Physical force used routinely against detainees in South Australian immigration detention last year
Physical force was used regularly by staff against detainees in the Adelaide Transit Immigration Centre last year despite the facility’s low-security status, with records suggesting it was used at least 350 times
The Adelaide Immigration Transit Centre in Kilburn, SA. (Photograph: Matilda Duncan)
Physical force was used at least 350 times by staff against detainees at Adelaide’s immigration detention centre last year despite its small population of detainees, according to figures released last month under freedom of information laws.
Located in Kilburn, less than a kilometre from busy shopping precincts on Churchill Road, the Adelaide Immigration Transit Centre is a low-security facility with a maximum capacity of fewer than 50 people, and due to its basic facilities, is designed to house detainees on only a short-term basis, such as in cases where a person is soon due to be deported from Australia.
Despite this, in 2018, the Australian Human Rights Commission found a small number of people had been detained at the centre for prolonged periods of time, including some who had been kept there for over a year. Vulnerable people with serious health issues and complex care needs were also being held at the centre by the federal government, in what the Commission termed “not a suitable environment for managing the care of people with significant vulnerabilities”.
The Adelaide centre was used to house predominantly adult men last year, with monthly population snapshots published by the Department of Home Affairs suggesting it housed groups of anywhere from 13 to 28 male detainees throughout the year. When women were detained at the centre, they were always vastly outnumbered by men—in one case in November, by 28 to 1—according to those same records.
Contacted for comment, the Department of Home Affairs declined to comment on potential safety issues arising from this gender disparity.
A freedom of information application made by this publication in December last year requested statistics from the Department of Home Affairs showing the number of times physical force was used by staff against detainees at the centre throughout 2019.
In response, the department refused to provide wholly transparent statistics. Rather than releasing the exact number of times physical force was used by staff against detainees, the department provided only the number of detainees that had been “involved” in incidents of force each month.
The department’s response also openly characterised detainees who experienced staff using force against them as “participants” in each incident.
“Figures are based on the number of participants involved in incidents, rather than the number of incidents,” one of the released documents reads. “Multiple participants can be involved in each incident.”
It is not possible to tell from the statistics whether any detainees experienced multiple uses of force from staff within the space of a single “incident”.
For the purposes of this article, it has been assumed that the monthly number of detainees listed by the home affairs department as having been “involved” in an incident of force all experienced physical force being used against them once.
The Department of Home Affairs declined to respond to a series of questions about the use of physical force at the Adelaide Immigration Transit Centre last year.
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The freedom of information application made by this publication also requested departmental policies governing the use of force in 2019 at the Adelaide Immigration Transit Centre.
The detention services manual released in response by the Department of Home Affairs states that physical force should only be used as a measure of last resort after using de-escalation techniques like discussion, negotiation and co-operation, and that any physical force used should be “reasonable” and “proportionate to the situation”.
The relevant 16-page manual from February 2018 is available at the end of this article, but has since been updated by the Department.
The figures released by the Department of Home Affairs do not differentiate between “planned” uses of force—where a “risk analysis” of a detainee is conducted before written approval is sought from the Australian Border Force to proceed with an incident of force—and “unplanned” incidents of use of force, supposedly used only in emergency situations.
As with Australia’s other immigration detention facilities, the Adelaide Immigration Transit Centre is managed by Serco.
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Despite the centre’s small population of detainees, 350 people were recorded as having experienced incidents of physical force being used against them by staff last year.
Adult male detainees aged 26 to 35 experienced the most frequent use of force, with 109 detainees within that age bracket recorded as having been involved in an incident of force, followed by 66 detainees in the 18 to 25 age bracket.
According to the records, no person under the age of 18 experienced force at the Adelaide Immigration Transit Centre last year.
The Department of Home Affairs took five months to respond to the freedom of information enquiry—five times the 30-day deadline stipulated by federal freedom of information laws—without seeking a voluntary extension of time.
Data released last year to Senator Rex Patrick shows this is not unusual practice for the Department, which has in recent years failed to process almost one in every three freedom of information requests within the standard 30-day statutory timeframe, leading to almost 8,000 requests being automatically refused.