Private prison provider Serco was this month fined $100,000 after a man escaped from a facility run by the British company in Adelaide.
The fine is baked into the contract between Serco and the South Australian government to manage the Adelaide Remand Centre, with the controversial multinational also facing a fine of the same value for any “unnatural deaths” in this facility.
But Serco could have been up for a fine five times larger if it was operating the prison in a different state, with the New South Wales government including $500,000 slaps on the wrists for private prison providers following an escape or death.
Under the contract with the South Australian government, Serco is also liable for a $50,000 fine for an escape from outside the secure perimeter, and $25,000 for a release or detainment in error.
Contracts between state governments and private prisoner providers are often redacted under the guise of commercial-in-confidence, with little information on performance benchmarks and potential bonuses.
Some of the publicly available contracts do however include the fines that these private providers are liable for in the event of an incident in a facility they are managing, revealing the dollar amount that state governments place on the lives of the individuals incarcerated in these prisons.
The contracts also typically place the same value on an escape from prison and a death in prison from unnatural causes.
Serco also operates the large Acacia Prison in Western Australia under a contract with the state government worth $1.8 billion over 15 years. The contract includes a potential $100,000 fine for a death in custody of unnatural causes, the same size as the fine that the company copped for the escape in Adelaide.
Two Indigenous men died in Acacia Prison last year, with the deaths now subject to coronial inquests. Its unclear whether Serco will be fined for these deaths, although the state government did recently award the company a $3 million bonus for “good performance”.
The contract with the WA government also details how Serco will be fined $100,000 for a “loss of control”, and $100,000 for a death in custody other than from natural causes, the same cost as for an escape.
US conglomerate GEO Group runs the Junee Correctional Facility in New South Wales. The state government applies much higher fines for this operator than those in South Australia and Western Australia, with GEO liable to pay $500,000 for a death of unnatural causes, $500,000 for an escape and $200,000 for an escape from open custody.
The Victorian government also includes “charge events” in its contracts with private prison providers to run three facilities in the state, with these including an escape, an act of “material indiscipline”, an unnatural death and professional misconduct. Despite other states publicly stating the size of these fines, the Victoria government has redacted the size of these fines in the publicly available contracts.
There is little transparency over how these figures are calculated and how often the fines are applied, and the requirements in place for private prison operators to report such incidents.
Denham Sadler is a freelance journalist based in Melbourne. He covers politics and technology regularly for InnovationAus, and writes about other issues, including criminal justice, for publications including The Guardian and The Saturday Paper. He is also the senior editor of The Justice Map, a project to strengthen advocacy for criminal justice reform in Australia. You can follow him on Twitter.
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