Victoria’s Ombudsman has uncovered “persistent and endemic” issues around the use of force in the state’s remand centres, where prisoners claim to have been choked, punched, kicked, slammed and badly injured by staff.
Ombudsman Deborah Glass examined eight separate incidents at the Melbourne Remand Centre and the Melbourne Assessment Prison between 2018 and 2020 where prisoners alleged they were assaulted by corrections officers.
A new Ombudsman report has found ‘persistent and endemic’ issues around the use of force in Victoria’s remand centres.Credit:Jason South
In one of the incidents, a prisoner with an acquired brain injury was hit in the back of the head and made to walk into doors by an officer escorting him inside the Metropolitan Remand Centre. On a separate occasion, another prisoner had his wrist fractured by officers attempting to remove his handcuffs.
The investigation found officers weren’t using body-worn cameras as they were supposed to and a concerning number of incidents occurred in CCTV blind spots, making it hard for investigators to determine whether excessive force was used.
It concluded officers had failed to de-escalate the situation in six of the eight cases reviewed and had instigated violence on at least two occasions.
In a report outlining the findings of the investigation tabled in Parliament on Wednesday, Glass said she found evidence to substantiate the claims of four of the eight prisoners involved in the incidents. In cases where the allegations were not substantiated, she said, “we found officers used force on people with acquired brain injuries or other vulnerabilities”.
She said Corrections Victoria had increased the use of body-worn cameras, changed its recruitment process to ensure it hired suitable candidates and was trialling new de-escalation techniques, but problems remained.
Glass said performance management processes still failed to identify and act on patterns of poor officer behaviour and a culture of silence encouraged officers to lie to protect their peers.
“There is no easy fix for these longstanding and sometimes intractable issues and this report
does not purport to solve them,” she said.
“Its purpose is to expose what is too often hidden behind prison walls and to encourage actions in addition to words, in the interests of everyone’s safety.”
The Ombudsman began investigating the use of force in remand centres in 2019, following reports that a Melbourne Remand Centre officer had choked a prisoner in an unmonitored cell the previous year.
The prisoner, referred in the report as Mr Griffin, claimed he was singled out and taken to a cell by an officer after making a passing comment to his cellmate. He alleged the officer choked him by pressing on his Adam’s apple with both thumbs and slammed him inside the cell.
His cellmate, who wasn’t present during the alleged incident, said the prisoner walked out of the cell with a red neck and told him “those dogs choked [and] slammed me”. The officer denied the allegations.
Glass examined the case as part of the investigation and determined it was likely the officer had used unreasonable force.
A separate investigation by the Department of Justice and Community Safety found there wasn’t enough evidence to start a misconduct probe into the officer involved. The matter was referred to Victoria Police, but they closed the file when the prisoner declined to provide a statement.
Glass said allegations of excessive force against prisoners constituted about 31 per cent of matters referred to the watchdog every year by the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission, but they were usually hard to investigate and substantiate.
The Ombudsman received 3367 complaints about Corrections Victoria in 2020-21. About 3 per cent of those were for improper conduct by prison officers, including instances of misuse of power, bribery and unreasonable use of force.
Data from Corrections Victoria contained in the report shows the Metropolitan Remand Centre was the correctional facility with the highest number of “use of force incidents” in the state over the past three years, with a total of 709 recorded incidents in that time.
The centre also featured in more than a quarter of the complaints about the use of unreasonable force in prisons to the Ombudsman and a third of all allegations of assault by staff on prisoners received by Corrections Victoria over the past three years.
Glass issued 12 recommendations to improve staff accountability in remand centres, including eliminating CCTV blind spots, reviewing de-escalation training programs, improving the vetting process of officers during recruitment, and developing a centralised system to access information about officer conduct complaints and ongoing investigations.
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