The extreme temperatures that are being recorded around the world highlight the importance of reorienting justice systems to focus on keeping people out of prison, as well as ensuring safe conditions for those who are incarcerated, according to John Ryks, Director of Jesuit Social Services’ Centre for Just Places.
John Ryks writes:
From mid-June to mid-July, at least 23 people died in Texas prisons from cardiac arrest or undetermined illnesses, in stiflingly hot cells. This, amid wildfires and world-record breaking heatwaves across the northern hemisphere.
While Texas has not reported a heat-related death in prison since 2012, former inmates and family members say heatwaves are cooking people alive – putting unbearable strain on incarcerated people whose physical and mental health is on average far poorer than the general population.
Here in Australia, outdated, uninsulated and overcrowded prisons without air-conditioning are also a threat to people’s lives.
Following years of campaigning from human rights advocates and lawyers, in November last year, the Western Australian Government agreed to air-condition all cells at Roebourne Regional Prison, after temperatures reached 50 degrees Celsius at the prison.
Aboriginal Legal Service lawyer, Alice Barter, said: “I’ve been told by men at Roebourne prison that they feel their brains are boiling.”
The Northern Territory Government is now assessing new cooling and heat mitigation strategies at the Alice Springs Correctional Centre, a desert prison where summer temperatures regularly reach 40 degrees Celsius, after allocating no funding for air-conditioning in its 2022-2023 budget. In 2018, a riot sparked at the prison after inmates refused to return to their cells during a heatwave.
Renewed scrutiny
Jesuit Social Services is a social change organisation that has worked alongside people involved with the criminal justice system for more than 45 years. We know that the effects of climate change are uneven, and people already experiencing disadvantage or marginalisation are often most at-risk because they have fewer resources to cope, adapt and recover.
Our 2021 Dropping off the Edge report into locational disadvantage across every community in the country included environmental indicators for the first time, in addition to indicators such as unemployment, criminal offending and family violence. The results confirmed what we already suspected – that Australia’s most socially and economically disadvantaged areas also experience disproportionately high levels of air pollution and extreme heat.
Australia is already suffering greater impacts from climate change than any other advanced economy, according to a 2022 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Under a worsening climate, the IPCC says normal outdoor activity across much of northern Australia could become potentially fatal.
In this context, prison infrastructure, emergency management procedures, inspections and oversight demand renewed scrutiny.
People in prison are among those people whose health, wellbeing and lives are most at-risk, and not just during extreme heat.
When a grassfire raged dangerously close to Central New South Wales’ Lithgow Correctional Centre in late 2019, local residents were evacuated and highways closed, but 400 Lithgow prisoners – around a quarter of them Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people – remained locked inside.
Incarcerated people’s movements are highly restricted, leaving them with limited options to keep themselves safe during extreme weather including disasters. Their lives depend on the policies and resources others have put in place to support them.
