Reimagining prisons

Australia has a prison problem. It is a problem decades in the making; a problem that stems from a preference—by most politicians in most states and territories throughout most of the last half century—to punish instead of to correct.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), in 1975 there were 8,900 people in prisons across Australia. Five decades later, there are more than 46,000, including more than 13,000 in New South Wales—by far the highest of any state or territory.

This 417 per cent increase in our incarcerated population is not because Australia has become a more dangerous place to live. In fact, ABS data shows that the overall crime rate has fallen substantially over the past 50 years. Recorded rates of assaults and sexual assaults are rising, but homicides, robberies and most other violent crimes have fallen. For most of us, Australia has never been safer.

And yet our prison numbers have soared to some of the highest in the developed world. There are 208 incarcerated people for every 100,000 adults in Australia—the seventh highest rate in the OECD and surpassed only by Russia, Turkey and Poland among European nations. The United States tops the overall OECD list.

Australia stands out. 38 per cent of our prison population are locked up for non-violent offences, many that would attract non-carceral sentences elsewhere.

An astonishing 40 per cent are yet to be convicted but, due to recent changes to bail laws that lead to a presumption against bail, they languish on remand.

One third of our prison population is made up of First Nations people, despite constituting just over three per cent of the general population.

And perhaps most troublingly of all, according to the Productivity Commission’s Report on Government Services 2025, our rate of recidivism—measured by the percentage of incarcerated people who return to prison within two years—stands at 43 per cent nationally. The figure for NSW is 48.8 per cent.

At the same time as many of Australia’s prisons have filled—necessitating the construction of 37 new facilities since 2000 and incurring an annual cost of $6 billion—the populations of prisons in the Netherlands, Norway and across much of Europe have shrunk.

When faced with bursting prison populations and ineffective criminal justice policies, these governments took action. They reduced the length of sentences, they repeatedly favoured alternative forms of punishment and, above all, they moved to prioritise rehabilitation.

According to the first-person accounts of dozens of currently and formerly incarcerated people here at home, Australia’s prisons do precisely the opposite.

Prison origins

The word ‘prison’ derives from the Old French word “prisoun”, which means captivity.

The word ‘jail’ derives, after a series of steps traversing through Middle English, Old French and Medieval Latin, from the Latin word “cavea” which means cage or enclosure.

Each of these words connotes a sense of confinement; the idea that a person is kept away from others, unable to leave voluntarily and unable to reoffend. This, after all, is the original purpose of imprisonment.

Yet nowhere in any of these words is there an implication that the place of confinement should be a terrible place to live. Nor can that implication be found anywhere in any sentencing Act in any state in Australia.

Sentencing Acts differ across our country’s jurisdictions but across federal, state and territory laws, the principles of sentencing are largely consistent:

• The offender should be punished in a way that is just in all the circumstances.
• The offender should be deterred from reoffending and others should be similarly deterred from doing the same.
• The community should be adequately protected.
• The offender should be held accountable for their offence to recognise the harm done and to denounce, condemn or censure their behaviour.
• The offender should be rehabilitated.

Imprisonment is said to be a last resort. It is the most extreme sentence, merited only where the offence is so grave that the only way to protect the community, to deter the offender and to punish them adequately, is to lock them up.

In circumstances where such a sentence is warranted, the punishment is said to be the prison sentence itself—crucially, not the experience inside.

The punishment is being stripped of all liberty. It is being separated from friends, family and the outside world. It is being unable to leave and unable to flourish in a world full of opportunities. It is not the experience inside.

Cramped cells with iron gates, strict regimes of discipline, penalties for minor infractions, work for negligible or no pay, solitary confinement—none of this is contemplated in Australian sentencing laws and guidelines.

Instead, it is a product of the imagination of various states over 400 years, advanced through the influence of the British penal system, and accepted and embedded into our collective psyche. The prison, as we have come to understand it, is not required under Australian law but, for a great many of Australia’s incarcerated population, it is the reality.

For those who pride themselves on being ‘tough on crime’, the punitive and restrictive prison environment is the point. To gain support for this approach, their argument follows the reasoning that the harsher the prison, the less likely one is to return. The evidence has never backed this up.

Instead it shows the opposite: if a person is treated like an animal, they are more likely to act as one. If they are afforded dignity and respect, they are far more likely to behave as a human being.

Reducing recidivism

There is an enormous amount of research on recidivism rates and how best to integrate people into society so they do not reoffend. While it remains incredibly difficult to achieve and requires a whole-of-society effort with targeted funding, attention and resources, the key factors are clear:

positive and supportive relationships;

• safe and affordable housing;
• educational pathways;
• sustainable employment; and
• where relevant, effective treatment for substance abuse.
• Some of these factors could be addressed immediately. With greater funding (albeit a lot of it) and by reducing some of the restrictions on incarcerated people upon release, we could help treat their addictions, find places for them to live and help them get jobs.

Other factors require out-of-the-box thinking—a new understanding of what prisons should look like. Though at first glance this feels much more difficult, if it were to be achieved, it might require no money at all.

In July of 1994, in the small city of Bradford, Pennsylvania (population 9,500), a slim man of just under 50 retired after a storied career as a warden.

Dennis Luther was no ordinary warden. Here in Bradford, at the medium-security Federal Correctional Institution, McKean, where he spent his last six years, Luther greeted each new arrival with a handshake and he spent each day implementing a vision that was perhaps unique among US correctional facilities.

At McKean, the residents sat in classrooms learning carpentry, horticulture, barbering, cooking, catering and literature.

In the evenings, they played and exercised in the yard, up to 500 of them at a time, with just three staff watching on.

The buildings that made up the prison were low-rise and modern, and the employees dressed well and treated the inmates with respect.

As the famed American author Robert F. Worth wrote for the Atlantic, “Luther came to believe American prisons were unnecessarily brutal places, more likely to teach hatred and violence than remorse.” He sought to change it.

Luther’s philosophy was business-orientated and simple: if you keep the inmates busy, they’ll require less supervision and, accordingly, it will cost the state less. In the long run, if you treat the inmates like human beings and prepare them for society, they’ll be far less likely to return.

Treated with dignity

The evidence backed him up. In Luther’s six years at McKean, there were no escapes, no homicides, no sexual assaults and no suicides. Parolees returned to McKean far less than to other institutions. And the inmates themselves felt they were treated with dignity—some for the first time in their lives.

The more Luther’s men involved themselves in recreational activity, the less likely they were to get in trouble. The more educational programs they undertook, the less likely they were to reoffend. They were healthier than their peers in other facilities, saving the government enormously. They were awarded supervised picnics for good behaviour, helping them to adjust to life on the outside. Senior inmates mentored those just arriving and many of those relationships continued on the outside. Above all, Luther placed unconditional respect for the inmates at the forefront of every decision he made.

“If you want people to behave responsibly, and treat you with respect, then you treat other people that way”, he told Worth.

Perhaps the most unusual feature of McKean was a plaque mounted on the walls, which read: “Beliefs About the Treatment of Inmates.”

There were 28 of these beliefs. Here are 10:

1. Inmates are sent to prison as punishment and not for punishment.
2. Correctional workers have a responsibility to ensure inmates are returned to the community no more angry or hostile than when they were committed.
3. Inmates are entitled to a safe and humane experience while in prison.
4. You must believe in man’s capacity to change his behaviour.
5. Normalise the environment to the extent possible by providing programs, amenities and services. The denial of such must be related to maintaining order and security rather than punishment.
6. Most inmates will respond favourably to a clean and aesthetically pleasing physical environment and will not vandalise or destroy it.
7. Be dependable when dealing with inmates. If you say you are going to do something, do it.
8. It is important for staff to model the kind of behaviour they expect to see duplicated by inmates.
9. Inmates are to be treated respectfully and with basic dignity. Staff can treat inmates respectfully without compromising the essential element of professional distance.
10. Never, never lie to an inmate.

The striking thing about these beliefs is how easy they are to embody. No time, money or extra resources are required. 

These are simply ideals which, if embraced by those inside prison (inmates, guards and staff alike), the environment will be better for all.

There is no reason why these same beliefs cannot be affixed to the walls of Australian prisons and adopted by those inside.

Luther’s and others’ research shows that correctional officers are motivated by the same things that incentivise most employees: promotions, bonuses and praise for good work. If, for example, Corrective Services NSW, the Victorian Department of Corrections or the general manager of a prison in Western Australia instructs their correctional officers to treat inmates with dignity and act fast upon their complaints, refrain from excessive punishment and reward them for good behaviour, and if those departments or officials reward staff who do just that, is there any reason why our prisons could not look like McKean? The reality is that today they do not.

And yet those who run our prisons do point to improvements already made and others to come. For almost a decade, NSW has been rolling out a program of delivering new facilities, along with a new model of education and vocational training for inmates. Corrective Services NSW says it has also improved performance monitoring and reporting, leading to greater accountability of prisons.

Stories from inside

Since the launch last July of Australia’s national prison newspaper, About Time, hundreds of people imprisoned across Australia have written to share their experiences. Their stories reveal a punitive and scatter-gun approach to corrections in our country. Rules and standard procedures differ markedly across states and territories, and even across prisons within the same jurisdiction, often at the whim of the facility’s general manager.

David from NSW writes that he has become blind from a disease in his eye after waiting months for emergency surgery. Bradley in Tasmania shares that the canteen prices have become prohibitively expensive and he has been denied medicines he was prescribed when outside. Jeffrey, at Queensland’s Woodford Correctional Centre, says the inmates aren’t allowed to keep TV remote controls, despite this not being an issue in any other Queensland prison.

Time and again, folks write in about the expensive cost of phone calls, strict restrictions on visitation, dearth of educational programs and constant, unrelenting boredom.

The treatment by guards comes up repeatedly. In a report issued last February by a former judge of the NSW Court of Appeal, it was found that the Chief Correctional Officer at Dillwynia Correctional Centre humiliated and excluded colleagues who showed kindness to those inside, telling his subordinates: “Don’t f*cking help those crims, they are pieces of sh*t.” It is one of countless examples of staff abuse and mistreatment.

Such a toxic culture in our prisons is not only cruel but also counterintuitive.

A person serves their punishment by being locked up. They are deterred from re-offending because they hate being locked up. Others are deterred for the same reason. They cannot leave, and so the community is protected.

But where is the prospect of rehabilitation?

Rehabilitation, many argue, is the most important principle of sentencing because, if effective, it is the only one that protects the community from all future harm.

Rehabilitation requires reimagining what prisons are for. If we make prisons pleasant—if we treat those inside as equals—they might just end up okay.

Several decades ago, before Australia’s prison population had swelled to today’s record numbers, recidivism was more of a problem in Norway than it was here at home. At that time, according to a report from Justice UK, up to 70 per cent of incarcerated Norwegians were returning to prison within three to five years. Norway’s prisons were a degrading, hostile and dangerous environment. The government took action.

Today it is almost a cliché to refer to Norway’s prisons as the gold standard of the progressive and reimagined correctional institution.

Their facilities look less like prisons than universities, with dorms, classes and libraries. Inmates reside in small cottages that might have 10-12 rooms, a common area and a kitchen. Each room has a door that guards can’t see into, cementing the right to privacy. The guards wear normal clothes and the inmates use real knives and dishes.

The inmates remark that they feel like equals inside. Without the usual barriers between staff and inmates, there is less resistance to authority. Today, Norway’s recidivism rate sits at about 20 per cent.

Karianne Jackson was working for the North Dakota prison system 10 years ago when she visited one of these prisons. She had described prison as a chronic disease that sticks with you after you’ve left and was keen to learn how to attain the seemingly unattainable: an end to the cycle of incarceration.

Jackson returned with ambition. Although she could not reshape the state of North Dakota into Scandinavia, she came to implement several of its ideals.

She scrapped the over 300-page book of regulations and standard operating procedures and designed a rule book “more like the 10 commandments”, where only serious offences that affected other people (like assault and severe threats) drew punishment.

And she allowed people out on field trips, to let them see their daughters’ graduations and to learn some of the skills they’d need in the future, like paying bills and buying groceries.

These changes were not popular among the higher ups in North Dakota corrections; Jackson had to fight to get them in.

“Most people operate prisons not to rehabilitate but rather not to get anyone killed or hurt”, she said, speaking on the Vox podcast episode, ‘How to make prisons more humane’.

“Fear is such a derailer of the goal.”

“What if we’re wrong?”, her superiors asked her. What if someone let out on work release commits a crime?

This fear of the worst is enough to make most authorities stick with the status quo. It is why it so hard for things to change.

Making it happen

Shifting the meaning of prisons from punishment to rehabilitation in Australia will require an enormous act of courage. Mistakes will occur and many in the media will seize on them as proof that ‘soft-on-crime’ policies are endangering society.

As the British journalist Sasha Abramsky writes:

“The politics of opinion-poll populism has encouraged elected and corrections officials to build isolation units, put more prisons on ‘lockdown’ status, abolish grants that allowed prisoners to study toward diplomas and degrees, and generally make life inside as miserable as possible.”

There are fewer than 50 people in Australia serving a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Almost every single person currently incarcerated will be released, the vast majority within three years.

As long as we continue to allow the politics of opinion-poll populism to win the day, we will continue to release them with no job skills, with no support, full of rage.

It is clear this is not our governments’ intent. It is no coincidence that Australia’s prisons are now called ‘correctional institutions’. Our governments have signalled that modern places of confinement are intended to rehabilitate; to correct and not to punish. At least that’s what they say.

Inspired by Norway, by Warden Dennis Luther and by countless others, there is no reason we cannot turn those words into action.

Joseph Friedman is the co-founder and publisher of About Time, Australia’s national prison newspaper. He is a contributing writer for the Journal.