Three years after prisoners ran riot at Darwin Correctional Centre, the findings of a once-secret report has been made public for the first time.
After allocating $60m to the Territory’s prison system in the 2023-24 budget, the government has now released the long promised recommendations of a review into the riot, along with a parallel “organisational review”.
Meanwhile, in an exclusive interview, NT Corrections Commissioner Matthew Varley revealed the Territory’s jails remain bursting at the seams as the social issues that drive up crime continue to spiral.
With no power to stem the ever rising tide of new inmates, Mr Varley says he will continue to advocate for the facilities and resources he needs, while not ruling out the potential need for an entirely new prison to be built within the next decade.
The report into the riot by Professor John Paget made a string of recommendations that were until now kept secret, with the Department of Chief Minister and Cabinet fighting a freedom of information application by this publication to the bitter end.
It can now be revealed for the first time that those recommendations included more funding, reduced overcrowding, better treatment programs and services, more staff and better training.
An executive summary of Prof Paget’s report concluded that where structural factors combine to create a tense institutional climate, “it only takes a small incident for individual prisoner feelings of frustration or sense of injustice to morph into collective disobedience or a riot”.
“The context in which the events of 13 May 2020 at DCC unfolded is one where nascent reform of the NTCS is under way to improve the agency’s progressively worsening performance outcomes and to avoid or reduce significant future capital and recurrent expenditures,” it reads.
The executive summary concludes a “consistent and significant” structural factor contributing to the riot was “impoverished prison regimes”.
“This impoverishment is a product of a range of issues, including poor relationships with staff, overcrowding, lockdowns (due to staff shortages), restricted access to programs and work and to parole,” it reads.
“If the (structural) factors identified in this investigation, with which the recommendations are directly concerned, are not addressed, the risks of further disturbances at DCC will remain.”
Emergency service vehicles arrive at Darwin Correctional Precinct after prisoners rioted on the roof of Darwin jail after mass breakout on May 13, 2020. Picture: Che Chorley
POPULATION/CAPACITY
With roughly 150 more prisoners in the system now than at the start of the year, the DCC is still almost overflowing in 2023 with 1277 of its expanded capacity of 1300 beds full as of this week.
Corrections have also taken over the Darwin police watch house, which adds another 40 potential beds but up to two dozen prisoners are still sleeping on mattresses on the floor, after the stopgap measure was introduced during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Despite the recent addition of 50 extra beds, Mr Varley says there are “still mattresses on the floor” while prison administrators continue “working pretty hard to fix that”.
“I don’t want mattresses on the floor, I think its something that needs to be remedied and made safe and secure and people need to have a decent place to sleep,” he says.
“But that said, the capacity of the jail to keep absorbing an endless stream of prisoners is not there either, there is a limit.
“We’re working with the architects and the design consultants to say ‘Right, how else might we have to look at expanding or using space differently, or what else can we build?’
“There are some works being done at the moment to see what else is left on that footprint for the Darwin site, similarly we’re in the process of managing a procurement and a construction process in Alice Springs for 80 new beds.”
Mr Varley says while he doesn’t think it’s time to build a new prison “yet”, it could be one of a number of options presented to the government when Corrections completes its 10-year infrastructure masterplan later this year.
“Every time you build another site you’ve also got to replicate a whole overlay of services and staff for that (so) it might be better as an economies-of-scale thing to expand what we do have,” he says.
“But I guess I’d never rule it out because that’s part of the planning cycle and I’d be prudent to make sure that I’m developing options for government consideration into the future.
“Those options haven’t been settled yet and of course, it all comes down to the effectiveness and efficiency of what we think is the best way to manage the future pressures on the system.”
The Darwin Correctional Precinct, Hotlze, has been subject to a riot in 2020 causing extensive damage, estimated in the region of $40 million. The Darwin Prison riot is currently undergoing review. Picture: Che Chorley
STAFFING
One of the Paget report’s key recommendations is “properly funding” staffing levels to “reduce the incidence of unscheduled lockdowns” and the “inefficient use of overtime” and to “improve staffing stability”.
To that end, Corrections has recruited about 140 officers this financial year, bringing the net total of new boots on the ground to between 60 and 70 staff but after posing himself the question “Is it enough to do the job?” Mr Varley’s answer is blunt.
“No, absolutely not and we’re still recruiting and we’re actually going to recruit another 50-odd correctional officers in the year ahead on top of existing workforce,” he says.
“So we’ve got our work cut out for us in relation to recruitment, that’s not a new thing for front line operation agencies, police are facing the same challenges.
“But I think the big step forwards is that we’ve been able to settle that agreement with the union on what is the defined staffing quotas for Darwin and we’re getting on with filling it.
“What that is is an agreement between myself and the union on what is the defined number of staffing posts, block by block, shift by shift, and that’s something that’s been settled only two or three months ago.”
But Mr Varley says while “there’s been quite a lot of progress”, actually meeting the target has been problematic.
“In Darwin we’re meeting it OK, it’s challenging because we’ve also got that additional overlay of higher prisoner numbers from earlier this year.
“My officers out at the prisons are working bloody hard every day under some really tough and stretched circumstances but we are in a far better position than we were at this time last year and certainly in the years before.”
Emergency service vehicles arrive at Darwin Correctional Precinct after a prisoners rioted at the Darwin jail after mass breakout. Picture: Che Chorley
PROGRAMS
The Paget report also recommended further investment in treatment services along with education and work programs, which Mr Varley says has also been increasingly difficult as inmates continue to flood the already overstretched system.
“With that rise in prison population over the last couple of years it has been tougher and tougher to provide the right level of therapeutic or psychological support to all of the prisoners that we need to,” he says.
“Ultimately, we’ve got to deal with the community expectation of holding people in secure custody for whatever term the court sentences.
“Our job is to make sure when they do exit at the end of their term that they’re better equipped to make their way to a new chapter and reoffend less.”
Mr Varley says while Corrections trains about 700 prisoners a year, there is “scope to do more in that space” and while the funding in this year’s budget is not “going to fix it all”, it “will go a long way to improving the services that we do offer”.
“It’s a start and it will help us recruit another 20 or so treating professionals,” he says.
“I don’t think that will fix all of the problems but again, we have to stage it in terms of the expansionary growth of those services, the clinicians we can hire in the market and being able to roll out the programs to new cohorts.”
SECURITY
The Territory budget also allocated several million dollars to direct responses to any future security threat at the prison, including a “a high security no climb security segregation fence” around the sector where the riot started.
But Mr Varley says work is also still ongoing to rebuild after the disturbance.
“There’s 400 prisoners in that sector on an average day and what that means is we’re now going to install segregation fencing to allow staff to more safely and securely manage that group in cohorts,” he says.
“Once some of that major construction work occurs it will free up some other capacity in the jail to be able to continue to expand some of the works that we’ve done around security fencing, CCTV and other things.”
Meanwhile, Mr Varley says the prison’s immediate action team has also been expanded “and of course, we’ve upgraded and purchased new riot control equipment for our staff”.
“We’ve also allocated funding this year for the establishment and a fit-out of a new incident control centre at Darwin, so in the event that another serious incident does occur, there’s a command centre,” he says.
“(That) doesn’t mean we haven’t had one before but we learned some lessons from the 2020 incident about where that command centre should be and how it should be equipped, so there’s a whole project behind that.”
THE FUTURE
Mr Varley says with its expanded and likely still growing population of 1300 inmates, the DCC is effectively “a small suburb when you think about it”, so “everything you can think of that goes on in a residential suburb, we have to provide some level of semblance in custody”.
“There’s 3500 meals a day delivered in DCC, we provide healthcare, we provide education, we provide clothing, we provide laundry, we provide employment and training — all of those things that you can think of that a population of 1300 people requires, in a secure contained environment,” he says.
“And then you add on to that the pressure cooker of people being away from their families and their loved ones and all of that because they’ve done the wrong thing and then you add on to that the overlay of my staff having to mange that facility safely every day.
“It’s never a done, fixed, finished thing, it’s always going to be room for improvement.”
But whatever the challenges and whichever strategies are adopted to manage them, Mr Varley says he will not shy away from continuing to put the case for further investment from the Territory government.
“I’ll do that every year that I’m commissioner because I’d be neglectful not to — but my job is to make sure that we’ve got the right people with the right tools and the right capability to do the job,” he says.
“We’ve got more staff than we’ve had before (but) we’re still short and I’m going to be quite frank about that, the unions remind me regularly that we’re still short every day but we’re working hard to recruit.
“So for me, the big challenges of the next year are going to be making sure we strengthen that workforce, we continue to recruit hard, we get the infrastructure piece planned and right and then we get some more capability in our centres to put people to work and to get our prisoners the programs and the rehabilitation that they need.”