Alex South’s article (Death on the inside: as a prison officer, I saw how the system perpetuates violence, 13 January) limits the scope of prison violence to individual acts by focusing on prisoner-on-prisoner homicides. But violence is part and parcel of how prisons function.
Hundreds of people die in prison each year, the majority by suicide, medical neglect or drugs. Even if we focus on homicides, they reveal how violence operates at an institutional level. Last year, the inquest of Sundeep Ghuman exposed how it was multiple failures by the prison, not just the actions of his cellmate, that led to his unlawful killing. The jury concluded that by forcing Sundeep to share a cell with a known racist, the prison contributed to his death. The inquest also found that placing three men in a nine-square-metre cell designed for two increased tensions.
Deaths like Sundeep’s reinforce how prisons should be seen as perpetrators of harm and death. They subject people to restraint and tasers, daily 23-hour lockups in cells, indefinite segregation and the denial of basic necessities including food, medicine and even underwear.
Further, the article is wrong to frame prison homicides as a new crisis. Since records began in 1978, there has been no year-on-year increase, with homicides oscillating between zero and eight annually. South asserts that “violence is not inevitable”, but Inquest’s casework exposes how prisons inherently enforce violence, degradation and dehumanisation on those trapped inside.
There are no “good prisons” and there never will be. Research has long proven that prisons do not rehabilitate or deter crime. Rather, they exacerbate existing societal issues. To end the cycle of violence, the government must cease prison building, reduce the prison population and invest in community-based services to prevent contact with the criminal justice system in the first place.
Jessica Pandian
Senior policy and communications officer, Inquest
