The lives of detainees in Australia’s immigration detention centres are controlled by a secret rating system that is opaque and often riddled with errors, a Guardian investigation has found.
Developed by Serco, the company tasked with running Australia’s immigration detention network, the Security Risk Assessment Tool – or SRAT – is meant to determine whether someone is low, medium, high or extreme risk for factors such as escape or violence.
Detainees are also rated for an overall placement and escort risk – which may determine how they are treated while being transported, such as whether they are placed in handcuffs and where they stay inside a detention centre – but aren’t given the opportunity to challenge their rating, and typically are not even told it exists.
Immigration insiders, advocates and former detainees have told Guardian Australia the SRAT and similar algorithmic tools used in Australia’s immigration system are “abusive” and “unscientific”. Multiple government reports have found that assessments can be littered with inaccuracies – with devastating consequences.
The SRAT seems to be producing “very conservative assessments of risk”, according to Jonathan Hall Spence, a lawyer with the Public Interest Advocacy Centre. “There’s no process for having it reviewed or overturned or reconsidered,” he said.
Versions of these security risk assessments, described as “a series of mathematical calculations” by Australia’s home affairs department, have been in use since at least 2012.
The SRAT calculates a detainee’s “risk” for behaviours such as escape, demonstration and self-harm based, in part, on their pre-detention history and more than 30 incident types that may occur in detention, such as abusive or aggressive behaviour, assault, possessing contraband or the refusal of food.
Nauroze Anees spent more than 1,000 days in immigration detention in Australia but, for most of that time, he had no idea he was the subject of a SRAT. When he was given the document during an Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) investigation, it almost gave him “a heart attack”.
He said the document was riddled with errors and vague claims: a minor injury he sustained while playing football listed him as an “alleged offender”. Another incident was summarised as “detainees involved in assault” but did not describe who was involved or even when or where it occurred. An incident described as a “minor disagreement” was logged as “abusive/aggressive behaviour”.
In October 2023, the OAIC decided his privacy had been interfered with because Serco failed to ensure his personal information “was accurate, up-to-date and complete”, among other breaches of the Privacy Act. Serco was made to apologise and pay him $1,500.
“Serco is essentially the judge, jury and executioner,” he said.
‘Unwarranted’ escalations
Alex*, a former intelligence analyst on Christmas Island, told Guardian Australia it was relatively easy to accumulate incidents on your SRAT that added to your risk score.
An expression of frustration almost always came through as “disturbance, minor”, they said, or even as abuse or aggressive behaviour. “Something like that could basically tip someone’s rating into an almost irreparable rating,” they said.
A 2019 AHRC report found “abusive/aggressive behaviour” incidents were used to calculate a risk rating for “aggression/violence” even though the interaction may not have included any physical aggression or violence and may have simply been “bad language”.
Multiple detainees told Guardian Australia that while people do not explicitly know their risk assessment, it is common understanding that compounds are sorted by risk level. “We aren’t made aware of what our security level is but it’s fairly obvious,” one said.
This means that inaccurate SRATS can have profoundly serious consequences. Some detainees who the AHRC found were inaccurately assessed as high risk due to inaccurate SRATs were placed in high-security compounds where they were assaulted.
A 2020 report from the commonwealth ombudsman also detailed how detainees with any violent criminal history were assessed as high risk, no matter how much time had passed since the offence or any rehabilitation.
It suggested that risk assessments could be escalated in “unwarranted” ways: someone convicted of having a trafficable amount of a drug is automatically linked to organised crime, which automatically raises the risk of violence. “Therefore, a person may be assessed as having links to organised crime and an associated higher risk rating without any material facts to support that rating,” it concluded.
Multiple sources familiar with the system said SRAT ratings rarely go backwards from high to low, even for detainees who have “long periods of perfect behaviour”.
“We have serious doubts about the accuracy of the [SRAT],” PIAC’S Hall Spence said.
Home Affairs and Serco did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.