Queensland’s Women's Prison Is So Overcrowded Inmates Have to Sleep on the Floor

Brisbane Women's Correctional Facility was built to house 258 prisoners but there are currently 366 female inmates living there. Released on Tuesday, a damning report written by Queensland Ombudsman Phil Clarke exposes how dire the situation has become. In the overcrowded conditions, many inmates are sleeping on the floor—some even with their heads pressed up against the toilet in their cell.

"In my view, Queensland Corrective Services has failed to provide adequate living conditions for prisoners at the BWCF [Brisbane Women's Correctional Facility]," Clarke writes in the report.

His report details the many instances where two prisoners are forced to share tiny cells that are designed for one person. This means that one inmate must sleep on the floor, with their head next to the toilet—neither hygienic nor comfortable. Any sense of privacy goes out the window.

It gets worse. Some of the prisoners required to sleep on the floor are pregnant. Sometimes two prisoners are locked into tiny cells together for an excess of 80 hours. There's no space to store even the meagre personal belongings, and there are insufficient tables and chairs to allow all prisoners to eat their meals. There aren't even enough washing machines and dryers for everyone to have clean clothes.

Sure, prison isn't meant to be a five star hotel—but it is meant to provide some means of rehabilitation for its offenders. Not only are conditions within the facility abjectly below even minimum standards, they are also destructive. "I am very concerned that the overcrowding at BWCC has coincided with a significant increase in the number of prisoners involved in assaults, self-harm episodes or incidents of attempted suicide," Clarke writes.

For Debbie Kilroy, CEO of female incarceration advocacy body Sisters Inside, these findings are far from surprising. "Well, nothing changes and nothing changes," she tells VICE. "It's been like that and continues to be like that for years."

As the report confirms, BWCC is by far the most overcrowded prison in the state. "It's worse than any man's prison," Kilroy says. "Despite the fact we know that women have fundamentally different issues to men, so overcrowding has much more impact on them."

For Sisters Inside, having pregnant women sleeping on floor mattresses is just unacceptable. "You also have women who have returned from hospital after a miscarriage or giving birth sleeping on floors," Kilroy says.

Queensland's state government has been aware of overcrowding in its prisons for years. A similar report issued in 2013 exposed conditions at BWCF, and recommended they should be improved. Instead, this year's report shows how the situation has become even worse.

Queensland's Corrective Services Minister Bill Byrne addressed the report in a media briefing on Tuesday, but while he acknowledged Clarke's findings, his response to the report was dismissive.

"I am comfortable with the safety, and provision of services in Queensland prisons," he said. Byrne also took the opportunity to announce a new $1 million policy that will help released prisoners re-integrate into society—but no new measures to combat the issue of overcrowding.

So what can be done? A simple solution to overcrowded prisons, of course, would be to build more of them. But Kilroy cautions that this could also be a dangerous approach. "Building more prisons is not the answer, we don't support that at all," she says.

"We need de-carceration strategies, to keep women out. These women are poor, mentally ill, have drug addictions. That needs to be addressed in the community. Prison shouldn't be a default response."

Overcrowding issues aren't limited to Queensland either. Critics of the current state of Australia's prison system are calling for a national conversation about the conditions people are placed in. Earlier this year, the ABC reported that Western Australia's Bandyup Women's Prison was severely over capacity too, holding about 100 more inmates than it was designed for. Women were crammed three to a cell, with many sleeping on the floor there too.

"The government have dismissed this issue in part because there's no CCTV footage, and it's hard to get the attention of the public and the media because of that," Kilroy says.

"But we're talking about women's lives here. We know that women come out of prison with worse mental health than to begin with."

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