Late last year the Western Australian government issued a press release praising the state’s independent prison inspector on its 20th anniversary.
Corrective Services minister Francis Logan labelled the Office of the Inspector of Custodial Services (OICS) as the “nation’s leading oversight body”, a model that some other states had copied.
The OICS offers independent scrutiny and oversight of custodial facilities in the state, including 18 prisons and detention centres and 20 court custody centres, reporting directly to Parliament and with its own statute and funding.
The office reports directly to Parliament and is influential, with one of its recent reports led to a private prison being taken back into the state’s hands.
While the state government correctly labelled the office as the best of its kind in Australia, it failed to note that the OICS is chronically underfunded to the point where the current inspector is concerned it may not be able to perform its various functions effectively or comply with a UN convention against torture.
“Our costs are going up and our net funding has reduced in line with everybody else - we’re required to do more with less,” Inspector of Custodial Services Eamon Ryan said.
“That’s the dilemma we’re in, and the challenge of the job I’ve got. It puts pressure on us and might influence our ability to meet our KPIs or to meet our expectations around those things that are not mandated in legislation.
“It is tight. We do run on a little bit of an oily rag. It’s not critical, but it’s extremely tight.”
The OICS has been allocated $3.605 million for 2020-21, down from $3.67 million in the previous year, and $3.81 million annually over the forward estimates. This accounts for just over 1 percent of the WA government’s total budget for the Department of Justice of $285 billion.
The inspector is legislatively required to inspect every prison, youth detention centre and court custody centre in Western Australia at least once every three years. This will be completed with the current funding, Ryan said, but if no extra resourcing is provided, the office will be unable to complete many, if any, additional reviews of the wider custodial system and important themes.
Reviews that the OICS has been able to complete in previous years include on access to acute forensic mental health treatment in prisons, the routine use of restraints and in relation to specific incidents.
“It’s where we have that flexibility that we are pushed for resources,” Ryan said. “We may do one report or one review, whereas our target is generally two, or three or four.”
The last three annual reports from the OICS have raised these budgetary concerns, but there has been no response or increased funding from the state government.
The most recent annual report said “budget constraints” were impacting the inspector’s ability to operate effectively.
“We, like many other public sector agencies, are facing difficult resource challenges. We have tried to maintain the extent of our work coverage within our allocated resources, but this has been difficult,” Ryan said.
The OICS will have 12 full-time staff, 2.6 on a full-time equivalent basis and 1.1 part-time contractors across 2020-21. This is down from a total of 18 staff in 2018-19. The office missed its target of the state government accepting 80 percent of its recommendations narrowly with 77 percent.
Western Australia has also recently become the first Australian state or territory to designate its independent prison inspector as part of Australia’s ratification of the UN’s Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture. The OICS will share this responsibility with the state’s Ombudsman, and will have the state’s 26 police lockups included in its remit.
But it will be unable to perform these additional duties unless extra funding is provided, Ryan said.
“That will require additional funding,” he said. “We simply wouldn’t be able to do that with the resources we have at the moment.”
The OICS has been heavily influential and led to a number of significant and positive changes in the WA custodial system.
Its report on the Melaleuca Remand and Reintegration facility found a “bewildering” lack of clarity around basic operational matters, and led the government to take the prison back into public hands and end the contract with private prison contractor Sodexo. In 2019-20, 77 percent of recommendations from the inspector were accepted by the department.
The office plays a crucial role in the state, Ryan said.
“If your brother or sister, son or daughter is in prison you would want some independent process of oversight and accountability to ensure they were treated fairly and decently and that the conditions were human and decent,” he said.
“An oversight agency like this shines a light on what goes on in a very closed and secure environment that the majority of people don’t have access to and don’t get to see. At its very core it’s a fundamental human right that people are treated fairly and equitably.”
The state government recently handed multinational Serco a $1.8 billion contract to continue running WA’s largest prison Acacia for the next 15 years, and the state’s prison population has grown steadily up until the COVID-19 pandemic last year.
This means the role of the state’s independent prison inspector has never been more important.
“I’m worried about every prison,” Ryan said. “We could double our budget and still not meet the demand.”
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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