Man ‘cooked’ to death in Australian prison van

SYDNEY (AFP) — The family of an Australian Aboriginal elder who died after being “cooked” in the back of a scorching hot prison van may sue after a coroner branded his treatment inhumane.

A coroner Friday described the treatment of the 46-year-old man as a “disgrace” and inhumane, saying he would ask prosecutors to consider criminal charges over his death from heatstroke in Western Australia in January 2008.

His shirt here reading "Zen - Awakening - Mind", and looking like a terrible menace, we can all rest easier that the evil Mr. Ward was dispatched promptly by our overlords

The elder, known only as Mr Ward as his first name was withheld for cultural reasons, was transported 360 kilometres (225 miles) to jail in temperatures of up to 50 degrees Celsius (122 F) in a van with faulty air conditioning.

Ward, who was arrested a day earlier for drink driving, spent four hours in the searing heat between the mining towns of Laverton and Kalgoorlie, suffering third-degree burns where his body touched the metal floor, the inquest heard.

Western Australia Coroner Alastair Hope found that Ward was effectively “cooked” to death and heavily criticised the state prisons department, the private security firm that operated the van and the two guards who escorted Ward.

“It is a disgrace that a prisoner in the 21st century, particularly a prisoner who has not been convicted of any crime, was transported for a long distance in high temperatures in this pod,” Hope said.

The hearing was told that when Ward eventually arrived unconscious at hospital in Kalgoorlie, his body was so hot that staff were unable to cool him down. After an ice bath, which failed to save him, he had a body temperature of 41.7 degrees Celsius as opposed to a normal temperature of 37 degrees Celsius.

Mr. Coroner Alastair Hope has it wrong, of course. The disgrace is that the uniformed gangsters roaming the countryside being paid with money stolen from innocents and kidnapping people, throwing them in chains and metal boxes in order to take them to larger cages made of concrete and steel where they’ll be kept like animals, all without said kidnap victims having harmed anyone, don’t wake up one fine morning to find their severed heads mounted on pikes along the palisades of the free cities.

But, oh, geez, I forgot. That wouldn’t be “civilized”, now, would it?

I’m sure it’s a great relief for the people of Occupied Australia that the two outsourced thugs from G4S aka Group 4 Securicor contracted for prisoner kidnap victim transport, “have now been suspended,” a year and a half later.

Once upon a time, I was a very early employee of an internet service provider that raised hundreds of millions of dot-com boom-days dollars. I was specifically a network engineer, and more generally just an IT infrastructure implementation and management guy. Heady days.

Some time after the company had issued its IPO and begun hiring people by the boatload, control of the IT department fell away from the executives I knew personally and into the laps of a bunch of new “white knight” corporate types hired in from the likes of the local phone company and various billion-dollar black holes of enterprises that had imploded in the not-too-distant past. My role remained in network infrastructure development and management for our customer-facing network; all of the internal stuff got reorganized under a newly-minted CIO. Internal infrastructure wasn’t strictly my problem any more, though I cared deeply about seeing it done right, both because of my own knowledge of the field and due to IT’s pivotal role in the automation and smooth management of a large number of complex business processes facing a customer base and deployment footprint that were literally exploding in size.

The new people charged with running IT were managers, not engineers. Their expertise lie in spheres like hiring consultants, drafting proposals and securing funding for projects. None of them had a deep grasp of the processes they were supposed to implement, and problems began cropping up almost immediately.

Ultimately, there was a grand proposal to spend something on the order of $30 million to outsource the bulk of the IT infrastructure and all of the business systems that managed those complex processes which we were only just learning how to implement, manage and scale ourselves, as a company. Now, outsourcing parts of your IT infrastructure often makes a lot of sense, if several things are true. You must have the right outsourcing partner, who brings solid experience in managing IT in your line of business. These were not in evidence. You must also be in a business where IT itself is far away from the focus. If you’re operating a nationwide network of sawmills and lumber yards, for instance, your top people really ought to be folks who know wood and the lumber trade inside and out. IT expertise is something you can outsource in such a case. But when your business is IT itself,  well, outsourcing your own brain is ill-advised at best.

Eventually I took my concerns to the Chairman of the company, to whom I had personal access simply due to my seniority. The Chairman was a brilliant engineer, a guy who had made a fortune developing a series of innovative projects in a burgeoning field and developed those projects in turn into successful products. His previous start-up had been acquired for a hefty sum, the bulk of which went to him personally, and he had stayed on there for a time helping to manage all the transitional stuff that comes along with corporate mergers and acquisitions.

I laid out my case over the course of twenty minutes or so: what was being proposed was ridiculously expensive, likely doomed to failure for reasons of ignorance of the players involved (the IT management and the proposed outsourcing partner), and foolish for the reason I outlined above. The Chairman valued things like “propriety” and “decorum” and “respecting the chain of command” rather more highly than I ever did, and I quickly found myself getting nowhere, as he assumed that if these men had been hired into these positions to manage IT, they must necessarily know what they were doing.

The end of the conversation boiled down to an exchange that went roughly like this:

“Well, Mike, I hear what you are saying, but what would you have us do? Fire the CIO, Mr. So-and-So?”

“Well, that’s certainly one option, and a better course than the one we’re on now.”

“And what then? Put you in charge? Are you, Mike Gogulski, going to run IT for a half-billion-dollar publicly traded company?”

“Well, if I were assigned to do that, I’d certainly give it a solid go, and I believe that I could do it far better than these jokers.”

“But Mike, that’s insane! We couldn’t give you such a job! You’ve never been head of IT for such a large enterprise before!”

A few seconds ticked by as gears turned in my head, my face no doubt flushing with mounting anger.

“And which half-billion-dollar publicly traded company has Mr. So-and-So served as CIO of in the past? And for which such company have you served as Chairman? “

The response consisted of several deep sighs and a great deal of spluttering — the answers, of course, were “none”.

And thus ended the meeting, with me storming out of the Chairman’s office.

I was reminded of this little anecdote of corporate elitist jackassery while watching the amusing — and terrifying — video at Congressman Pete Stark: crazed lunatic on the disinter blog. Enjoy.