Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are warned that this article contains the names of deceased Indigenous people.
Author's note: We have consulted directly with Shandell Pryor's family before publishing this article. Her loving mother and daughter has read our intentions and has given her full support for us to speak publicly about her mother's death and the broader issues surrounding deaths in custody. We publish this piece with the family's knowledge and in solidarity with their call for dignity, accountability and justice.
Before the facts are even known, the familiar script has already begun. A woman dies in a prison cell. Queensland Corrective Services releases a short statement confirming that she was found unresponsive, that attempts were made to revive her, that support is being offered to staff and that the death is being treated as "non-suspicious". The matter is referred to the coroner. Within days, public attention begins to move elsewhere.
This time, the woman was Shandell Pryor, a 42-year-old woman who died at Townsville Women's Correctional Centre after being found unresponsive in her cell on Sunday morning. Her family has spoken publicly about their devastation. Her daughter described the unbearable pain of never having the chance to tell her mother she loved her one last time. Behind every death in custody is a family forced to absorb a loss that happened while their loved one was under the complete control of the state.
That alone should demand far greater public scrutiny than another carefully worded departmental statement.
The language used after deaths in custody has become so familiar that it barely registers anymore. The phrase "non-suspicious" appears almost automatically, as though it offers reassurance that nothing of significance has occurred. However, the absence of an immediately identifiable criminal act does not resolve the questions that follow a death in custody. It merely narrows them to individual wrongdoing, leaving the institution itself largely beyond examination.
A death in prison can be entirely consistent with the ordinary operation of the prison itself. That is precisely why describing a death as "non-suspicious" tells us so little.
Prisons are not hospitals. They are not therapeutic environments. They are institutions built upon confinement, violence, coercion, surveillance and deprivation. They remove people from their families, Country, communities, support networks and autonomy, while concentrating large numbers of people living with trauma, mental distress, disability, chronic illness, addiction and the effects of racism and profound poverty. When someone dies within those conditions, the question cannot simply be whether an officer committed a criminal offence. It must also be whether the institution itself produced the circumstances in which that death became possible.
Shandell Pryor did not die in just any prison. She died in Townsville Women's Correctional Centre, the same prison where Selesa Tafaifa died in custody.
That history cannot simply be treated as coincidence.
Each death should deepen public concern about the conditions within that institution and about Queensland's reliance on imprisonment as a response to social disadvantage. Instead, each death is too often treated as an isolated incident, disconnected from those that came before it. Individual investigations occur, coronial processes begin, recommendations are eventually handed down, and the prison system continues much as it always has.
This latest death also comes only months after the deaths of women in custody in Western Australia reignited public concern about the safety of women's prisons across the country. Once again, questions were raised about healthcare, mental health support, supervision and the treatment of women experiencing acute vulnerability while incarcerated. Before those conversations have even concluded, another woman has died behind prison walls.
Different jurisdictions continue to produce remarkably similar outcomes because they are built upon remarkably similar assumptions. Governments continue to respond to complex social problems by expanding systems of punishment while neglecting the community supports that prevent criminalisation in the first place.
The public narrative that follows these deaths is equally predictable. News reports frequently catalogue a woman's criminal history, her experiences of mental distress or substance dependence, often implying that these characteristics somehow explain why she died. In reality, they should prompt exactly the opposite response.
If someone entered prison with known mental health needs, what care was available to her? If she had experienced significant trauma, what therapeutic supports existed? If she required specialist healthcare, was it accessible? If her circumstances were already marked by disadvantage and vulnerability, why was imprisonment considered an appropriate response at all?
Women in prison are not randomly drawn from the Australian population. They are overwhelmingly survivors of violence. They are disproportionately Aboriginal women. Many have experienced homelessness, child removal, disability, acquired brain injuries, addiction and lifelong poverty. They enter prison carrying layers of disadvantage that governments have repeatedly failed to address in the community, only to find themselves inside institutions that were never designed to meet those needs.
These vulnerabilities are not incidental to imprisonment. They are what make imprisonment so dangerous.
For decades, governments have responded to deaths in custody by pointing towards coronial investigations. Those investigations matter enormously. Families deserve answers, transparency and accountability. But Australia has accumulated decades of coronial findings, royal commissions and independent reviews documenting the conditions that place people at risk inside prisons. The problem has never been a lack of knowledge about why people die in custody. The problem has been the political refusal to act on what we already know.
We know that women with complex health needs continue to be imprisoned. We know that Aboriginal women remain grossly mass represented in custody. We know that prisons struggle to provide adequate healthcare. We know that isolation, surveillance and coercion exacerbate trauma rather than resolve it. We know that imprisonment has become the default response to poverty, homelessness, addiction and mental distress.
Yet governments continue investing billions into expanding prison systems while community health services, public housing, alcohol and other drug services, culturally safe supports and violence prevention programs remain chronically under-resourced. Every death in custody reflects those political choices.
Shandell Pryor's death should not become another routine administrative process followed by institutional assurances that appropriate procedures were followed. Nor should the conversation end because someone has declared the death to be "non-suspicious". The more important question is whether prisons themselves have become so normalised that deaths within them no longer provoke the outrage they should.
When a person dies in state custody, responsibility cannot end with determining whether an individual committed a criminal offence. The state exercised complete control over every aspect of that person's life. It therefore bears responsibility for the conditions under which that life ended.
Prisons are often described as institutions designed to keep the public safe. Yet they continue to produce entirely foreseeable deaths among some of the most marginalised people in our communities. Until governments are prepared to confront the reality that imprisonment itself creates conditions of profound harm, women like Shandell Pryor will continue to die behind prison walls, their deaths folded into familiar bureaucratic language that asks the public to accept them as unfortunate, isolated events rather than the predictable consequences of a system built around punishment instead of care.
Tabitha Lean and Debbie Kilroy are organisers with Sisters Inside.
