The ACT Supreme Court found on Thursday that the human rights of a female detainee in the Alexander Maconochie Centre had been seriously breached.

It found that actions against Julianne Williams included the use of force, an attempted strip search and an actual strip search. And that these actions were taken against an Aboriginal woman with a background of trauma, who was in state of extreme distress following the AMC’s refusal to allow her to attend her grandmother’s funeral.

Where was the ‘common decency’, asks columnist HUGH SELBY.

I’m not a funeral person, but I know that a lot of people are. Paying last respects to someone now dead, but loved, admired, respected in life is important, no it’s more than that, it’s a core obligation.

Death rites are an integral part of letting go, of journeying along the stages of grief. Funerals are the occasion for individual despair expressed in a community coming together. 

All of which makes it more shocking that when a prisoner at our mismanaged prison was told that her much-loved gran had died, she was refused permission to go to the funeral.

It gets worse. This prisoner has problems. Apparently, she can be difficult to control, especially when she gets upset. But there was no urgency, and no need for the force that was used for a strip search. What’s more there was no excuse to strip search her with blokes having a perv.

I’ll allow that there are many shades of grey in our lives, but there are also actions which offend our common decency.

“Common decency” transcends rules (such as those in prisons) that are always designed in response to specific situations. Unexpected situations don’t fit within the rules. 

“Common decency” is the reason that made that infamous incident of underarm bowling notorious. “Common decency” is what makes the Albanese government’s failure to pay out Fiona Brown for the shocking treatment of her during the extended Higgins fiasco so pathetic. Likewise, NSW Minns’ government failure to pay out Kathleen Folbigg for her life destroyed. Here in our town Andrew’s and Yvette’s failure to see that Little Dion and his Gran are properly housed offends “common decency”.

“Common decency” doesn’t need Acts of Parliament. It doesn’t need Human Rights Commissions. It doesn’t need judges to spell it out. Those of us who are not narcissistic, and/or hell bent on putting down others for the sake of it, get the idea quite early in life. A formal education is not required.

The prison knew that a prisoner’s beloved gran had died. They knew she wanted to go to the funeral. The task of prison management was to make that happen, not to put barriers in the way, not to cause the prisoner to have another melt down, and not to raise a pathetic list of after-the-event excuses.

Anyone who has experienced the effects of the shock upon another person just told of the death of someone important to them is well aware that the bereaved does not act “normally” for at least days, and often quite a bit longer.

Yet our prison management put up as an excuse for their serial failures that the prisoner hadn’t properly completed the paperwork to attend a funeral. 

That explanation would be pathetic if it was not outrageous.

I have pointed out before that the legislation gives Life Leader Andrew and Corrections Minister Marisa specific powers to direct prisons management. Given the way the prison is run they might have given directions, along the lines of: “Trample on them. Every day must include acts of wanton punishment. Our voters want, if not blood, then long-term psychological bruising. The term rehabilitation is offensive”. 

I doubt any such direction has or would be given. It’s unnecessary. Benign neglect and wholehearted indifference achieve the same ends with never a word uttered or written down.

Simply unbelievable

Corrections management has not apologised for its defective conduct. It has not promised to turn over a new leaf.

Instead, what happened to the prisoner became a case in our Supreme Court. It took eight hearing days. The prisoner was the plaintiff, the government was the defendant – so no contrition there. The Human Rights Commission (HRC) intervened. The judgment is 113 pages, 479 paragraphs. You can fully engage with it here.

The objective was to have a court state the bleeding obvious: what happened is unacceptable.

The Court made declarations that what happened to the prisoner breached her right to privacy, her right to be protected from degrading treatment, and her right to humane and proper treatment.

It doesn’t take a law degree, or indeed any tertiary education, to reach that result. Given what happened to the prisoner it speaks loudly and clearly for itself.

Why spend all that time, and all our taxpayer money, to run such a case?

Apparently, hundreds of pages of submissions were filed and were accompanied by thousands of pages (of pasted text from decided cases). The HRC’s bundle of authorities (that is decided cases thought to have something apposite for this case) ran to six volumes.

The ever patient, ever so considerate judicial officer had to go through all of it. God help her!

The farce continued post judgment. The HRC issued a press release calling on our government to “immediately implement a comprehensive, ongoing human rights education and training package” for everyone working at the prison.

Don’t you love pointless training? Some training agency will pick up a juicy contract to develop modules to teach corrections officers what, in their hearts, they already know: treat people with care and compassion and decency and most of them respond very positively.

Hold on, though. Such training, if and only if given with pass/fail simulation exercises to government ministers and Corrections management, might lead them to re-embrace common decency. That in turn could trickle down to the front-line workers. Dream on.

Former barrister Hugh Selby is a CityNews columnist, principally focused on legal affairs.