Page 3885 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 25 September 2019
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The ABC published a piece in June this year titled “Female prisoners in Canberra say they’re struggling and terrified in a prison designed for men”. Meanwhile, it is widely known that the cottages, which were designed for women, are housing the sex offenders. While it is understandable that they may need to be kept separate from the rest of the male detainees, it seems incredible that this is a permanent arrangement, given what is known about the difficulty of checking these cottages, with limited staffing over the night shift.
In the ABC article a former prisoner said that there was little separation at all between the men and women. “We see them quite a lot”, she said. She also said that in the cottages section designed for women “we didn’t really have much to do with them”. She said:
But now that we’re in a block, amongst the boys’ blocks, we can see them from our bedrooms, we can communicate through the window, our yards are right next to each other. You can communicate just by yelling over the fence.
She said that some of the women refuse to leave the block for education, library, gym or the oval “because of the anxiety of having to walk through 300 men yelling out”. They spend a lot of time locked in their cells, where there are only two options—lie down or stand up.
In the protected cells, in the west wing of the facility, the women have privacy concerns when showering or going to the toilet, because of the male guards being around. These facilities were designed for men and were not designed to have privacy screens or curtains on the toilets or showers. This, however, is the norm in facilities designed for women. It would be a great welcome to the facility for women starting out: the first time that you have a shower, you are not sure if someone is going to walk past.
Late last year the International Committee of the Red Cross released guidelines for good prison design. These are designed on the ICRC’s experience of almost 1,500 prisons in 90 countries. Called Towards humane prisons, the document spelled out how good design can improve the mental health of inmates and allow for better reintegration back into society. It describes how daily experiences of smell, noise, light, line of sight, green space et cetera all strongly affect the level of frustration and mental distress that inmates feel when deprived of their liberty, which, of course, prisons do by their nature. One of the contributors to the report, Sara Snell, said at the time:
Day after day, exposure to these frustrations can negatively influence an individual’s state of mind, even prolonging their time in prison and affecting how well they integrate with society on release.
Designing the accommodation of prisons to suit the sex of detainees can have a huge impact on their state of mind and their ability to engage in education or health improvements, and can then make all the difference to their reintegration after release.
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