GRAPHIC CONTENT: Unnecessary pain, suffering and death is rampant in prisons because of understaffing and indifference, particularly towards Indigenous people, whistleblowers say.
Hills said staffing at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre in Melbourne was often woeful, and a failure to employ Indigenous support workers or those with appropriate health expertise exposed vulnerable inmates to preventable harm.
Hills said CorrectCare and the jail had attempted to cover up medical neglect. She observed a prison doctor fail to get off his chair and deliver appropriate medical support to the desperately unwell Nelson. Instead, Nelson died in a cell after calling for help more than 40 times over three days. She also said a CorrectCare manager laughed at her when she pushed for appropriate COVID-19 protective wear.
Williamson, who was recently appointed director at another Victorian government department, made his comments on the eve of coronerThe inquest findings into the death of Nelson “and every other [Indigenous] death in custody” around Australia needed to be viewed together as an urgent catalyst for change, he said.
In his findings, McGregor referred CorrectCare for possible prosecution and concluded that if the recommendations of the 1991 royal commission had been properly implemented, Nelson would probably still be alive. He said failings by CorrectCare in Victoria left prisoners in “great pain waiting for an ambulance because I didn’t have adequate painkillers to treat them”, and in two cases may have contributed to potentially preventable deaths, which the doctor had disclosed to the state coroner.
“He was in absolutely enormous pain when I met him. And I believe he would’ve been that way for quite some time,” Rattray-Wood said.Credit:“Now, to leave someone like that … for three days going bad before they were found by accident, is not something you want to see in the First World in the 21st century.”
Another with melanoma was not given his chemotherapy medication for six weeks. One woman was double-dosed and prescribed 28 Valium tablets over three days. After Rattray-Wood confronted the most senior officials at the jail with his concerns, prison general manager Glen Scholes said Serco had made mistakes in its delivery of healthcare when the jail opened.Senior Serco manager Andrew Mead said there were a “lot of things that we didn’t do right”.
Karen Blanket and Connie Moses-Penny at Fremantle Cemetery, where their sons are buried. Both young men died at Acacia Prison east of Perth.Connie Moses-Penny, the mother of Stanley Inman, said family members warned Serco of the 19-year-old’s mental state just hours after he had told his sister: “I don’t feel like being alive”.
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