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Inspector of custodial services says inmates are sleeping on the floor and denied basic entitlements due to ‘a systemic failure across multiple prisons’ Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast Inmates in Western Australia are sleeping on mattresses on the floor of overcrowded cells and subjected to “cruel, inhuman and degrading” conditions, prompting the jails watchdog to call for urgent reform. Most of WA’s correctional facilities are in crisis, with an increased level of harm observed across the system, the state’s inspector of custodial services, Eamon Ryan, said in a report tabled in parliament on Tuesday. Continue reading...

The Guardian Culture

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‘They are disturbing the dead’: reconstructing the site of the forgotten first genocide of the 20th century

At least 3,000 Herero and Nama people died in a German concentration camp at Shark Island, Namibia. A new forensic exhibition in Berlin is using digital technology to unearth how colonisers scarred a landscape, and a community Visiting the Namibian port town of Lüderitz in late 2024, I came across a small museum run by descendants of German settlers. Alongside imperial German flags and memorabilia, it displayed artefacts of the Herero tribe that had been recovered from nearby Shark Island. What went unmentioned is that, from 1905 to 1907, Shark Island was the site of a concentration camp where Herero and Nama prisoners were subjected to forced labour, starvation and systematic abuse. At least 3,000 people are estimated to have died there. Shark Island was used as a tourist campsite when I visited. Monuments on the island honoured Adolf Lüderitz and Heinrich Vogelsang, the German merchants who helped establish the colony known as German South West Africa. Today, it is widely reported that Namibia’s white minority – less than 2% of the population – owns roughly 70% of commercial farmland. Continue reading...

The Guardian World

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Corrupt Liverpool prison worker jailed for smuggling drugs and sending sex texts to inmates

Helen Spree, 63, headed prison watchdog and was said to have become besotted with killer Dylan Westall, 35 A corrupt prison watchdog boss who billed herself “the prisoners’ Deliveroo” has been jailed for five years after admitting sending sexual messages to a killer inmate and smuggling drugs. Helen Spree, 63, was the head of the independent monitoring board (IMB) for HMP Liverpool when she engaged in illicit chats with prisoners over a 20-month period. Spree was said to have become besotted with Dylan Westall, 35, who was serving a life sentence for manslaughter for shooting a teenager in the head. Continue reading...

The Guardian Culture

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Tomorrow Will Be a Palestinian Day review – work that finds a way out of Gaza’s ruins

Theatre503, London Hope still resides against horror in this collection of short plays from Palestinian playwrights, poets and artists What are the basic requirements of theatre-making? Actors, writers, resource and rehearsal space, to name a few. What happens when these factors are narrowed to their most dangerous extremities? Companies like Belarus Free Theatre and the Freedom Theatre have shown that theatre does not stop its production even as bombs and bullets assail the building. The work finds its way to an audience. This is certainly the case with this collection of nine short plays written by Palestinian playwrights, poets and artists, and directed by Ahmed Masoud and Micaela Miranda. Four writers are currently in Gaza while two are former political prisoners, including Walid Daqqa, one of the longest-serving Palestinian prisoners, who died in custody in 2024. An extract from The Martyrs Return to Ramallah (translated by Julia Choucair Vizoso) is both absurdist and haunting, featuring the dead bodies of prisoners stored in Israeli prisons and denied burials, who begin to talk to each other. At Theatre 503, London, until 6 June Continue reading...

Venezuela inmates occupy prison roof and set fire to mattresses to protest alleged abuses

Inmates at Barinas prison allege they were peacefully protesting when prison staff opened fire, leaving some wounded Inmates at Venezuela’s western Barinas prison staged a protest on its roof on Sunday, piling flaming mattresses and calling for the removal of the facility’s director, who they accused of overseeing guards as they shot unarmed prisoners. “We want justice. They are shooting us, the guards and the wardens,” a prisoner said in a video shared by the Venezuelan Observatory of Prisons, a local NGO, on X, in which a man is seen with a bullet wound in his chest. Continue reading...

New breed of political prisoner arises in Britain as anti-protest sentences rise

More people are being jailed in England and Wales as a result of acting to prevent climate breakdown and the war in Gaza, research reveals Britain has created a new breed of political prisoners through the systematic incarceration of people acting to prevent climate breakdown and the annihilation of Gaza, a report claims. The research by Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and the protest group Defend Our Juries says that custodial sentences for acts of direct action or civil disobedience were once rare but are now being imposed with increasing length and frequency. Continue reading...

Hunger and Thirst by Claire Fuller review – a blend of social realism and gothic horror

In this lurid, big-boned, often brilliant book about a sculptor and a true-crime documentary, state-of-the-nation commentary and gruesome chills combine Claire Fuller is fascinated by corpses: by the moment when a supple, beloved body turns into inert, heavy matter. In her masterful 2021 Costa winner Unsettled Ground, adult twins veer between pathos and gawky comedy as they attempt to dress and bury their dead mother, floored by the sheer, awful weight of her. Now in Hunger and Thirst, Ursula’s destiny is shaped by encounters with two cadavers. And as the book oscillates between social realism and gothic horror, these two unruly corpses destroy her life. The first is Ursula’s itinerant, troubled but loving mother, who’d been busking with her child alongside her since giving birth at 16. Aged seven, Ursula spent an appalling two days stuck in a bathroom in Morocco, with the door trapped by her mother’s dead body after she died of dengue fever. By the time the novel opens in 1987, Ursula is 16, and has been moved between seven children’s homes before ending up at a “halfway house” alongside recovering addicts and released prisoners. She lands a trial job in the postroom at Winchester School of Art: there she makes friends with bold, madcap Sue, who thrusts on Ursula an unfamiliar intimacy, introducing her to her enviably warm and rambling family. Ursula is narrating the book 40 years later, and it’s clear from the start that something will go so horribly wrong between Ursula and Sue that a prurient documentary-maker will end up making a film about Sue’s murder. Scenes from this documentary, Dark Descent, punctuate the book, adding to the sense of foreboding. Continue reading...

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