There's always another way

Today's newspaper is tomorrow's fish wrapping. It's what they say, generally, to prove how quickly the news goes stale, as fresh happenings jostle for headlines. Yet over here, in Australia, we've just been shown a television video clip of an incident that occurred in 2001, and it's made the headlines.

It shows three men in an otherwise deserted prison compound using a tennis net to scramble over the walls and escape - two of them; the third makes a futile attempt, then gives up. The guards, we are told, were watching a game of cricket on television. The two escapees were recaptured some time later, we are also informed and one of them, allegedly, committed suicide.

This has irked the wrath of prison worker unions and others who wonder why such sensitive video was selected for national disclosure at this period in time. Some are alleging it's a political manoeuvre, a stunt, to ease things towards the privatisation of some prisons. And this videotape helps make a good case, they feel. Government... private& whatever. A jail is still a jail. Prisoners are locked up, confined, ostracised from society for crimes they may (or may not) have committed.

There have been incidents of wrongful imprisonment, with governments issuing the token apology, which is staggering, but that's a whole other article and cannot be fitted in here. Travelling as I am down this train of thought, I'm for the moment in the company of those who've been proved guilty and locked up.

What then? Too often we've read of or seen pictures of overcrowded cells and prison courtyards swarming with inmates in blue. Okay, so crime is rampant, we can figure, and criminals have to pay. So what's the next step: Punishment, for sure. Expose them to the harshness of prison life. Put them side by side with others whose crimes may be even more monstrous.

My curiosity lies here: How much correctional work actually takes place in prison, and if it does, what is the success rate? For that should be at the forefront of every such correctional institution. To make, or attempt to make, even the most hardened of criminals, something of a better man. Do people become better men by living roughly and viciously beside each other, day after day, in cramped confined spaces, the nauseating overpowering stench of the toilet not far away?

Sure, they get to exercise a bit; they are taught social skills - roadbuilding, laundering, cooking, baking. But these are all exercises pertaining to the physical. What about that other vital aspect of man: the mind. How is the mind made better, reconditioned, made ready for re-entry into society? This is not an article that sets out to make a plea for the criminal to be given five-star comfort. This is only an exercise in wonderment: What can a prison do to strengthen the mind of the prisoner even as it helps teach them physical skills?

Somehow, this mass grouping of raw criminal energy in one cell for even eight or ten hours a day, doesn't quite square with me. At the end of each day, after more new skills of laundering and baking have been imbibed, the prisoner walks back into the familiar world of dark proximity with minds, perhaps, even darker than his.

I think that's an aspect jails need to address. For as we've always known, it's a tri-une that makes a man, not just the flesh and bone that we see on the surface.

A man is these three: body, mind and spirit. It is the latter two that jails need to, somehow, look at finding ways to strengthen. Only then will they - the jails - be able to lay claim that they function as true correctional institutions. How is that possible, logistically? The answer is not to be found here, sadly. But to quote the lyric of one recent Eurovision song: There must be another way.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney.