Plans to open prison units without staff to run them

The WA Prison Officers’ Union said the State Government’s decision to open new prison units at Hakea and Casuarina vindicated its position that WA’s prisons were chronically overcrowded.

One unit was opened at Casuarina on Tuesday and the Department is planning to open another unit at Hakea.

However, while the WAPOU has welcomed the move to open the units, it has some serious concerns about how the government plans to staff them.

“After months of telling us that the prisons are not overcrowded, we are glad the Minister has finally come to his senses and begun to open these units, which have been sitting idle for more than a year,” said WAPOU Secretary John Welch.

“However, because they do not have enough staff to run the new units, they are staffing them by offering existing officers overtime shifts. This situation is not sustainable.”

Mr Welch said both Hakea and Casuarina were already understaffed, and opening new units without additional staff was going to exacerbate the problem.

“Hakea’s prison muster reached over 1,000 on Tuesday for the first time ever. Because the prison doesn’t have the staff to cope with this number of prisoners, the entire prison had to be locked down for the day.”

Mr Welch said Hakea was up to 30 staff members short and opening a new unit without hiring additional staff would inevitably lead to more lockdowns.

Mr Welch said the State Government had been caught short because of poor planning.

He called on the government to undertake an urgent recruiting drive to make up the current shortfall of around 200 officers.

“We have been warning the government that prisoner numbers were soaring and staffing levels were not keeping pace, but they have ignored our warnings,” he said.

“Now we’re in a situation where the government has finally acknowledged it needs to open more units, but it has no way of staffing them because it hasn’t recruited enough new prison officers.”

“The government keeps telling us that it has enough prison officers employed in the system, however what their figures do not take into account is that at any given time we will have officers off sick, on secondment, on long service leave or on holidays and there is simply not enough provision for that.”

Mr Welch said the overcrowding situation had been made worse by an extraordinary spike in prisoner numbers.

“If prisoner numbers keep going up at this pace, the prison system is simply not going to cope,” he said.

Mr Welch said the government needed to put on extra training schools to get new staff trained and job ready.