Our prisons are boiling pots for angry people and universities of crime

Years of incarceration have made me a successful failure. To the world out there I am a neatly packaged convicted felon whose views and observations are irrelevant but I will offer them to you anyway – just for the hell of it!

Prisons are still society's garbage can. Places where unwanted rubbish is dumped. Out of sight. Out of mind. They are places where Ministerial portfolios are gauged by the amount of adverse publicity generated and responsibility is delegated to somebody with a shotgun and a roll of razor wire who has a mandate to ensure the streets are not sullied by any unwanted presence of a felon before he has done his time. Rehabilitation has become a four-letter word that is alien to a system that relies on revenge and retribution in answer to the public's perceived notion of what they want the incarceration process to accomplish.

It is a curious sight to witness the "law and order" debate raging out there with such a wide cross-section of the community all eager to offer views as to how men like me should do time. Journalists. Politicians. Lawyers. Judges. Doctors. Academics. Psychologists. Social workers. Prison administrators. It is ironic that the only person not allowed to contribute to that debate is the prisoner him/herself.

Emotive argument flies back and forth; "make 'em do every day", "bring back the death penalty", "hang 'em", "maggots", bleeding hearts", and the debate bubbles along with the same well-worn arguments that have no consideration for future generations who may suffer the consequences of today's draconian proposals that continue to dehumanise, desensitise and make angry men angrier.

Twenty years ago a rebellious and angry young man wrote an article that described how incarceration had become Australia's most effective educational system. I was that angry young man.

Prison, the end of the line, had become the university of crime. It was 1979. The International Year of The Child. I was serving an 18-year prison sentence for armed robbery inside the State Penitentiary at Parramatta, NSW, when those observations were made in Brown & Zdenkowsky's The Prison Struggle:

"Prison is the end of the road. An overcrowded garbage can that society carefully chooses to ignore. For most of us behind these walls, the road to prison has been a steady procession of Boy's Homes and Reformatories. To some, we are crime statistics. To others, we are a combination of animals, brutes, deviates, psychopaths, products of broken homes, or just plain psychologically unbalanced individuals. Despite whichever tag we are labelled with, the undeniable fact remains - we are all prisoners behind these walls but the majority of us are experts too. We know the juvenile/justice system intimately. We know it from the gut level of experience. And prison is a direct extension of the juvenile/justice system.

During the past nine years in prison there is one thing that has occurred with monotonous regularity: the guys I knew at Mt Penang and Albion Street and Yasmar (NSW Juvenile Reformatories during the 60s and 70s) were in those places for truancy, running away from home, stealing and in some cases house-breaking. Today I see those same guys I knew 14 and 15 years ago walking the yard. Now they are doing time for murder, rape, armed robbery and kidnapping. Recently I walked the yard with a guy I knew from Yasmar in 1964. He was in there for stealing a bicycle but today he is doing a 14 year sentence for armed robbery. Some may look at this example in cynical vein and remark that it is a big step from stealing bicycles to robbing banks. It isn't a big step at all. It is a progressive extension of the juvenile/justice system ...

The juvenile/justice system is the most efficient education system in the State. It is a timeless machine that sucks children in at one end with the seal of judicial responsibility and spews them out again on their 18th birthdays to become endless flotsam and jetsam that continually float through the NSW penal system during their adult life.

Having been taught to steal and commit petty crime at Kindergarten (Mittagong) and taught the values of the con, lie and cheating at Primary School (Daruk), and then the High School education at Mt Penang teaches them skills to make an impression in the life of crime. Tamworth and Hay Reformatories blunt their sensitivities with brutality. Their education secures jobs for people who would be otherwise unemployed – magistrates, judges, police and prison guards."

Nearly three decades later and maximum-security prisons are still the universities of crime.

Incentives for prisoners to participate in conventional education and rehabilitation programs during the 90s were forfeited to the punishment and retribution concept of the "get tough" purges of politicians and prison administrators. Criminality has again become the preferred option on the yard and is learned at a faster rate than numeracy or literacy inside a system that has replaced brick walls and gun towers with razor wire, sophisticated technology and privatisation.

Budgetary constraints dictate that money spent on prisons is earmarked for security. The physical, monetary and psychological barriers placed upon educational pursuits inside maximum security prisons are never-ending and Trevor Doherty illustrated some of those complex issues in a paper he presented to The International Forum on Education in Penal Systems in Adelaide during April, 1998:

"Education within a prison is viewed by authorities as a privilege and is consequently heavily policed. Although viewed favourably by the parole board, it is far from being encouraged by prison staff. The adamant opposition toward educational pursuits displayed by prison staff invariably brings about a 'play the game mentality' to which a large proportion of correctional educators succumb. Consequently, to safeguard their own careers, they often wear two hats."

Knowledge is power but the learning curves can be difficult to navigate inside maximum-security prisons. They remain seething cauldrons of anger, frustration and discontent that rest on an underlying current of tension and raw violence which can explode without warning at any time.

There is no privacy within a prison. Random cell searches, strip searches, body searches (squat and cough) and lock-downs are an integral part of prison life. All activities within a prison are geared to the security restrictions enforced within the prison and there is no control whatsoever as to what prison authorities may dictate as being policy on any given day.

A prisoner has no control over his own life. Helplessness and vulnerability have become prerequisites of the incarceration process that disempowers and totally crushes any initiative or individuality. Everyday prison life becomes one continuing battle to retain a dignified sense of balance between institutionalisation and subservience.

The learning experience is no weight to carry but there are two types of educational systems inside a maximum-security prison - the conventional and the unconventional. For some prisoners it is easier and less demanding to simply assimilate into a sub-culture where successful failures carry a mark of respect on the yard that is equivalent to a BA or a Phd in the outside world.

This concept was challenged by Senator John Tierney, Chair of the Senate Employment, Education and Training References Committee, when he released a Report on 26 April, 1996, that recommended wide-sweeping reforms to conventional education programs inside Australian prisons.

The Report culminated a nation-wide series of public hearings and visits to correctional facilities throughout Australia and drew this observation from Senator Tierney:

"Currently prisoners who leave prison with useful skills and a positive outlook invariably lack the support to establish themselves with a job or further education in the community. As a result, a significant proportion re-offend and end up back in prison. This is an outrageous waste of skills, time and money.

"If we can reduce the levels of recidivism we can save millions of taxpayer dollars, to say nothing of the social gains when ex-offenders can put their lives back together.

"If we are serious about rehabilitation - and let's face it, about 99% of prisoners will be returning to the community - we need to make sure what happens in prison with education and training is geared to the best possible outcomes for prisoners, because that's what will be in the best interests of society at large."

Those noble sentiments expressed by Senator Tierney were not validated on the prison exercise yard. The abandonment of prison as a last resort was replaced with the "get tough on crime" approach that politicians of both persuasions use in vote-grabbing exercises to woo the electorate.

Zero-tolerance incarceration is the buzzword of prisonocrats who oversee the new-age prison system - a warehousing process where sensory deprivation labours under the masquerade of security and containment. Fresh air and sunlight have become a privilege and not a right. Retribution replaces rehabilitation. And education is at the bottom of the priority list. As the incarceration process moves into the 21st century one can only speculate what the process will produce for future generations.

That speculation was the focus of a respected US Judge, His Honour Judge Dennis Challeen, when he made this critical and candid observation of the incarceration process as I know it:

"We want them to have self worth so we destroy their self worth.
We want them to be responsible so we take away all responsibilities.
We want them to be part of our community so we isolate them from our community.
We want them to be positive and constructive so we degrade them and make them useless.
We want them to be non-violent so we put them where there is violence all around them.
We want them to be kind and loving people so we subject them to hatred and cruelty.
We want them to quit being the tough guy so we put them where the tough guy is respected.
We want them to quit hanging around with losers, so we put all the losers under one roof.
We want them to quit exploiting us so we put them where they exploit each other.
We want them to take control of their own lives, own their own problems and quit being parasites -- so we make them totally dependent on us."
(Quoted in the New Zealand Journal Stimulus in August 1994).

How many successful failures will the prison system continue to produce? Is this what the community really wants?