A fatal flaw in the design of AMC prison cell doors was known for seven years. Nothing much was done about it until the inevitable happened. Who’s to blame? It’s “Seven Days” with IAN MEIKLE.

“THERE are no bystanders – the standard you walk past is the standard you accept.”

That’s the quote, from former Chief of Army Lt-Gen David Morrison, that Neil McAllister, the Inspector of Correctional Services, used to begin his uneasy report into the tragic death of a young man in his twenties, in his first day on remand, at the Alexander Maconochie Centre (AMC) earlier this year.

“The AMC is managed by a government we elect and by public servants employed in our names. The practices employed and the culture which dominates the AMC are ones we, particularly through our silence and disinterest, endorse.” That’s what Julie Tongs, an indigenous leader well acquainted with deaths in custody, says in response to the report.

The tragedy that we have “endorsed”, is embedded in the shameful revelations in McAllister’s report that might have prevented this young man’s suicide death. He is not named at the request of his parents. 

The inspector says: “Subject to any findings of the ACT coroner, it appears that the detainee used a bedsheet to hang himself from a horizontal bar on the rear door of the cell, which provides access to a small outdoor bricked courtyard.

“Most regrettably this risk had been identified and reported by AMC facilities management staff in 2015, but had not been addressed.”

That’s right. “Most regrettably” the bureaucracy had known about this flaw in the design of the prison doors for seven years. Seven years, but chose not to fix it.

There was a further unaddressed design fault with the same cell doors that was identified on May 13, 2020, which although not related to the death of the detainee, raised further serious concerns about the safety of the doors and ligature points. 

That incident involved an indigenous detainee who self-harmed by attaching a ligature to the cell’s external door. Following this incident, a brief was prepared by the then commissioner of Corrective Services and forwarded to the director-general of the Justice and Community Services Directorate, which advised, in part: “It has been identified that all of the high-security doors in the AMC’s Management and Crisis Support Units are no longer fit for purpose and present a safety risk to detainees… As a result up to 42 doors require urgent replacement.”

The brief sought approval for a public-tender process to procure replacement doors, noting the replacement of the doors “has been deemed as urgent”.

So urgent was it that three weeks later the director-general approved the brief on June 2, 2020. What happened then? 

“Due to budget constraints, the scope of work was reduced to the replacement of the front cell doors only,” the inspector of correctional services notes. “However, one might have expected that replacing the rear MU cell doors would have been the priority.”

The inspector went on to make, among his findings:

• “That at the time of the detainee’s death in 2022, ACTCS was aware of a serious design fault in the rear cell doors, which had been known since 2015.”

• “That in 2020 the director-general of the Justice and Community Safety Directorate approved an urgent purchase of replacement doors for the AMC Management Unit due to “inherent safety risk identified with the current doors”. For reasons unclear to [the inspector], the rear MU doors had not been replaced at the time [the detainee] utilised the rear door as a ligature point.”

Doubtless, as our slippery ministers hide behind the nearest enquiry to avoid comment, we will have to wait until the findings of the forthcoming inquest before we hear from them.

But inescapably, you’d have to wonder how something as important, as urgent, as fixing the cell doors when the risk was known for seven years could ever be subject to “budget constraints”. Unfortunately, the standard we, who elect and employ these people, walk past is the standard we accept.

Ian Meikle is the editor of “CityNews” and can be heard with Rod Henshaw on the “CityNews Sunday Roast” news and interview program, 2CC, 9am-noon. There are more of his columns on citynews.com.au