Deaths in custody : a gender-specific analysis (2002)

This paper discusses gender-specific trends in custodial deaths in Australia over a 21-year period. Established in 1992, the National Deaths in Custody Program (NDICP) collects data on all deaths that have occurred in police, prison or juvenile custody in Australia since 1980, Gender-specific information regarding deaths in custody is presented here for the first time, enabling differences between the circumstances of male and female custodial deaths to be considered. Between 1980 and 2000 there were 75 females who died in custody in Australia: 38 in police custody or custody-related police operations, 36 in prison custody and one in juvenile detention. Of Indigenous women who died, the majority died in police custody (79%), while non-Indigenous women were more likely to die in prison custody (63%). Overall, self-innicted death by hanging was the leading manner of death for females (and males), although Indigenous women were more likely than non-Indigenous women to die from natural causes. Adam Graycar Director In Australia and overseas there exists a paucity of research on deaths in custody where women are the primary focus of study; most of the literature in this area treats women as a subset of the primary focus - men. It has been suggested that this lack of information about women dying in custody is due to the relatively small number of female deaths when compared with the number of male deaths. Indeed, Scraton and Chadwick (1995, p. 89) comment that: ...the relatively small proportion of women in prison compared to men is one of the reasons for the apparent invisibility of women in research studies or official accounts. In her review of the literature on suicides in prison, Liebling (1992) adds that the lack of information on women also stems from the fact that most studies use all-male samples or have a tendency not to consider women as a separate and distinct group. Of the limited research on deaths in custody that examines gender differences, the focus has predominately been on suicide in prisons. One suggested explanation for this narrow focus is that suicide has consistently been found to be the leading cause of death in prison (Sattar 2001). Lloyd (1990) reviewed the international literature on suicide and self-injury in prison and found that of the 13 studies reviewed, only six provided any specific information on female inmate suicides and, of these, only three provided information about the broader gender composition in the penal population under study. Most literature on suicide deaths in prison has found no significant gender-based differences in the rates of suicide in prison (Sattar 2001; Morrison 1996; Dooley 1994; Liebling 1992, 1994). Hanging has been found to be the most common cause of death for either gender in prison custody (Sattar 2001; Dalton 1999; Crighton & Towl 1997; Morrison 1996; Lester & Danto 1993; Liebling 1992; Green et al. 1992; Lloyd 1990). However, most of these studies had a very small number of female suicides in their sample group (between one and four females), thus making it difficult to generalise about the nature and circumstance of female prison deaths based on the results. For example, in a study of prison suicide and suicide attempts in England and Wales between 1985 and 1993 there were only six females included in the sample group (Liebling 1996). The only article to focus specifically on female deaths in custody is by Kerley and Cunneen (1994). The authors examine differences in the use of prison and police custody between Indigenous and non-Indigenous women in Australia and examine the 11 Indigenous female deaths looked at by the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (RCIADIC), and five such deaths that occurred after that time. The majority of these deaths occurred in police custody, where the women had been detained for relatively minor offences and had died of causes other than suicide. …