 30 October 1997 when he found prisoner George Drinken hanging. Mr. Judge said that earlier in the day, he had been too busy to look at Mr. Drinken’s file after the prisoner became distressed. He did not know that he should try resuscitation before seeking emergency assistance and he had never seen a summary of his duties as a unit officer;

Mr. Judge is now a duty supervisor whose job is to teach new officers about prisoner suicide and self harm. But he told the inquest that he had still only “browsed through” a training manual and had not yet read the prison’s entire operational instructions. He agreed that the situation was unsatisfactory;

former prisoner Hasan Tasiyan told the inquest that he had felt sorry for the staff as they did not know what they were doing. “They would pull us aside and ask what went on in another prison.”

counsellor Mary Vyssaritis told the inquest that she was one of only five responsible for 600 prisoners and staff. “I think we are grossly understaffed,” she said. Ms Vyssaritis had been originally employed as a probationary psychologist but she had not yet attained that qualification. Another counsellor listed as a probationary psychologist on a Group 4 document had also not attained the qualification;

in Ms. Vyssaritis’ view, the prison was “chaotic” around the time of Mr. Drinken’s death. She also believed that the prison should not have opened in August 1997 as proper counselling services had not been established. There were no psychologists employed and standard risk assessment forms were not in use at that time. There is now one psychologist employed;

neither Mr. Drinken nor Rodney Koers, who was found hanging on 19 March 1998, had been placed on suicide watch despite both being at risk;

the suicide of Adam Irwin in December 1997 might have been avoided if his psychiatric condition had not been overlooked. Despite a magistrate’s order that he should receive urgent psychiatric attention, Mr. Irwin was not seen by a psychiatrist during his 11 days at Port Phillip;

Mr. Kish Jude, a former prison officer, alleged that Port Phillip staff falsified log book records relating to checks on prisoners at risk;

a lawyer’s concerns for his client Michael Filips were passed on to Group 4 staff but this was not documented and no action was taken to prevent Mr. Filips from hanging himself on 19 March 1998;

the company was warned before Port Phillip opened that hanging points in the cells should be removed as they posed a risk. But no remedial work was done until eight months after the first hanging;.

Mr. David McDonnell, the prison’s director, said, “there are things we could have done better but no, I don’t accept that we made mistakes.” He blamed the high Australian suicide rate for the number of deaths at Port Phillip. When asked if the company took the suicide rate into account when they designed the prison, he replied: “Not in a direct sense, no.”

Eleven prisoners have died at Port Phillip since it opened in August 1997.67

A threatened 48-hour strike by staff at Corrections Corporation of Australia’s Women’s Correctional Centre was averted on 8 July 1999 after the company agreed to improved pay and conditions. The Community and Public Sector Union, which represents the staff, had complained about staff shortages and inadequate sick leave. The company agreed to increased pay, penalty rates, higher duties allowances and better sick leave entitlement.68

The employment of prisoners in Victoria’s three private prisons breaches the International Labour Organisation (ILO) convention on forced labour. In September 1998, the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) filed an official complaint with the ILO, claiming that the Victoria Government’s arrangements with Group 4, Australasian Correctional Management and Corrections Corporation of Australia contravene rules preventing private companies benefiting from the use of prison labour.

The ACTU also cited examples of prisoners earning between A$6.50 and A$7.50 per day compared with the minimum wage of around A$75 per day for similar work. Prison labour is exempted from the ILO’s rules provided that it is supervised by a public authority and not hired out or placed at the disposal of private companies. In its ruling, the ILO said that the legal prohibition on the use of forced prison labour for the benefit of private firms was absolute and applied to all work organised by privately run prisons. Both the Federal Government and the Government of Victoria maintain that private prison arrangements do not breach the ILO convention.69

Within weeks of Wackenhut subsidiary Australasian Correctional Management (ACM) taking over the operation of Melbourne Custody Centre, a mentally ill prisoner was beaten so badly by other prisoners that he could be permanently brain damaged. On 28 April 1999, Michael Tully, a 43-year-old schizophrenic on armed robbery charges, was attacked in a holding cell while awaiting transfer to a forensic psychiatric hospital.

His family has criticised the company for not recognising his disability and failing to segregate him. The Opposition spokesperson for Corrections, Mr. Andre Haermeyer, said that the decision to hold Mr. Tully with violent offenders was an act of “senseless stupidity.” Meanwhile, Liberty Victoria has called for the company’s contract to be made public in order to examine ACM’s training standards.

In February 1999, when ACM was awarded the A$6m contract, Victoria’s Corrections Minister Bill McGrath said that penalties and incentives built into the contract would ensure that targets for safety and fair treatment would be met. ACM started the contract on 4 April 1999.70

Three prisoners overdosed on heroin on 1 April 1999 at Corrections Corporation of Australia’s Metropolitan Women’s Correctional Centre. The incident happened in a high supervision unit. The prison’s manager said, that although none of the prisoners involved had received visitors that day, the heroin was smuggled in by visitors despite the presence of sniffer dogs. Three other prisoners had suffered from drug overdoses in the preceding three weeks.71

Prisoners objecting to overcrowding at Corrections Corporation of Australia’s Metropolitan Women’s Correctional Centre held a sit-in and sprayed staff with water on 24 February 1999. There are 152 prisoners in the facility with a capacity of 125. Also, a number of prisoners at the Australasian Correctional Management (Wackenhut)-run Fulham Correctional Centre were taken to hospital in February 1999 after being injured during violent incidents over a three day period. Victoria Police are investigating the incidents.72