Hopeless days of man, Adrian Faulton, lost in prison system

AS uniformed guards pound the grey concrete walkways of the Northern Territory's largest prison, a man calls out from the jail's isolation block.

AS uniformed guards pound the grey concrete walkways of the Northern Territory's largest prison, a man calls out from the jail's isolation block.

His name is Adrian Faulton. He is a severely intellectually disabled young Aboriginal man from Wadeye with the mental age of a toddler. For months the 25-year-old has been locked in a small concrete cell in A block, the most austere unit of Darwin's overflowing Berrimah Prison.

Mr Faulton is in the care of the Northern Territory's public guardian. Since the age of 15, he has committed crimes ranging from stealing to drinking in public, escalating as he got older to low-range sexual assault and indecent exposure.

During a mostly petty criminal career, the young man slipped through the gaps of the Northern Territory's under-resourced mental health services.

The only alternative available to the public guardian in guaranteeing community safety is a 22-hour lockdown of a brain-damaged young man who is becoming more distressed by theday.

"When getting out?" Mr Faulton asks of anyone who will talk to him. He spends his hours pacing back and forth in his cell, periodically asphyxiating himself as a distraction from the blank horror of his days, squeezing his throat with his thumb and shutting off the airway.

Most nights, his wailing resounds in the isolation wing.

A confidential forensic report on Mr Faulton, obtained by The Weekend Australian, paints a desperate picture. "On Monday1 December, Mr Faulton's mother visited him and she spent the entire visit weeping and attempting to hold him," forensic disability officer Jane Walsh says. "He appeared confused during this process. After she departed he was observed at his worst, whereby he fell down on his hands and knees in the yard and literally wailed and sobbed in what appeared to be a helpless and painful manner.

"He called out to 'go home, please, please' for approximately 30 minutes after his mother departed."

On paper, Mr Faulton is a classic example of the kind of recidivist offender that attracts the full policy force of the NT Labor Government's obsession with mandatory sentencing.

In reality, Mr Faulton never had a chance.

The brain damage that is all too common among people who grew up in the worst of the NT's socially shattered remote Aboriginal communities meant that he should have been in permanent care. In the Territory, no residential care facilities exist for people like him. The most critical of Darwin's mentally ill prisoners find beds in one of two units: the Joan Ridley Unit and the Cowdy ward, both at Royal Darwin Hospital. The units have 26 beds in total, and the dire shortage means that many of the mentally ill find themselves locked in isolation in prison.

Some of those languishing in isolation blocks are convicted of crimes. Some, like Mr Faulton, are unfit to plead. Some have served their sentence yet there is nowhere for them to go, so they remain in limbo in the most harsh prison conditions.

Despite a royal commission into black deaths in custody during the 1990s, the number of indigenous people in jail has been steadily rising nationwide for years. A significant proportion are mentally ill. Western Australia leads the nation on its rates of indigenous imprisonment, with 3686 out of every 100,000 indigenous people in the state in prison.

Statistics recently released by the NT corrections department show that 83per cent of Territory prisoners are Aboriginal. The NT's rates of imprisonment of the general population soar way above the rest of the country, with 586 people out of every 100,000 in prison. That compares with 180 for NSW and 170 for Queensland.

For the past 18 months, the federal intervention into remote communities has seen the criminal justice system penetrate previously unpoliced settlements. Most of the resulting arrests and charges are for petty crimes: according to NT Department of Public Prosecutions' recently released annual report, there has been a 25per cent increase in summary prosecutions in the NT in the past year, but no commensurate increase in the prosecution of more serious offences.

The NT Government's focus on mandatory sentencing for violent assaults reached fever pitch during this year's election campaign, when the Government promised mandatory sentencing for any assault intended to cause harm - a definition so broad that lawyers questioned whether one punch could result in a jail term.

Darwin's prison is full to capacity. Shipping containers - makeshift cells - dot the grounds of Berrimah jail. The remand wing is claiming more and more space within the jail. People on remand are sometimes held in the police watchhouse for lack of space. Twelve per cent of convicted prisoners are there for driving while disqualified.

The Labor Government is gearing up to build a new $320million jail. It will almost certainly be filled by repeat-offending, alcoholic or brain-damaged Aboriginal petty criminals whom magistrates bound by mandatory sentencing laws reluctantly jail. A planned forensic mental health unit also looks certain to become the new storehouse for the mentally ill in a place of critically underfunded social services.

Of significant concern was the criminalisation of children in the Territory, says North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency principal lawyer Glen Dooley. There has been an influx of children facing court as a result of a tabloid-driven police crackdown on teenage gangs in Darwin and the satellite suburb of Palmerston in recent weeks. NT corrections figures show that little mercy is on offer in juvenile courts for young indigenous delinquents: of the 43 children who received sentences after entering the youth corrections system in 2007-08, all but one was indigenous.

"The whole criminal justice approach in the Northern Territory is becoming horribly skewed towards punitive measures, horribly skewed towards imprisonment," says Mr Dooley.

"There's increasing emphasis on the misbehaviour of children, on the criminalisation of children.

"The police seem to be increasingly reactive to the short-term thinking of the public and of politicians."

Mr Dooley says that 10 years following the soul-searching of the 1990s royal commission, the only extent to which NT prisons have implemented reform is to remove physical opportunities for people to hang or slash themselves in prison.

"The solutions that were thrown up into the black deaths into custody royal commission have been largely ignored," he says. "Quite plainly the recommendations were not implemented. Things have gone backwards in terms of policy, in terms of enlightened and constructive policy."