Four Aboriginal people died in custody in Australia this month, March 2021. Those first three First Nations prisoners died in a six day period.
On 2 March, a man in his 50s died in Long Bay Prison Hospital, NSW. On 5 March, a 44-year-old woman died in Silverwater Women’s Correctional Centre, NSW. On 7 March, a man died in the Ravenhall Corrections Centre in Victoria. And on 18 March, 37-year-old Barkindji man Anzac Sullivan died during a police pursuit in Broken Hill.
So why are we not horrified? Recent SBS coverage showed justice campaigners rightly asking the question, ‘where is the outrage?’
At the same time as these multiple deaths in NSW and Victoria, a coronial inquest’s findings were released into the 2018 death of Nathan Reynolds who died in a Sydney jail. The Aboriginal man had a long history of asthma and died gasping for air on the prison floor with urgent medical assistance taking ‘an unreasonably long time’ to reach him. The nurse on duty in the facility took 22 minutes to deliver aid.
Deputy state coroner Elizabeth Ryan concluded: ‘Nathan’s medical crisis on the night of 31 August [2018] required an emergency response. But the response he received fell well short of this. It was confused, uncoordinated and unreasonably delayed.’
As his sister Taleah Reynolds summarised: ‘It’s just no care. No duty of care.’
'No wonder individual countries, the UN and Amnesty International are shocked that here in Australia — including in my own state of South Australia — we continue to imprison children, largely Aboriginal children, as young as ten years old.'
There are a number of current issues within our present Australian political system, issues we need to remedy brought to light with strong media attention.
But in contrast, how much media attention is being paid to this ongoing scandal of First Nations peoples who, while representing just 3.3 per cent of the population, now represent an extraordinary 30 per cent of the nation’s prison population?
In rallies held across the world last year after the death of George Floyd in the United States, Australians were reminded that since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody released their 339 recommendations in 1991, a frightening number of First Nations deaths had occurred in Australia.
Since 1991, the number of Aboriginal deaths in custody has risen to 455. Obviously nobody knows the number of such custodial deaths since colonisation.
In a previous article in