This post is part of the exhibition Dreams Nursed In Darkness at Wollongong Art Gallery from 8 September 2024.
Prisons fail everyone
We know that prison doesn’t work
When I was first invited to be in this exhibition it was because I was an artist who had been one of a large group of people actively involved in the prison reform movement that grew up in 1970s Sydney.
It was focused around two groups, Women Behind Bars and the Prisoners Action Group. The membership of the groups overlapped and consisted of prisoners and former prisoners, activists, lawyers, journalist and academics, all people who had some awareness of the corrupt state of the prison system, its dysfunction and its social destructiveness.
My first proposal was to produce a newspaper which revisited this history and also outlined the problems with the prison system but it soon became clear that this was impossible, not least because it required several years of research to treat it properly.
The problem I faced was a personal one – my involvement in the anti prison movement had been a traumatic period of my life that I was not keen to revisit, showing how prisons can be disastrous for anyone involved in them – but also a practical problem because I did not feel that I could provide a work that in any aestheticised the ugly reality, made the indigestible digestible.
I came to a very difficult decision about this exhibition. As much as I admire the curators and their work, and the work of other artists I found it impossible in all conscience to produce work that in any way normalised the existence of prisons. Instead I have produced some posters and this zine linking to online resources that present the arguments for necessary radical reform that we fought for in the 1970s and that still hold true.
It is intended to be an educational resource rather than an aesthetic object and it is aimed at people who have never thought much about prisons, pointing to a radically different approach which is fully supported by research and experience in the face of the current system which is a clear failure, as shown by its recidivism rates if nothing else.
Prisons are the crime
The existence of prisons is an entrenched systemic error, social institutions that are worse than the problems they claim to solve and in fact can be seen to be a major contributor to that problem.
The majority of people in prison are disadvantaged in ways that led them to crime and that are made worse by incarceration, leaving them even less capable of surviving in mainstream society than they were when they were first imprisoned. This creates lasting damage to physical and mental health that also damages the lives of their families.
This does not decrease crime, it increases it.
According to the 2022 census approximately 41,000 people are in prison in Australia.
A quick look at who they are points to the underlying social causes:
• they are male – 93% of the adult prison population are male, compared with 50% of the general adult population
• they are aboriginal – 32% of the adult prison population were First Nations people, compared with 3.8% of the general adult population
• they are young – 63% of the adult prison population were aged 18–39, compared with 30% of the general adult population
• they are unhealthy – 52% report chronic conditions (asthma, arthritis, back problems, cancer, cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, diabetes, pulmonary disease and osteoporosis)
• they have mental health problems – 51% report a previous diagnosis of a mental health disorder, including drug and alcohol abuse.
• they were unemployed – 46% reported they were unemployed during the 30 days before prison compared with 3.7% of the general adult population
• they are poorly educated – 66% had an education level of year 10 or below compared with 16% of the general population (aged 15–74).
• they are stressed – every aspect of the prison system and its consequences is stressful
• but above all, they have been there before and are now trapped in a system they cannot escape – 68% have been in prison before and 41% within the previous 12 months
This is a group of people whose disadvantages – social, medical and psychological – have created a direct pathway to prison. The community supports and funds prisons because it expects them to somehow reduce crime and make the community safer yet clearly prisons fail to do this as shown by the recidivism rate.
Change is desperately necessary both for society as a whole and for those imprisoned.
Other countries recognise similar problems and there is now a world wide push towards prison reform and a more sustainable approach.
And the United Nations is also now arguing against prisons
But the mainstream media loves crime
Crime sells newspapers, grabs viewers. Law and order has been an issue from the beginning of the European invasion of Australia and a law and order beatup remains a lazy way for a hate driven media to attack politicians regardless of the truth. They will particularly attack attempts to reform the prison system and programs to rehabilitate prisoners. The media has so much invested in fake law and order campaigns they are now one of the gretest obstacles worldwide to prison reform.
Law and order panics have been around ever since the European invasion of Australia
so what are the alternatives to prison?
That is the wrong question!
The simple rarely stated truth is that beyond a very small number of violent and dangerous prisoners, most people in jail simply should not be there.
The Norwegian system has low recidivism rates
The justice system was once linked to social services but with the growth of neoliberalism it is now simply another business model. As a result Australia has one of the highest rates of prisoners held in private facilities in the world, although the many problems mean this privatisation is beginning to be reversed. But whether private or public, the prison system needs illegality and manufactures it both in the wider society and within the prisons. This means that social measures to reduce crime, like poverty alleviation programs or housing for the homeless or increased mental health services are ignored or even opposed because they would reduce the prison population in a system that needs prisoners because it has taken on a life of its own.
Privatisation has been an expensive failure
Unfortunately the so called “alternative” perpetuate the same punitive thinking despite its history of failure. Home, community and surveillance based systems may be more tolerable for those who have been sentenced but their ease may in fact lead to an increase of imprisonment rather than a decrease.
Alternatives have been long discussed
The real solutions lie in redefining crime. Imprisonment is not a solution to the petty crime marginalised people need in order to survive the crimes against them like lack of public housing and lack of adequate mental health services. There is no reason any victimless crime like drug possession or addiction should result in prison, it’s a medical problem and should be treated as one. The same applies to public order crimes that grow out of poverty, they are known to decrease when poverty decreases. As in health, prevention is better than cure and reducing the rate of imprisonment frees up money for the far more effective social programs.
It is critical to get away from the neoliberal mentality that treats everything as business
The UK Centre For Crime and Justice Studies listed the following criteria for developing real alternatives to imprisonment:
• Does the proposed alternative target individual, institutional or systemic level problems? What assumptions are made about the underlying problem?
• Does the proposed alternative reduce the use of punishment, surveillance and control, or will it expand, entrench or normalise carceral power?
• Which groups of people are most and least likely to be targeted by the initiative?
• Does the alternative challenge or reinforce patterns of inequality and discrimination?
• Is the alternative approach less harmful than what it proposes to replace or could it create more harm?
• Returning to Foucault (1976), his fundamental questions remain unanswered. Ultimately the problem is not simply to imagine ‘a form of punishment that would be more gentle, acceptable or efficient’ but rather, whether we can ‘conceptualise a society in which power has no need for illegalities’. This question invites us to consider how to re-organise society in fundamentally different ways to move away from the current ‘economy of illegalities’. Foucault challenges us to contest the normalisation of carceral logics – within and beyond the prison – and to think about social problems differently. This task requires a set of deliberations and actions that arguably cannot take place within the confines of neo-liberal market logics.
The mistreatment of aboriginal kids is a particular problem
In Australia the alarming level of imprisonment of Aboriginal youth has led to some thoughtful research into the use of citizen juries that has shown that public attitudes are far more sophisticated than the attitudes promoted by the hate media.
The Lowitja Institute’s research is a basis for a complete rethink
The Lowitja Institute’s Views on Alternatives to Imprisonment: A Citizens Jury Approach reports:
“An important obstacle to a reform agenda in the criminal justice area is public opinion. The public are often perceived to hold punitive attitudes towards offenders, a situation often exploited by politicians to perpetuate punitive penal policies at the expense of developing decarceration initiatives. However, alternatives to public opinion surveys/polls are needed. Citizens Juries offer an alternative method to assess the public’s views, views that are critically informed and thus better aid policy development.”
It is an approach that applies equally beyond aboriginal youth. It’s time to rethink our approach to crime. While prison may seem like the obvious solution to anti-social behaviour, it is the least effective approach to making the community safer.
and a personal note about prisons
My interest in prison reform began after being arrested in various political actions but my experiences soon completely changed my attitude to how our society operates and also how we all create meaning in our lives, whichever form of imprisonment we find ourselves in.
The British sociologist Stanley Cohen was particularly influential for me. His two books with Laurie Taylor Psychological Survival: the Experience of Long Term Imprisonment and Escape attempts: the theory and practice of resistance in everyday life transformed my thinking about the reasons we make art and the potential for making it in other ways.
A few years ago I discovered some other artists thinking in similar ways, Temporary Services whose book Prisoners Inventions documented the creativity within the constraints of prison. I will upload my interview with Mark Fisher of Temporary Services soon.
And more recently my discovery, far too late, of James C. Scott has been a joy. His concept of “hidden resistance” relates directly to the approach I have taken ever since the 1970s of making art that as much as possible is indistinguishable from the objects of daily life and yet completely unlike them. It is exactly the way to survive in any prison.
Resistance is a daily thing made of small acts