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Today in collaboration with Guardian Australia, New Matilda and The Global Mail we launch Detention Logs, a new site committed to investigating Australia’s immigration detention centres.
Detention Logs was born out of what we believe is a need for more transparency. As debate about immigration becomes more heated the closer we head to the election, the harder it becomes for facts to emerge. Our aim is to publish data, documents and investigations that reveal more about conditions and events inside Australia’s detention centres. We want to help let the sun shine in on these facilities.
The first release we’ve put together is a dataset of over 7,000 incidents in detention facilities, obtained under Freedom of Information laws. These records show incidents across detention centres from October 2009 to May 2011, and is the most comprehensive dataset ever published about Australia's detention network. The data provides insight into what has happened inside, ranging from births, deaths, escapes, self-harms and assaults. The department of immigration and citizenship has access to this information and we believe the public should too.
This remarkable data was originally published on the Immigration Department’s disclosure log in a 300 page PDF file. Despite our requests for the data in a more user friendly format, we had to process and collate it ourselves. Over the past six months we’ve slowly been developing a searchable database to allow the public to easily explore and navigate each individual incident.
The document exposes previously unreported details of a range of incidents in detention, including graphic descriptions of desperate acts of self-harm.
One incident report describes how a detainee is “sitting with his arms folded and is visibly trembling and rolling [a] razor blade in his mouth", leading to a four hour stand-off with immigration staff. Another describes how a “client REDACTED has self harmed with a razor making three cuts to his left upper arm. Client stated that he has done this as he is bored.”
Our investigation is strongly rooted in open journalism. In a news environment where resources are dwindling and audiences are fragmented, collaboration is an important part of the future of journalism. Our release today brought together the skills and resources of five different digital organisations; Detention Logs, The Guardian, New Matilda, Open Australia and The Global Mail. The news organisations that reported on the logs all produced entirely different stories and entirely different visualisations based on the same set of data. We want more collaboration like this to occur in the future, and we hope to encourage more Australian news organisations to engage with each other, rather than compete with one another.
Open journalism is also about engaging with our audience, and one of the key features of the Detention Logs site is our “adopt an incident” campaign, which is run through Open Australia’s Right to Know site. All of our readers can become involved to help make Australian detention centres more transparent by lodging freedom of information requests for an individual incident report.
Each one of the logs that appear on the Detention Logs site is actually part of a much larger “incident detail report.” These documents provides more information about what happened during the event, and can lead to more in-depth reporting and analysis. Australian government agencies should publish this data proactively, so we asked the department of immigration and citizenship to publish these documents in the interests of transparency.
They’ve refused, so that’s where our audience can help. The dataset we’ve published so far is enormous, and there are many stories that remain untapped. With the help of our audience, and the audiences of the organisations we’ve partnered with, everyone can be involved.
If our readers see an incident that they think should be investigated further, then we’re encouraging them to use the “adopt an incident” function that appears on our site. The forms for the request is then automatically generated on the Right to Know website, where a whole community of regular freedom of information requesters can help them out. Together, we can shed light on what really happens in Australia’s detention centres.
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