Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander readers are warned that this article discusses deaths in custody.
Another man has died in the Adelaide Remand Centre. He is the second man to die there in six months, with the last death occurring during July 2025. And, once again, the state moves quickly to reassure us: the death is “not believed to be suspicious.”
This phrase has become a reflex. A script. A pre-emptive closure. It appears before facts are established, before families are informed, before accountability is even imaginable. It is not a finding, it is a political statement, one designed to protect institutions, not people. But there is nothing non-suspicious about death in custody.
To die while imprisoned is to die under total state control. Movement restricted. Care rationed. Autonomy extinguished. The state denies psychological support, and decides where you sleep, when you eat, when you are seen by a doctor, if you are seen at all. In such conditions, death is not incidental. It is produced.
Prisons are not life-making environments. They are death-making ones.
They are systems of containment, coercion, and degradation. They fracture bodies and minds. They accelerate illness. They intensify trauma. They age people faster than the world outside. And then, when people die, the system calls it “natural causes,” as if cages were benign.
The data exposes the lie.
In the outside world, death overwhelmingly comes late in life. In 2023, 68% of all deaths in Australia occurred among people aged 75 and over. The median age at death was 79.6 years for men and 84.6 years for women. This is what “natural death” looks like in a society not structured around confinement.
Inside prison, the picture is entirely different.
In 2021–22, the average age at death in prison was 55. For First Nations people, the median age at death was just 43. Let that sit beside the national median age of death, nearly eighty-five for women, nearly eighty for men, and then tell us prison deaths are natural.
They are not.
They are premature. They are patterned. They are the result of deliberate exposure to conditions that strip years, sometimes decades, from people’s lives.
Between 19792022, more than 3,300 people died in custody in Australia. Over 2,100 of them died in prison. Nearly one in five were First Nations people. And more than half of First Nations people who died in prison were under the age of 40.
This is not coincidence. It is carceral violence. And it is not happening in ignorance.
In June 2025, reporting by The Guardian revealed what families and prisoners have been saying for years: people are dying in prisons in ways the state already knows how to prevent. The investigation found that across Australia, people died at known hanging points that had been identified but not removed. In South Australia alone, 14 people died at hanging points the state already knew about. One of those sites was the Adelaide Remand Centre.
A grim admission reported by a whistleblower days after the July 2025 death in Adelaide Remand Centre proves the point. The former nurse of that prison confirmed that serious health concerns of prisoners were treated with flippancy or suspicion, that there was often a dangerous reluctance to take patients to the Royal Adelaide Hospital, that there was a routine tendency to assume all inmates were faking illness to cause problems or ‘drug-seeking’, that inmates were referred to by medical staff as ‘fuckwits.’
These deaths in custody can only be described as negligence.
When the state knows where people are dying, knows how they are dying, and leaves those conditions unchanged, the deaths that follow are not unforeseeable. They are produced and they are sanctioned. They are the result of decisions not to act.
South Australia’s response followed the familiar script.
“Every death in custody is a tragedy.”
“It is distressing for staff.”
“We are committed to reducing risk.”
“We have invested $200 million.”
“We have acted on coronial recommendations.”
“Upgrades are ongoing.”
“Programs are in place.”
This language does not confront harm. It misrepresents the harm to mitigate the public response to it.
At no point did the Department explain why known hanging points remained. At no point did it say how many coronial recommendations were delayed, ignored, or quietly shelved. Instead, responsibility was dissolved into process, intention, and future infrastructure, while people continued to die in cells already identified as dangerous.
A “safe cell standard” that arrives after a death is not safety. It is post-hoc justification.
Hanging points are not abstract risks. They are bolts, bars, fixtures, and fittings that the state can see, document, and remove. When they remain, it is because someone decided they could. This is how prison death is normalised: through bureaucratic language that treats preventable harm as unfortunate, inevitable, and already addressed, even when the bodies say otherwise.
The state wants us to believe most of these deaths are benign. Since 2000–01, around 65% of prison deaths have been classified as “natural causes.” But there is nothing natural about dying twenty or thirty years earlier because you were locked away. There is nothing natural about chronic illness becoming fatal because medical care was delayed, dismissed, or denied. There is nothing natural about despair being managed with discipline rather than support.
“Natural causes” inside prison is not a medical category. It is an administrative convenience.
Thirty per cent of people who died in prison in 2021–22 were on remand. Not sentenced. Not convicted. Held because bail was inaccessible, housing unavailable, support absent. Presumed innocent yet exposed to lethal conditions.
Almost half of all prison deaths occur in cells. Alone. Behind locked doors. Out of sight. And every time, the language is the same.
“Unresponsive.”
“CPR commenced.”
“Support offered.”
“Non-suspicious.”
This language is not neutral. It is engineered to make death feel procedural rather than political. It turns the extinguishing of life into a checklist. It shifts responsibility from the system to the body that failed to survive it. Then when police say a death in custody is “not suspicious,” they are not telling us the truth. They are telling us what they need us to accept: that prisons can kill without consequence.
But all deaths in custody are suspicious.
They are suspicious because the prisoner could not leave.
They are suspicious because the state had total control.
They are suspicious because the duty of care was absolute.
They are suspicious because history shows neglect and harm are not anomalies in prisons, they are structural.
The state does not struggle to understand why people die in custody. It struggles to admit that prisons themselves are the cause. So instead, we are offered condolences without change. Counselling without accountability. Coronial processes that rarely disrupt the conditions that produced the death in the first place, and in fact function, as Debbie Kilroy regularly asserts, as alibi courts.
And so, the machinery continues. The language repeats. The bodies accumulate, and we are expected to mourn quietly and move on. But death in custody is not a tragic inevitability. It is the predictable outcome of a system that prioritises control over care, punishment over life, and containment over humanity.
Until we refuse the lie that these deaths are natural, unsuspicious, or unavoidable, people will keep dying decades before their time, and the state will keep telling us there is nothing to see.
But pay attention, because there is everything to see. And what we are seeing is a system that cannot sustain life, only peddle in death.
The truth in this article is indisputable, they keep getting away with it bedside they can , no one is ever held to account . To get an asprin in prison you are treated like a junkie , I have personally been fighting to get medical attention for my Son for over 6 months . The prison Doctor had refused to consult with him , no reason given and pain medication prescribed by a neurologist refused . Justice health investigate themselves and didn’t even have the correct medication regime for him , I had to correct it and was then spoon fed back my own words . The health commissioner said to administer, no , didn’t happen , ombudsman useless , he remains in constant pain on a daily basis . We are First Nations and have utilised there services, also politicians, it’s systemic genocide.
In point of fact the health of prisoners is monitored by the Australians Institute of Health and Welfare. The most recent one was released in 2024 with data taken from 2022. In a nutshell it shows for all the certainty and sincerity of the writer’s opinions, they are dead wrong..
The report finds prison entrants have worse health (and health behaviours) than the general population and that when prisoners were about to leave prison 55% said their health had improved as opposed to 18% who said it had worsened (p 16 of Health of People in Australia’s prisons 2022). Far from feeling the health care in prison was inadequate, 70%% of prisoners said it was ‘excellent’ and ‘good’ with only 10% saying it was “poor’ or ‘very poor’ (p134)
But the most brutal evidence of the writer’s ignorance is found in the death rates of prisoners in prison and the first year outside it. IF prisons were ‘death making environments’ the death rate would go down in the year prisoners were released. In fact it skyrockets. The figures were 1.4 per thousand per year in prison 10.1 for those outside (p 67). That’s a 720% increase.
With regards to hanging points in prisons, the problem is a lack of funding rather than indifference from prison management. There are a very large numbers of cells in prisons and only so much money is allocated. That said table C17 of the latest Deaths in Custody Report shows that the rate of hanging deaths in the last 10 years is markedly down on what it was in 1990-2003. But the fact remains there are a lot more methods of suicide opon to people at liberty and it’s rather easier to find a secluded spot to make an attempt. We have every reason to suspect the suicide rate is higher amongst released prisoners.
Thank you for demonstrating exactly how carceral statistics are routinely misread to defend harmful systems.
A few corrections and clarifications, grounded in the very reports you cite.
First, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare prison health survey you rely on is self-reported, based on a small, non-random sample of prison entrants and dischargees, excluding Victoria. The AIHW itself repeatedly cautions against using these findings to draw broad conclusions about prison health outcomes. A sample size of 10% is generally recommended to avoid high error risk. The sample size here, 802 participants from a population of 40600, is just under 2%. Presenting these figures as “brutal evidence” is not rigorous analysis; it is overreach.
Second, the claim that “55% said their health improved” does not mean prison is health-producing. The baseline matters. Prison entrants disproportionately arrive with untreated illness, acute withdrawal, unmanaged chronic conditions, and crisis-level distress due to poverty, homelessness, and lack of community care. Stabilisation after acute deprivation is not evidence of a healthy environment; it is evidence of how catastrophically people were failed before incarceration.
Third, given prison authorities had to permit the surveys in prisons, medical staff were likely aware these surveys were being conducted over the two week survey period and adjusted their quality of service to attempt to prevent negative reporting by prisoners.
Fourth, self-reported satisfaction with prison healthcare is not a proxy for adequacy or safety. When healthcare is accessed only through coercion, when alternatives are absent, and when complaining can carry consequences, “good” often means better than nothing, not clinically appropriate, timely, or trauma-informed care. The AIHW does not claim otherwise.
Fifth, the post-release death spike you reference does not disprove prisons as death-making environments, it confirms it. The dramatically elevated mortality rate after release is internationally recognised as a consequence of incarceration itself: loss of tolerance after forced abstinence, disrupted healthcare, trauma, housing instability, and sudden withdrawal of structured supports. Prison produces the conditions that make release lethal. This is not controversial in public health literature.
Sixth, on indifference by prison management, we just need to look at the rare occasions when prison staff express their indifference on record. Evidence includes that of a prison guard in Victoria telling Veronica Nelson who was asking for help that “It’s not an emergency, stop asking”. Ms Nelson died a short time later. In NSW there was evidence that 4 guards stood outside the cell of Tian Jarrah Denniss, laughing and joking, just moments after Mr Denniss had taken his own life. In Perth there was an inquiry into guard’s for laughing and making jokes about a 16 year old child that had died from self-harm.
Finally, reducing suicide prevention to a funding or “hanging points” problem fundamentally misunderstands carceral harm. The fact that suicide rates inside prisons have declined relative to the 1990s does not mean prisons are safe; it means people are being kept alive under extreme control while psychological harm accumulates, only to surface fatally once the cage is removed. Fewer deaths inside does not equal less harm. it often means harm has been deferred.
No one here argued that prisons fail to monitor prisoner health. The argument is that prisons are structurally incapable of producing health, because they are institutions of confinement, coercion, and deprivation.
Your numbers don’t refute that claim.
They illustrate it.
I acknowledge this response and the writer’s integrity by leaving my dissenting statement up.
With regard to point one on sample size, I happen to have some training in statistics and can say this comment is plain and simply wrong. Any statistician would tell you this. With big populations. the absolute size of the sample matters more than what % of the population it is. Just Google “how big to sample sizes need to be to get estimates of big populations?” and you’ll find 800 is a perfectly adequate sample size. If the 10% fantasy was right there’d be no public opinion polling in Australia because no one is going to run sample sizes of around 2 million!
Your second point about the poor health status of some entering prison brings illustrates an important point. Health care (and status) in prisons should certainly be compared to what inmates would access outside. That’s part of the “Mandela Standards”. The examples you cite only demonstrate that prisons do a much better job of caring for the health of some of its charges than they themselves do when at liberty. As Theodore Dalrymple (a prison doctor) said viewing many seriously malnourished prison entrants ‘prisons are the health farms of the slums’.
Your third point about prison health systems artificially improving the quality of care around data collection is purely speculative. And speculation has all the advantages of theft over honest toil.
When someone confronted with a 720% increase in the death rate outside prisons compared to when they are in it, says this ‘confirms’ and ‘illustrates’ the harm of prisons rather than the realities of life outside…well we know we’re dealing with a hard core ideologue. No armor piecing shell of fact can penetrate the meters-thick armor plating of their prejudice.
Blaming prisons for post-prison overdose deaths because it removed their drug tolerance could only occur to someone totally committed to the harmfulness of prisons (in the face of the evidence) and determined that the choices of the recently released must never be questioned. A google search show accidental deaths in the recently released are known to spike. I doubt even the writers would argue this is the prison’s fault… though perhaps not!
Other allegedly lethal factors cited are ‘disrupted health care’. Well yes. It’s because a lot of these men (90% are men) leave reasonable health care in prison and for whatever reasons don’t adequately access the public health system. I happen to have read academic articles on the post prison death surge and the bulk of these deaths are natural causes (ie not suicide, overdose or accident). I will need a lot of written doctor’s opinions to believe the large increases in deaths by heart attacks and strokes in the 6-12 months post release can be put down to prisons and not what happened outside. It is these facts that I consider ‘brutal’ and not ‘over-reach’. (If the writers dislike ‘over-reach’ they should perhaps do some serious reflection of their own writing.)
The writers piously say that they weren’t arguing that prisons don’t monitor prisoner health. But they did say that deaths in prison ‘are not accidental-they are produced’, they reflect ‘decisions not to act’ that ‘prisons (can) kill without consequence’, that ‘all deaths in custody are suspicious’ that prisons are systems ‘that cannot sustain life, only peddle in death’. The trusting reader would certainly get the message that prisoner’s health care is scandalously bad and prisoners would surely have vastly higher death rates than those fortunate enough to get outside. The poor trusting reader would be dead wrong.
If the writers really cared as deeply about the health of this population as they imply they should focus attention to post prison health care. They should also stop denigrating the work of people who are achieving praiseworthy results with a very challenging population. A 84% reduction in the death rate is no mean feat.
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