prisons

Newsletter date: 30 May 2013

Contents:

* Australian Institute of Criminology: Deaths in custody in Australia to 30 June 2011
* Gerry Georgatos, The Stringer: Report on Deaths in Custody - people dying at high rates
* Inga Ting, SMH: Policy failure as prisons fill with indigenous people
* Paul Simpson and Michael Doyle, ABC The Drum Opinion: Indigenous prison rates are a national shame
* SBS World News: 'No lessons learned' on Aboriginal deaths
* Cairns Post: Concern as Aboriginal deaths in custody rise
* Bundaberg News Mail: Aboriginal incarceration rates hitting crisis levels

On Friday 9th of March in response to a call for an international day of action against Serco, a corporation running government services from juvenile and adult prisons to immigrant detention centres, to army bases in Afghanistan, to speed cameras in Victoria, and soon the Sydney Ferry system.

Demonstrations were held in London, Perth, Melbourne and Sydney, where a number of cordinated demonstrations were held throughout the day.

An impoverished Indonesian mother, in front of an Australian journalist, lies on a cement floor clutching a photograph of her 16 year old son who is now in an Australian adult prison and whom she hasn't seen since he was fourteen. Abject and acute poverty ravages Indonesia, a country where only 10% of the population has a refrigerator, where most people do not have electricity let alone a television, where many people live half lives working in sulphur mines and where most folk will never rise out of the shanty towns and villages they are born to die in.

The Human Rights Alliance: Deaths in Custody: Australia's horrific record - The Australian Senate lets us down. Motion is an insult.

The Australian Senate approved the Greens Motion to acknowledge the rising Aboriginal incarceration rates and deaths in custody in lieu of Friday 15, April which marks twenty years since the release of the 339 recommendations and Final Report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.