Back in 1983, 25-year-old Saeed Dezfouli fled Iran and found asylum in Australia. He became a citizen in 1986 and found work as a court interpreter. But today he is a prisoner and a patient in Sydney’s Long Bay jail where he is involuntarily injected with anti-psychotic medication, according to one of his advocates, Michael Poynder.
Mr Dezfouli was jailed for setting fire to the New South Wales Community Relations Commission office in Ashfield in 2001. In 2004 a jury found him not guilty of manslaughter by reason of mental illness and not guilty of maliciously damaging property by fire by reason of mental illness. Since then he has languished in the prison system.
Currently a patient at the Long Bay Forensic Hospital, Dezfouli has over the past two years vigorously pursued claims against the prison administration for access to his medical records, and to complain against discrimination. He is clearly a determined man.
But now, according to Michael Poynder, who works with a prisoners advocacy organisation in Sydney called Justice Action, every fortnight Dezfouli, is being held down by up to eight staff and forcibly injected with Clopixol, a drug designed to alleviate paranoia and hallucinations.
Poynder says what is happening to Dezfouli is in clear breach of a Health Department protocol which says, “An injection without consent should be given only in the interest of the immediate physical safety of the patient or those in his or her vicinity.”
There is no record, Poynder says, of Dezfouli being violent while he has been in prison.
Worse still, says Brett Collins, who heads Justice Action and has also been nominated by Dezfouli as his primary carer, repeated requests made by himself and Dezfouli orally and in writing over the past two months for the injections to cease have simply been ignored by the prison health authorities.
The claims made by Dezfouli’s advocates are serious and if proven, show that while mental health professionals are bestowed with enormous powers under legislation in each state and territory, when it comes to prisons where mental illness is rife, they are not sufficiently accountable.
This is particularly the case in New South Wales where both sides of the political fence are demonstrably interested only in making sure that prisons are hell holes and that prisoners have few enforceable rights.
Such an attitude on the part of legislators is in clear breach of the law. As former High Court Justice Michael Kirby said in 2004:
“[Prisoners] have lost their liberty whilst they are in prison. However, so far as I am concerned, they have not lost their human dignity or their right to equality before the law.”
The claims made about Saeed Dezfouli need to be investigated independently of government.
Mr Dezfouli may have lost his liberty, but he has the right to refuse treatment and he most certainly has a clear right to ask that a decision to subject his body and mind to involuntary injections of a powerful drug be reviewed before it proceeds further.
Greg Barns is a legal adviser to Tasmanian prisoners advocacy group, Prison Action Reform.
I believe that the treatment as described is appalling. What Justice Michael Kirby has said is true. People are jailed as a punishment(or in this case due to diminished responsibility or its equivalent) and that is supposed to be the punishment, not further acts of cruelty etc. It will be interesting to see what happens when this case one day reaches court, as indeed it should. This doesn’t sound any better than what the US have been doing at Guantanamo Bay when inmates go on a hunger strike – they are forcibly ‘fed’ with a tube shoved up their noses and into their stomachs by untrained people, and without due responsibility to hygiene etc. In short, it’s abuse!As this case is! It’s a crime of violence and should be treated as such! IF this man’s illness is so critical that it warrants this kind of treatment, then, obviously,he’s in the wrong place – he should be in a hospital and treated with dignity and respect! These types of actions demean us all if we allow them!
I wonder if the prison system would be able to do this, legally if we had a bill of rights.
Could Victorian prisons administer medication against some ones will under their state bill?
Could this sort of appalling treatment whilst in prison be one of the reasons why our successive governments have been so actively against a bill of rights?
Sue Gilbey
I used to work in the Victorian system.
In my experience no involuntary medication or injections were permitted in prison, and none were given.
If a person was so mentally ill that they needed such treatment, they were in layman’s terms
“certified ” and transported to a secure Forensic Psychiatric Facility.
The Victorian facility is Thomas Embling Hospital in Fairfield.
There a person can legally have treatment forced upon them as an Involuntary Patient.
In my experience the overwhelming majority of people in such treatment recieve a high
level of quality care.
Bozwell
The guy killed someone and got off the conviction for that because of a mental illness. I’m sorry but in my opinion if you avoid a conviction for manslaughter or murder because of a mental illness than you also lose your right to complain about the treatment proscribed for that illness.