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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

1500 kilometres north of Perth, inmates at the Roebourne Regional Prison are exposed to some of the hottest temperatures in the country.

Recently, the prison marked its hottest day on record - reaching 50.5 degrees.

Former prisoners and advocates have warned that it’s not a matter of if someone at Roebourne will die from heat - it’s a matter of when.

Today, contributor to The Saturday Paper Dechlan Brennan on what it’s like in Australia’s hottest prison, and why the government is refusing to act.

It’s Thursday, February 3.

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RUBY:

First of all, Dechlan, hello. Hi, welcome to 7am.

DECHLAN:

Hello.

RUBY:

It's great to have you here. You've been reporting a story about some things that have happened at a particular prison in Western Australia, and I wanted to start by asking you why that is what it is that drew you to reporting on this.

DECHLAN:

Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up in a fairly privileged household, I suppose. But when I was 17, my father was incarcerated.

And even he really struggled in the system of prison he went to several various ones in Western Australia from high end to to sort of like a prison farm - and the bureaucracy in it was so difficult for him and from what he passed on to me when I went and visited him and saw him, it was such a horrible experience.

And, you know, we all sort of pretend to learn that it's not called a prison. It's called like a rehabilitation style centre. And it's not that it's just there to break people down.

So my father's experience made me very interested in people who are incarcerated. And in Western Australia, the worst prison is Roebourne Prison.

RUBY:

Yeah. And so Roebourne Prison, you said it's known as the worst prison in Western Australia, but can you tell me a bit more about it? Where is it exactly and who's kept there?

DECHLAN:

Absolutely. So Roebourne is a very small town about 1500 kilometres north of Perth in the Pilbara region.

It's a very regional prison and it's mostly Indigenous population, so it’s about 80 per cent.

And before it existed as Roebourne prison today, there was a previous incarnation of the prison, which was actually built in 1896. It's known now as old Roebourne Jail.

And it was one of the first all indigenous prisons in Western Australia.

Archival tape -- Roebourne Documentary:

“They were charged with running away from their bosses or with sheep stealing, and guilty or not dozens were carted off in chains to the Roebourne prison.”

DECHLAN:

And some of the tales of that are just beyond sort of our belief of how people are. It's what we would view Southern America to be like before the end of slavery.

Archival tape -- Roebourne Documentary:

“Others at the chains rolled around their necks naked bodies. The effect of the chains can be imagined in a climate where the stones get so hot that they cannot be handled. Samuel McCloud 1889.”

DECHLAN:

Tales of people walking and being walked from Karratha, which is a good hour drive away in this absurd heat in neck chains and leg chains being walked through the desert to get to this prison. There's tales of it being so hot that the locks in these, the pins in these locks melting in the heat.

And it's just the weather up there is just horrifically hot. I mean, we think about the north of Western Australia, how hot it would be, but inland from the coast, it regularly hits 40 degrees and above.

RUBY:

Right - so it sounds like for a long time, Roebourne Prison has been a horrific place and the heat has added to that - added to the awful conditions. But what about now - what happens when it gets at Roebourne Prison now - what is it like for the people incarcerated there?

DECHLAN:

So. The heat is regularly about 40 degrees in the Pilbara, that's a very regular day. But in the night, it's regularly over 30 degrees, which is probably even more dangerous in a lot of ways because you're in your cell all night. In the night it is locked in, 12-13 hours minimum, in a hot box.

And of the people I sort of interviewed - former inmates - there would sort of be minimum of four, but mostly six seven eight people in a cell at a time with only four beds, so people would be sleeping on the floor a lot of the time.

RUBY:

Hmm mm.

DECHLAN:

And their stories of people with heat rash on their body. One of the former inmates I talked to had burns a lot of the time in the summer. They don't have windows in the cells. So they just have bars. So you think about the heat of a day in any city, which is 35 degrees, you think the wind is hot and it's not a pleasant experience.

One of the prisoners told me they would cover their windows with wet sheets to cool the air because it would just burn their throat when they were in the prison cells.

RUBY:

Oh God.

DECHLAN:

Yeah. So there's been several reports from the Office of Inspector Custodial Services

Archival tape -- Eamon Ryan:

“Our office has been inspecting Roebourne Prison since the year 2000, and almost in every report we've written about the intolerable conditions in the accommodation units.”

DECHLAN:

And the head of that is a gentleman called Eamon Ryan.

Archival tape -- Eamon Ryan:

“I think it's probably safe to say Roebourne Regional Prison is the hottest prison in Australia, without any doubt.”

DECHLAN:

And in 2014, the report was scathing.

Archival tape -- Eamon Ryan:

“We were particularly scathing in 2014, where we said that there was just a lack of effective heat mitigation in the cells.”

DECHLAN:

And one of their major recommendations was heat management in all the cells - air conditioning.

Archival tape -- Eamon Ryan:

“Ultimately, I think that the answer is that the cells ought to be air conditioned.”

DECHLAN:

And then in 2020, they went up there and they noted some slight improvements with things like barbecue areas and stuff. But once again, number one recommendation - heat management in cells.

And so all of this came to a head on January 13th.

Archival tape -- World is One News Reporter:

“With mercury on the rise, Australia reported its hottest day ever on Thursday.”

DECHLAN:

When Australia recorded its hottest reliably recorded temperature in history.

Archival tape -- Nine News reporter:

“The Pilbara sweltered through its hottest day in history, with three towns topping fifty degrees.”

DECHLAN:

And in Roebourne, it reached 50.5 degrees.

Archival tape -- Sky News Australia reporter:

“The temperature in Roebourne, Western Australia soared to 50.5 degrees at 12.49pm.”

RUBY:

Wow so what happened when it reached 50 degrees?

DECHLAN:

One of the inmates that I talked to, he described the oldies, which is what he describes people over 50. They would lay on the ground all day, and they did because it was just too hot to move.

RUBY:

Mm.

DECHLAN:

They would have to line up at 4pm every day to day medication out in the sun.

But for the best part, they just stayed in their cells because it was too hot to move, but it was also too hot to survive. You think about how difficult it is in 35 degrees for us, and these people are just stuck, unable to move, unable to be treated like people.

It's a complete miracle that no one has died of heat stroke or of a heat related death so far.

And this 50 degree day, it's renewed calls for upgrades to the prison and for air conditioning to be implemented in all the cells because it's not if somebody is going to die. But really devastatingly when?

RUBY:

We'll be back in a moment.

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RUBY:

Dechlan, we’ve been talking about the heat at Roebourne Prison - and how dangerous it is, that it’s only a matter of time before somebody dies. And the reason we know that is because there is a precedent, isn’t there? Something like that has happened?

DECHLAN:

Yeah so one of the best known cases or most infamous cases, is one by a gentleman called Mr Ward, who is an elder, and he was put in the back of a prison van from Laverton to Kalgoorlie which is about four hours. There was no air conditioning in the back of that van. He was only given a 600 ml bottle of water. And he passed away.

And some of the tales of him being in the back are just so awful to talk about, he received third degree burns on his skin. Comments in later reports describe that he was cooked to death. And the inside temperature actually only got to 48 degrees. The metal on the ground got to 56 degrees.

RUBY:

Oh.

DECHLAN:

And when you talk to a couple of the gentlemen who have been through the prison and then Mervyn Eades who’s an Aboriginal incarceration expert and person who deals with people who've been out of prison, they routinely discuss that the temperatures in the cells get minimum five to 10 degrees hotter inside than outside.

So you've got to think that on that 50 degree day, it is a minimum 55 degrees in those cells with no air conditioning, which is hotter than what Mr Ward died in the back of the van.

And so, the fact that nobody has died in Roebourne prison from heat directly, it's not anything other than just potluck. There's nothing else that can be described as.

RUBY:

And so given the seriousness of this that it is a matter of life and death, why does it seem to you that authorities in WA aren't acting? Aren't trying to mitigate this, prevent this from occurring? Has anything really been done so far?

DECHLAN:

It's hard to know why people don't want to reform these prisons other than a lack of care.

RUBY:

Mm.

DECHLAN:

Because there's no other reason. It's not like they haven't been told. It's not like they haven't been made exactly aware of the circumstances. The results they know about Mr Ward, they know about all the reports that mention hate rash and burning. We put questions to the government ministers.

Archival tape -- Alison Xamon:

“Can the minister explain why recommendations from the 2016 report were not fully implemented by the time of the 2019 inspection?”

DECHLAN:

You had Fran Logan, who was a former corrections minister in 2020, coming out and saying that some people up in the Pilbara don't like air conditioning.

Archival tape -- Stephen Dawson:

“Madame president, the answer to one to four has been provided in tabular form, so simply to have been incorporated into Hansard members.”

DECHLAN:

Which is just such an absurd comment to make without any understanding of it.

And people just painting or government ministers or officials just painting all Aboriginal people as the same, all First Nations people as they're from the heat, they can deal with it.

So it goes beyond sort of callous and just really just becomes a racist stereotype, and it's hard to think of anything else besides that.

And from a lot of reports, it comes down to the fact that 80 percent of the population in the prison is indigenous, and it's, you can't sugarcoat it any other way that if it was somewhere else, there would be a bigger outcry. But because it's 1500 kilometres away from the population centre in Perth, and it's people that aren't in the periphery of everyday sort of viewing people just don't care. And there's not an outcry for it. There's articles and then it's forgotten.

RUBY:

Hmm. Absolutely. And at the end of the day, it does seem like there is a fairly simple solution to all of this. Air conditioning needs to be installed, but there is no will at all to make that happen. And in the meantime, it's only going to keep getting hotter. Every summer will be hotter. So is the reality, the really grim reality of the situation, that until someone dies, which seems inevitable, nothing is going to change?

DECHLAN:

Yeah, providing them with air conditioning sounds like a luxury when, of course it's not. It's just a matter of life and death. And so there's just very little political will in Western Australia to do that. The cost The West Australia received a $5 billion budget surplus this year or the last financial year, and the latest costing for air conditioners is $2.5 million for the entire prison. And it's a very quick fix. You think about how easy it is to put air conditioning into a house realistically.

And I mean, Alice Barter from Aboriginal Legal Service WA she said that as I said, the fact that nobody has died is just luck and really sadly, somebody will die.

And somebody will die and there will be like we all know a government report will come out. A government inquest will come out and the recommendations will be the exact same recommendations that have come in 2014, 2016 and 2020. And only then maybe will something get done and that is such a disgusting callous way to think of things that only when someone dies will anything get done that every single person has the right to normally live like.

RUBY:

Dechlan, thanks so much for your reporting on this and for talking to me today.

DECHLAN:

Thank you.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today,

The head of the Reserve Bank, Philip Lowe, has cooled expectations of a rise in interest rates, saying the RBA will ‘take time’ before potentially raising the rate for the first time since November 2010.

Speaking at the National Press Club on Wednesday, Lowe emphasised that the Reserve Bank's decision to stop buying government bonds did “not mean an increase in the cash rate was imminent.”

And Amnesty International has ​​accused Israel of subjecting Palestinians to a system of apartheid founded on policies it describes as "segregation, dispossession and exclusion".

Amnesty’s new report echoes similar findings published by Human Rights Watch last year.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Tuesday, in response to the report, “no country is perfect" and said Australia would remain a “staunch friend of Israel”

Israel’s foreign minister rejected Amnesty’s report and accused the organisation of antisemitism.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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