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A leaked report shows staff shortages have created rolling lockdowns at a Melbourne prison, where there have been numerous suicide attempts and limited access to water. By Denham Sadler.
Exclusive: Female prisoners going without food and clean water
As many as seven prisoners a month are attempting suicide at a women’s prison on the edge of Melbourne, where staff shortages mean women are being kept in lockdowns that resemble solitary confinement.
Prisoners report shortages of food and a lack of access to clean drinking water during these lockdowns.
“We were going days without water,” says Ashleigh Chapman, who was released from the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre last month. “We were getting quite sick and a lot of us had lost a lot of weight.”
A leaked internal document, obtained by The Saturday Paper, shows that a new system of “rolling lockdowns” was introduced at the prison this month. The document formalises the system of lockdowns and indicates that they will continue for the next six months.
Chapman says that as the lockdowns escalated this year, the water in her unit turned green and was not drinkable, but prison officers were not allowed to fill up her water bottle. She says the water was turning her sink green and had a strong metallic taste. Prison officers were told about the issue on multiple occasions.
Kelly Flanagan, who was also recently released from the prison, said there was green water in her cell. She says it smelt strongly of sewage and was making people ill.
Flanagan kept a diary of the lockdowns during her time in the prison. It details an escalation in their frequency, with a brutal impact on the women incarcerated there. Some lockdowns were for hours. Some went for days.
Chapman says prison officers initially filled up drink bottles for the women from taps outside the cells, but were eventually instructed not to do this, leaving the women able to buy water from the canteen only once a week.
Corrections Victoria says it did not have any records of green water in the cells or of officers being advised not to fill up drink bottles.
Chapman says that when they were placed in lockdown, the women relied on pieces of bread and two packs of cereal. During each lockdown, women are not allowed out of their cells, where they are kept alone.
According to Corrections Victoria, women in “self-catered” accommodation at the prison are given bread and cereal during a breakfast lockdown, and access to meals from the prison kitchen at other times.
The lockdowns at the Dame Phyllis Frost Centre, Victoria’s only maximum security women’s prison, are not due to the behaviour of women or any unrest in the prison. Instead, they have been attributed to staff shortages, with large numbers of prison officers calling in sick, meaning not all parts of the prison can be unlocked.
The leaked internal document shows lockdowns will be put in place “if there is insufficient staff to open the centre each day”, with a rotating roster of units to be shut down each day. The document says women will be required to have movement slips in order to leave their units.
During these lockdowns, medications will be provided through cell doors, and most appointments will be cancelled. “Unless critical, stakeholders will book appointments to occur in the following week,” the document says.
Ordinarily, cells are opened about 8am and women are given about 11 hours out-of-cell time a day. During this time women attend appointments for housing, addiction, mental health and legal support, as well as visiting with loved ones and making phone calls.
At a recent Public Accounts and Estimates Committee hearing, Corrections officials confirmed there had been 129 lockdowns at the prison between April and October last year, all because of staffing shortages.
The Victorian Ombudsman confirmed it has received complaints about the lockdowns at the prison.
Chapman says a number of her appointments were cancelled due to lockdowns, including with a psychologist, as well as phone calls with her friends and family.
She says she has spoken to women still incarcerated at the prison, who have told her about regularly missing phone calls, medical appointments and other programs due to the lockdowns. She has heard of women who have not received their regular antipsychotic medications for multiple days because of the lockdowns.
Flanagan, a First Nations woman, was released from the prison in March after serving a three-year sentence. She recorded the seven suicide attempts in her diary.
The diary also shows the way lockdowns escalated this year.
In January, there were eight days with a lockdown of at least one hour, with a total of 28 hours spent in lockdown during the day.
In February, Flanagan’s unit at Dame Phyllis Frost was kept in lockdown for 61 hours. In the first two-and-a-half weeks of March, there were 18.5 hours of lockdown.
Some of these lockdowns began at 3pm on one day and continued to the following afternoon, with prisoners kept in their cells for nearly 24 hours.
The diary shows that across three days in February, Flanagan was only allowed out of her prison cell for 90 minutes.
This brief time out of her unit was a mad dash to get enough food to last for another extended lockdown, and not nearly long enough to call any loved ones or attend programs.
The diary shows that from 7.30pm on February 26 until 1.30pm two days later, the women in Flanagan’s unit were locked down entirely. They were locked back in just 90 minutes later, at 3pm, and not let out until 3.30pm the following day.
Flanagan’s diary also details many of the appointments and sessions that were cancelled as a result of the lockdowns. These include Aboriginal healing sessions, alcohol and other drugs assessments, creative writing classes and even some legal calls.
“They started out just a couple of days a week, for a few hours here and there,” Flanagan tells The Saturday Paper. “But by the time I left in March it was every single day.
“The shifty thing they’re doing is they’re letting you out for 15-minute blocks. You might not get unlocked in the morning, but they’ll let you out for 15 minutes at 3pm so it’s not a whole-day lockdown.”
Women in protection units, such as Flanagan and Chapman, are hardest hit, with their units locked down more often, placing them in what is effectively solitary confinement.
Victorian Minister for Corrections Enver Erdogan said in a statement that lockdowns are “sometimes necessary to maintain the safety of staff and prisoners and the security of the facility”.
He added: “We expect these are kept to a minimum and all essential services continue to be delivered.”
Erdogan said new recruits will begin working at the prison “as soon as possible”.
Nerita Waight, chief executive of the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service, says the organisation is deeply concerned about the conditions in the prison, with clients reporting that programs, calls and visits are still being disrupted.
“It is unacceptable to punish the women further for the sheer incompetence of the department to manage its staffing requirements,” Waight tells The Saturday Paper.
“The mental and physical distress it causes is profound and, in some instances, life-threatening. The Aboriginal women currently experiencing these lockdowns are incredibly vulnerable, with their access to cultural safety supports such as the Aboriginal Healing Unit and an Aboriginal Wellbeing Officer unclear to us as the department is yet to respond to our concern.”
Ellen Murphy, the principal legal officer at the Law & Advocacy Centre for Women, says her clients have described these lockdowns as “routine and unrelenting”. She says her organisation is “deeply concerned by the impact that ongoing lockdowns are having on our clients’ mental health and on their ability to access services and programs which will aid their reintegration to life outside the prison”.
“Many of our clients in DPFC have a history of complex trauma and the persistent lockdowns are distressing and isolating,” Murphy tells The Saturday Paper. “The ability to maintain contact with children, family, support people and service providers is integral to our clients’ wellbeing, and frequent disruption to these relationships has the capacity to have devastating and long-lasting consequences.”
Murphy says one of her organisation’s clients, a victim-survivor of childhood sexual abuse and serious family violence as an adult, has had appointments with external services and supports cancelled as a result of the lockdowns.
Adriana Mackay, a manager at Flat Out, an organisation supporting women incarcerated in Victoria, said that in one week in late May the organisation was blocked from entering the prison on three days due to lockdowns, with a number of appointments missed, including to help women apply for bail or parole and to access housing support.
“They’ve been really disruptive,” Mackay tells The Saturday Paper. “We’ve had staff on multiple occasions turn up to the prison and get turned away.”
Flanagan is still in touch with many women incarcerated at the prison, who tell her that the lockdowns have only become worse in recent months. “My heart is so sad for them,” she says. “I can feel the pain in their words. They’re not coping and no one is listening.
“No one can see them so no one has to think about them. But someone has to, because something bad is going to happen. It’s inevitable.”
Flanagan says there were multiple suicide attempts at the prison at the start of this year. “We don’t want to hurt anyone, but we need to get out that pain and aggression,” she says. “We’re more likely to harm ourselves, and that’s exactly what’s happening.”
Likewise, Chapman is still in contact with several women still incarcerated at the jail. She says the situation has got worse since she was released and it was difficult leaving people behind. “It was a little sad,” she says. “You know people are still suffering in there.”
Chapman says she is still feeling the impact of the extended lockdowns and time in solitary confinement. “It has caused a lot of different problems,” she says. “I went to the shopping centre and had to leave; it was just too much. The issues in the prison have caused a lot of problems.”
The Victorian government said there had not been an increase in recorded self-harm incidents at the prison in the past six months.
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This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 21, 2025 as "Exclusive: Female prisoners going without food and clean water".
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