“Wandoo shouldn’t exist at all,” Brian says as we get in his car. “These young men should be in community, full time. When I was on work-release in prison, I didn’t need to come back inside; I’d never have violated. Neither would’ve my peers.”
It’s funny, just as I’m wishing Wandoo on my students, Brian is wishing it away. Progress is relative.
“The only reason these boys aren’t in the community, with their families, is because we as a society are risk-averse,” Brian goes on. “But we’ll never have a risk-free society. There’s liable to be a crime tonight—there’s nothing we can do about it. Risk is built into life. A life ruled by fear is not living. Fear builds prisons.”
He’s right, of course. I let forth a rant about the local papers I’ve been poring over every morning with my coffee.
“There’s basically four topics covered, all fears. Sharks, bushfires, drunken pub brawls, prisoner escapes. OK, I get that last one”—Serco has been garnering bad press of late for a series of escapes during prisoner transport. “But damn, Perth is the cleanest, safest, most chipper place I’ve ever been, so what’s all this anxiety about?”
“Welcome to the Rupert Murdoch press,” Brian grunts.
Ah, yes. I’d forgotten that the media mogul behind Fox News and the New York Post, renowned for peddling exclamation-point hype and passing hysteria off as news, launched his empire here. It’s an empire I hold partly responsible for mass incarceration in my own country. Beginning in the 1980s, the era when President Reagan famously spoke of the criminal as “a human predator”—“nothing in nature is more cruel or more dangerous,” he said—local news became crime-saturated, fear-mongering spectacles, even as crime declined. Between 1993 and 1996 the US murder rate dropped by 20 percent, yet the number of murders reported on ABC, NBC, and CBS rose by 721 percent. Such anxious public rhetoric about the wickedness of the criminal and the vulnerability of the victim shored up America’s increasingly punitive policies.
By the time I reach my hotel, I’m fixated on fear, progress, and Wandoo. And I’m drowning in self-reproach.
The private prison wasn’t evil.
It’s supposed to be. I know the statistics. Here in Oz, all immigration detention centers are private, and Serco’s revenues from such contracts add up to more than $1.8 billion. This, again, mirrors America, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency spending over $1.9 billion annually on custody operations, is creating a network of massive immigration detention centers managed largely by private companies. They’re rapidly transforming these detainees into a labor force—a slave labor force. In 2013 at least sixty thousand immigrants worked in the federal government’s nationwide detention centers, more than worked for any other single employer in the country. Paying these detainees thirteen cents an hour, sometimes merely in candy bars, saves at least $40 million a year.
I open my laptop and browse Serco’s Web site. It calls itself an “international service company” with a nifty catchall motto, Bringing Service to Life. With 100,000 staff worldwide and a $10 billion portfolio, it has security, defense, health, and transport contracts in some thirty countries. I scroll down to the Ethos section, which speaks in lofty terms about allowing staff responsibility and the opportunity to make a real difference for their clients. Flipping through the company’s annual report, with its generic corporate-speak and photos of jaunty staff retreats, one could altogether overlook the fact that Serco deals in prisons.
Further research bolsters my confusion. Serco facilities are less expensive to run, and unlike government prisons, Serco’s contracts involve recidivism-based measures. The cost-effectiveness bit doesn’t surprise me; it’s a selling point of privatization. But whereas American private prisons are often accused of saving via less training, substandard services, and lower staff salaries and benefits, this hardly seems the culture I’d witnessed at Wandoo. Serco’s London-based think-tank arm presents a series of seemingly attractive arguments. Treating people in prison more humanely ultimately costs less, and private prisons are more accountable than government-run prisons because contracts specify financial penalties for not meeting standards of health and educational services. Private prisons are cheaper, Serco claims, because of sound management, efficient staff levels, and flexible practices.
———
But does it take a private company to run a humane prison? I shudder at that oxymoronic phrase as it emerges from my mouth days later, when Brian takes me to Boronia Pre-release Centre. It’s home to eighty-two women within five years of release. As in the United States, women are Australia’s fastest-rising group of prisoners, the bulk of them serving time for drug and property offenses.
I meet Brian in his office at Curtin University. He gives me a tour of the Centre for Aboriginal Studies and a crash course in Aboriginal art, its intricate dots, loops, and circles serving as codes for complex narratives, known as yarning. We stroll from the leafy campus walkway past cheery students eating kale salad and organic sandwiches at the cafeteria, to a brick building with a small sign and—wait, am I still on campus or is this prison? There’s no barbed wire and no metal detector. No uniforms, no indications of rank, no loudspeaker systems blasting eardrums with “Brown to the mailroom, stat!” The prison and the college are neighbors, and it’s near impossible to tell where one begins and the other ends.
A woman wearing a bloodred pantsuit is kissing her son goodbye and sending him off in a taxi. Is she a prisoner or a college student? The sunny outdoor deck, where staff and visitors snack on fruit platters and tiramisu, is adorned with bright flower pots and charming lampposts and surrounded by manicured lawns. A vegetable garden, education and health center, computer lab, and copies of a colorful newsletter, The Grapevine, round out our tour.
“The idea is to simulate real life as much as possible,” Brian explains. “And to foster agency and responsibility, not passivity.” Like Wandoo, Boronia is an open space in which the women work in the morning and go to classes during the afternoon.
“Meaningful work,” the powerhouse of a superintendent explains. “We are not in the business of offering slave labor. We want supportive employers. As soon as an employer asks me, ‘What’s she in for?’ I know they’re not for us.”
When the women go on home leave to visit their families, they’re given two directives: don’t access the Internet and don’t get pregnant. Housing is designed such that every few weeks the prisoners’ children can spend a night at the facility, and a full-fledged parenting program ensures that it’s quality time, not time spent parked before the TV.
I pick up a bottle of brand-name moisturizer in the well-stocked supermarket, where a giant food pyramid hangs on the wall and the shelves are color-coded according to nutritional content. Green means healthy and red not so healthy, thus more expensive. The women get prepaid credit cards and shop at their will, but they must buy within the healthy pyramid or their money runs out in a snap.
“You want to buy three tubs of margarine?” explains the superintendent. “Go ahead. But not on my money!”
The “catering coordinator” tells us, in his French accent, that he oversees menus and cooking classes for the women, many of whom have large families and too often lean on McDonald’s to feed them.
“Boronia is all about breaking down the institutionalized mentality of our women. They need to think for themselves,” the superintendent concludes. “This is what prison does to you: You line up and hold your food tray and there’s food. You leave your clothes out and they’re washed. You lose your basic life skills. Here, if you don’t cook you don’t eat. This whole way of thinking is a shock at first, but it’s critical.”
What she’s describing is deinstitutionalization at its best. But then again, what if institutionalization never had to happen in the first place? What if the whole of one’s corrections experience could be spent this way, not simply the last lap? And could the model be replicated in higher-security prisons?
“Of course,” de
clares the superintendent. “It all comes down to size and management. Max is just a fence. I spent fifteen years running a max.”
“It didn’t shatter your optimism?”
“No, it showed me that it’s all wrong—this approach doesn’t work. Boronia is definitely not representative of Australia, but it’s a very big, very small step in the right direction, see? Baby steps. It takes a while to turn the Queen Mary around.”
———
The days march on, stubborn in their splendor: another perfect day in perfect Perth. The sun always seems to be just-right bright in the cloudless blue sky; one night I spend an hour trying to photograph the moon because no one, I’m sure, will believe it hung so gaudily close. What would it do to a person, to live in this genetically modified “cool city,” where the economic boom of the last decade manifests itself not in big-and-bling but eco-fabulous? I’m worlds away from where this prison journey started, from the ur-townships of Pollsmoor and the Uzis of Uganda. This is the stultifyingly sunny land of Oz.
I say as much, one evening, to my new friend Craig. He’s a reporter for the Indigenous News Network and also moonlights as a comedian. We’d met via Facebook through various connections, and he’s fast becoming my favorite companion because he, like me, loves to poke holes in the perfect-Perth facade. His favorite topic to skewer, with incisive hilarity, is Australian racism.
“Because that’s what’s lurking beneath all the sunshine in sunny Perth,” Craig says.
It’s also on full display at the imperial-looking Fremantle Prison, which I visit one afternoon. Built in the 1850s by convict laborers, modeled after England’s Pentonville Prison—itself mirroring American penitentiaries—Fremantle was the region’s biggest colonial prison until it closed in 1991 and became a museum.
“Doing Time Tours” are advertised on the way in; I bypass them and go solo, entranced for hours by a gallery of prison murals and paintings. They’re mostly Aboriginal art, because that’s who has long filled the prisons here. For Aboriginal populations, Australia averages five times the incarceration rate even of black South Africans at the height of apartheid. Apartheid, I learn, was actually modeled after Australia’s 1905 Aborigines Act, which limited movement, governed sex, set curfews, and more. In 1841 nearby Rottnest Island became the legal prison for Aboriginal men, and by 1952 they represented up to 40 percent of the nation’s prison population. Same old story: another minority population ghettoized, stigmatized, incarcerated en masse; another labor force manufactured by way of prisons, assigned to fill cells and then further criminalized by a system that remains stacked against them. I can feel the rage welling up within me.
“For Convicts Big and Small” reads the sign at the gift shop. Aprons, mugs, and wine racks are for sale, all featuring cute “jailbird” designs. Care to purchase an adorable little convict magnet? asks a shopkeeper.
This marriage of convict and commerce is even more disturbing to me than the prison gift shops in Thailand, because it epitomizes the rosy marketing of a penal-colony past. I’d grappled with it as soon as I arrived, when I spent a weekend in Sydney. Following the lead of a tourism brochure entitled “Convicts, Criminals and Culture,” I’d trekked around the city visiting monuments and museums, absorbing the idea of a whole country founded on second chances. I did not have a “convict brekkie” at the Hyde Park Barracks Museum, or make my meal “truly memorable by dining in the former solitary confinement room,” as the brochure beckoned. But I did visit the fascinating museum, a former prison for the transported. Until 1822, the narrative goes, all lived peacefully in “the land of convicts and kangaroos.” But then a visiting British commissioner balked. They’re living too peacefully, he decreed, accusing the local leader, Governor Macquarie, of that familiar political sin of being soft on crime, and demanding harsh conditions. No more pardons or parole for these criminals. Give them chain gangs, hard labor, and draconian discipline.
Touring the museum meant confronting this discipline. The “treadmill” was a terrible torture device, and floggings were administered for infractions as minor as insolence.
As I watched, tittering children ran about, hooting and hollering at the interactive exhibit, trying on “convict clothes,” playing with cute little rats serving as cartoon guideposts. In the cramped chamber where prisoners slept, rows of hammocks evoked slave ships—and three little girls were joyfully swinging across them. It felt like prison-as-Disneyland. This place of sadness and suffering ought to have the solemnity of a concentration camp.
But wait, you say. The people here were hardly pitiable victims—they were “convicts.” So explained the tourist beside me to his son, puzzled by the whips and chains: “These were very bad criminals and this was what they deserved, honey.” It’s the same thing we say today: These very bad people are getting what they deserve, behind bars.
But who are these “bad people,” really?
The nefarious “convicts” of Oz were primarily poor people who, perhaps, stole a loaf of bread. By the eighteenth century, a series of such minor crimes could earn one the sentence of banishment—vanishment, as it’s also aptly called. Eighty-three percent of Australian “convicts,” their mean age a mere twenty-six, were guilty of crimes against property. They were overwhelmingly literate and skilled workers, a labor market, not a criminal class. But call them convicts and it’s suddenly easy to dismiss, to justify, their enslavement and their suffering. This is still true. Call someone a “criminal” or “ex-con” or “offender” and you have, in one fell swoop, reduced them to their worst act and vindicated yourself for tolerating their lynching. You’ve also lumped all criminal acts, from marijuana smoking to mass murder, into one catchall category, though even the worst categories of crimes can be so broad as to be meaningless. “Sex offender” might denote the vile act of rape or the deplorable yet quite different act of brushing up against a woman inappropriately in a club. “Violent crime” can mean murder or intimidation.
Terms like “convict” and “offender” are scarlet letters, expediently trapping people in their worst selves forever. Such shameful stigmas are why language, when it comes to crime and punishment, deeply matters. Australia has only in the last decade or so begun to shed its shame over its early settlers. It was once a disgrace to find a “convict” in one’s family tree, but now it’s considered a badge of honor; eleven historic “convict”-related sites were recently added to the World Heritage list here. How could it be otherwise? One in ten Aussies is said to have a “convict” ancestor. This is a nation of the formerly incarcerated. They can’t beat it, so they’d better commodify it.
This is yet another way in which Oz is the United States’s far-flung twin. At the beginning of the millennium, 5.6 million Americans had served time. By age twenty-three, at least a third of them have been arrested; up to 100 million Americans have a criminal record, and in some major cities, 80 percent of young African-American men have one. What is this but the updated version of a penal colony, where an entire population sports the label which our country so adroitly, so abundantly manufactures?
———
The day of my third and final prison visit arrives, and the name intrigues. Acacia. It could be a writer’s retreat, but it’s a Serco-run prison, soon to be the largest in Australia and, with 1,387 men, sizable even by American standards. It’s the last prison on my agenda here, and the dry, dusty drive there brings Brian and me through Swan Valley, where tourists indulge in wine-tasting tours, and, via memory lane, to Thailand, Uganda, Brazil—another road to hell paved in divine vistas. Lined with warning signs, too. Beware the bushfires! The color-coded fire-hazard rating system here makes me think of post-9/11 America, when orange and red terrorist “threat levels” appeared on every news screen, ensuring that our anxiety never abated.
We take a turn into Warloo Farm, where sheep roam in fields of gold. And then into barbed wire, low tin roofs, and cement blocks. Compared to the progressive Serco prisons I’ve visited up till now, Acacia has the feel o
f a standard prison; it actually strikes me as a more parched-looking version of Otisville, back home. At the Visitors’ Center, with its bolted tables and phone booths, broom-wielding prisoners wear green uniforms. There is a caged-in gym, and cell blocks made from zinc and concrete, including the block known as “Bronx”—there’s a “Queens” and “Brooklyn,” too—where dozens of tattooed men smoke cigarettes and do push-ups in their cells. I visit behind-bars factories with full-on assembly lines, where hundreds of men are paid up to nine dollars a day to build bedframes, fireplaces, or car parts. In the chicken farm and greenhouse, I wave off the smell of manure, disinfect my shoes, and inspect pristine rows of spinach and arugula. Everything here is logged, monetized, and efficiently organized around skills training, the earning of trade certificates, and direct channels to corporations. My mind seesaws as I try to appraise the scene. Certainly productive, paid work and job training are better than idle, wasted time. But Acacia is also the prison industrial complex in its most intense incarnation. Right before my eyes is evidence of a prison turned into a mass money-making enterprise.
Around my waist I wear a “distress button,” presented by the German guard who checked me in and explained that if I felt in danger, I should simply press it and help would arrive at once. This was new to me. So are the vivid streaks of progressive thinking here. It’s evidenced by the Aboriginal art everywhere: serpents, lizards, and moons painted by incarcerated men and volunteering Curtin University students. Admittedly, it’s a bit like mowing down the trees to build mansions and then naming suburban streets after the razed greenery, but I appreciate the gesture nonetheless. And the self-care units that mimic apartment or dorm living, with kitchens and common areas shared by several “pod-dies”—the only thing that screams prison in these units are dense iron doors on the bedrooms, locked every evening. On the way into the self-care units are computerized check-ins. Via thumbprint, men can receive messages, check their accounts, and coordinate their program schedules.
Incarceration Nations Page 20
