Riots v Resistance in Our Prisons

When we talk about prison “riots” in Australia, we’re almost always talking about something else entirely. We’re talking about people, both adults and children, whose only available tools of protest are their bodies, their voices, and the limited agency they can carve out within a system designed to break them. We’re talking about conditions so degrading, so unsafe, and so dehumanising that people risk everything: their safety, their liberty, their hope for parole, their physical wellbeing, their future, even their lives.

Yet the moment they try to draw attention to that violence, the language shifts. Acts of resistance are reframed as “riots.” Pleas for dignity become “unrest.” Children begging for safety from the rooftop of a detention centre become “dangerous offenders.” And the public is encouraged to see them as the threat, rather than as the ones living under threat.

When the System Boils Over

Uprisings in prisons are never really spontaneous. They are years in the making. People are subjected to prolonged lockdowns, chronic understaffing, isolation, lack of healthcare, and degrading conditions. Mental health crises go unanswered. Requests for medical attention are ignored. Family contact is restricted. People are locked in cells for days at a time.

What the public gets shown is a snapshot: masked prisoners brandishing makeshift weapons while standing on roofs, fires, smashed windows, trashed cells and cell blocks, tactical response teams in formation. What they are not shown is everything that happened first, the harm that accumulated over months and years until something snapped.

Take, for example, the 2008 action by 46 prisoners at Port Augusta Prison. Parliamentary discussion misrepresented the incident as being simply a ‘response to the cancellation of an exercise session’. However the signs displayed by prisoners as they stood on the rooftop during the resistance provided a clearer picture with messages such as, ‘NO MORE DCS BASHINGS’, ‘OVER CROWD’N – FACT’, and ‘NOT HAPPY RANN’ (referring to Mike Rann, then Premier of South Australia).

This omission is not accidental. If we were to acknowledge the conditions that produce resistance, we would expose the violence of the system itself. It is easier to criminalise the response than to interrogate the cause.

Prisoners involved in this resistance claimed they collectively suffered abuse for many months prior, including assaults by prison officers and were then denied visits and phone calls, racism by prison officers against Aboriginal prisoners, theft of property by prison officers, ongoing unplanned lockdowns, denial of yard time, provocation by prison officers, denial of access to the visiting chaplain, poor access to telephones to call loved ones, lack of appropriate clothing, and poor air conditioning resulting in excessive heat in the cells.

Just days after the resistance at Port Augusta prison, the former prison chaplain was quoted as saying ‘It’s been known for a long time that this was going to be happening and the Department of Corrections has taken no action, positive action whatsoever.’ He also stated that the Department of Correctional Services ‘tells lie after lie after lie’. 

Children on Rooftops Are Not Rioters, They Are Survivors

In children’s prisons across the country, including Banksia Hill in Western Australia and Don Dale in the Northern Territory, children routinely climb onto prison roofs. Some are as young as ten or twelve. They stand on the tin sheets, waving shirts, begging to be seen.

This is not a riot. This is survival.

These children are responding to solitary confinement, excessive use of force, lack of schooling, lack of care, punitive lockdowns, and environments where self-injury is common and hope is scarce. They climb to the highest point they can reach because there is nowhere else to go. Their bodies become the protest, because every formal avenue has been denied to them.

What does it say about us, about our governments, our systems, our public discourse, that children must scale a rooftop just to get the adults in power to notice they are in danger?

Why We Must Stop Calling These Riots

Language is a political weapon. It decides who is “dangerous” and who is “in danger.” It shapes public sympathy and public fear. When we use the word “riot,” we erase the humanity of the people resisting. We erase the months of neglect leading up to the moment a body hits a roof, or a fire is lit in a cell.

But when we say resistance, the accountability shifts.

Prisons suppress every legitimate form of protest. People inside cannot unionise. They cannot march. They cannot speak to the media. They cannot refuse labour without punishment. They cannot gather without being dispersed. Negotiation is not an option. Silence is enforced.

So, what is left?

• A hunger strike.
• A refusal to return to a cell.
• A rooftop protest.
• A collective refusal to be invisible.
• A fire lit in desperation.

These are not mindless acts. They are intentional, political expressions of pain, anger and survival. They are demands for justice from people denied every other mechanism to make themselves heard.

Bodies as the Last Tool of Protest

Prison takes everything from you, your autonomy, your time, your relationships, your movement, your safety. The only thing the system cannot entirely strip away is the body itself. That is why imprisoned people use their bodies as their final instrument of dissent.

And it is why the state responds so aggressively.

The state does not fear “property damage.” It fears exposure. It fears disruption. It fears people organising under the harshest conditions imaginable and still finding ways to resist.

The Real Question Is Not Why People ‘Riot’, It’s Why They Have To

If children are climbing onto prison roofs, it is because all the adults charged with their care have failed them.
If adults at Yatala or any other prison set fires or refuse lockdown orders, it is because they have been pushed beyond what any human being should be expected to endure.

Resistance is evidence of injury.
Resistance is evidence of harm.
Resistance is evidence of a system that survives by inflicting violence.

What we call “riots” are the clearest indictment of the prison system we have. They are the moments when the walls cannot hide what is happening inside.

Call It What It Is

We must stop describing these events as riots and start calling them what they are:

Acts of resistance, born from desperation, asserting the humanity of people a system has tried to erase.

And if the only way imprisoned people can make us look is by climbing on a roof or setting a mattress alight, then the real crisis is not the behaviour, it is the system that gave them no other choice.