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Until recently, I hadn’t met many people who had been incarcerated, and I hadn’t given much thought to prisons. I certainly hadn’t asked myself what happens when they complete their sentence, and walk back outside.
So perhaps it was reasonable that chief among my assumptions was this: that our jails are principally concerned with rehabilitating offenders and reducing crime in society. How wrong I was.
This year, I have spent several months with about a dozen former prisoners, filming this week’s Four Corners about a halfway house in Sydney called Rainbow Lodge. It was a sobering experience, and I’m now thoroughly disabused of my naivety.
Corrective Services NSW claims in its mission statement that in addition to running “correctional centres” across the state, it also “delivers programs to reduce reoffending [and] support reintegration”. It does this, it says, to “build safer communities”.
If so, it’s been doing a poor job. The programs it runs inside jails — to address violence and drug dependency, for example — and those it runs in the community, providing accommodation and pathways to employment, are clearly insufficient to the task.
The statistics bear this out. Critically, huge numbers of people leaving prison are committing more, not fewer crimes. The reoffending rate in NSW has climbed steadily since 2011 (with a slight reduction in 2020-2021), and the proportion of people in prison with a prior conviction — 56 per cent — climbed by 52 per cent between 2012 and 2022.
Then there’s the testimony I’ve heard this year from men who have only recently left custody. They describe a hostile, dangerous environment, largely bereft of access to the kinds of diversionary programs they say are needed to make a serious difference.
I’ve heard too from former prison officers and social workers who despair at the punitive nature of the jails they’ve visited or worked in; rather than the deprivation of liberty being the punishment meted out to those convicted of crimes, in practice it is just the first of many privations offenders endure.
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The toxic culture of prisons
A similar picture is painted by an 800-page report issued in February by Peter McClellan KC, a former judge of the NSW Court of Appeal. His investigation focused on western Sydney’s Dillwynia Correctional Centre for women, and was prompted by revelations that one of its former senior officers, Wayne Astill, had been raping the women in his care.
In return for the promise of better conditions, Astill spent years demanding and receiving sexual favours. He sexually assaulted one prisoner while she was pregnant. Convicted of 27 charges of assault and corruption, Astill was sentenced in March 2023 to 23 years behind bars.
As shocking as his crimes was the wider culture which enabled his offending for so long. Astill had been a suspect character for a long time, and his conduct was something of an open secret. McClellan raked much of this out in his report, exposing evidence of a “boys’ club” where “the bad culture starts at the lowest level and goes right up the hierarchy”.
Senior prison officials made a point of humiliating and excluding colleagues who showed any kindness to inmates. The chief correctional officer was heard to tell them, “don’t f***ing help those crims, they are pieces of shit”. Guards who insisted on helping prisoners were called “dogs” and “crim lovers”.
A Corrective Services employee who ran a diversionary program for young offenders was taunted for doing so. Another officer, who was “not overly nice” but also did not “make life hard” for inmates “would be ridiculed”. A third, who also showed empathy for the women, was targeted by the chief correctional officer, who was overheard saying he would “f*** him off to a shitty post”.
An exercise in intimidation
One female prisoner told McClellan: “There are so many officers at Dillwynia who continuously do this every single day, degrade inmates, treat them like they are lesser people, treat them … like cattle.” Perhaps most damning of all, she believed “this is going to continue on”, regardless of McClellan’s investigations, because “we have no protection”.
The women’s personal phone calls were intercepted and gossiped about, their mail was stolen. Sometimes they would be refused toilet paper, or return to their cells to find photographs of loved ones torn up. Evidence was heard that the women were verbally abused by prison officers, who called them “whores”, “dogs”, “sluts”, “f***ing c***s” and “mutts”. McClellan found this was an exercise in “intimidation”.
If the prisoners complained, the retribution was swift and wide-ranging, from delaying the processing of their “buy-ups” (grocery money given to them by family or friends) and visits not being booked, to serious payback such as being regressed into maximum security, or worse.
According to one witness, Astill silenced a complainant by warning he would transfer her to Wellington prison, which had a reputation for violence, “to get her head stomped in”. Staff at the prison would “green light” the bashing of an inmate by another, and would encourage the violence with promises to turn a blind eye. “Give her a flogging,” one said. “Give her a touch-up,” said another.
Reimagining the purpose of prisons
This prison culture is not confined to Australia. The United States infamously suffers among the worst rates of recidivism in the world, and its jails are notoriously punitive.
During the 1990s, the Norwegian justice system was also pumping out criminals hardened by repeated stretches of incarceration. Like America, Norway’s reoffending rate was 70 per cent, and those convicted of crimes were handed lengthy sentences in prisons marked by riots and assaults.
But, unlike America, and unlike Australia, Norway decided to do something about it. It transformed not just the country’s jails, but also the place they held in the society’s imagination. It built new jails with a new vision of what imprisonment could be, and it amended its penal codes and sentencing regimes.
Today, Norway is a world leader in turning criminals into valued members of society. Its reconviction rate, the lowest in the world, is just 20 per cent.
At the heart of this metamorphosis was a decision to shift the meaning of jail from punishment to rehabilitation, in clear-eyed acknowledgement of what is true of all criminal justice systems: they are filled primarily with people who are suffering poverty, mental illness and drug addiction.
Unlike Australia, Norwegian prisoners retain their core human and civil rights, just not their liberty. This became known as the “normality” principle, and the idea is simple: prisoners are placed on a path back to normality as their sentences progress, and so prisons must mirror, as much as possible, the life outside prison to which they will soon return. The men and women inside jails still vote, attend college, learn trades, exercise, see their families and participate in extracurricular activities like ceramics, music and yoga; some prison officials even participate in these hobbies alongside them.
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What’s blocking change in Australia?
Critically, Norway also introduced a “reintegration guarantee” for those who complete their sentences, which includes an offer of employment, education, housing, income, medical care and addiction treatment. The idea is to break down the exclusion of offenders.
As one academic wrote: “When prisoners feel that they are not part of the ‘us’ in society, what motivation do they have to follow the laws and norms of the society that has rejected them?”
So, could such a radical shift be possible here? Surely, in the interests of preventing future generations becoming the victims of crime, the answer has to be yes.
The primary challenge, however, is not repairing the broken culture of our prison system, or even the drafting and implementation of smarter criminal justice policy.
It is instead how to overcome reductionist voices of fear and vengeance in the debate, which is too often occupied by simplistic questions about leniency, and finding a way to focus us all on where the evidence has been pointing for decades: crime diversion and reintegration programs create a safer society. Not jails.
But there’s only one way for that debate to be cast anew. And that’s for our politicians to lead it.