PRISONERS OF POLITICS

The run-up to the NSW elections has seen a surge in law-and-order rhetoric.
But, say experts, locking up more people for longer does not cut rime - it
merely condemns society to greater spending on jails and some inmates to an
early death. BEN HILLS reports.

DREW Shipton's early release from jail came out of the blue one cold July
morning last year when someone came up to him as he was walking in a yard
at Silverwater Prison and slid a long, thin blade into his stomach.

The knife, probably one of a dozen home-made weapons discovered during a
subsequent search of the huge new jail, sliced upwards through his abdomen
and penetrated Shipton's aorta, the main artery from the heart. He fell to
his knees gasping "I've been stabbed - I'm dying" and bled to death before
the ambulance arrived.

A tough, fit man of 39 who kept himself in nick by working out, Shipton had
served all but six weeks of an eight-year sentence for armed robbery, and
had told his mother he was looking forward to completing a university
course that would qualify him for a regular job as a physical fitness
instructor when he was released. Instead of walking out with a diploma he
was carried out in a body bag.

Ironically, his mother, Frances Killion, is a professor of sociology and
welfare studies at the University of Central Queensland in Rockhampton who
has studied jails in Europe and the United States as a Churchill Fellow and
is an official prison visitor. She is under no illusions about how her son
came to be in jail: he was "no angel".

Shipton, who was unemployed and with a heroin habit to support, had robbed
a hotel in Edgecliff while armed with an imitation shotgun, and abducted a
patron. He was caught after a Keystone Kops episode in which he hailed a
taxi to make his getaway, fell asleep, and was driven to a police station
by the driver, who had spotted the gun.

"I freely admit that he has not done the right thing," says Killion. "But
he wasn't sentenced to death. Prison is supposed to rehabilitate people,
not kill them - the prison authorities have clearly failed in their duty of
care."

Killion has been pushing for an inquiry into the murky circumstances
surrounding her son's murder. Only the day before, he had been taken off a
"protection" regime which he had requested, fearing reprisals for giving
evidence to the Independent Commission Against Corruption about a corrupt
prison employee. There are also suggestions he was involved in a drug
supply network.

But she - along with a loose coalition of criminologists and civil
liberties and prisoner advocacy groups around Australia - has also taken on
the authorities over the broader issue of chronic prison overcrowding, the
consequence of a decade of "get tough on crime" rhetoric, which she
believes has fostered a pressure-cooker culture of drug use, violence and
death in prisons.

Drew Shipton was one of the casualties, one of almost 200 people who have
died and thousands more who have been bashed or raped in NSW prisons in the
past decade. Some, like the heroin overlord George Savvas, who hanged
himself in Cessnock Jail in May 1997, will be little mourned; others, such
as 18-year-old Jamie Partlic, who was stomped into quadriplegia at Long Bay
in 1987 while serving four days for non-payment of parking fines, spark
community outrage.

The violence has increased as the number of people in prison has doubled in
the past 13 years to its current near-record level of about 7,000. And now
we are heading into another election with the two main parties vying to
outbid each other on promises to crack down on crime by putting more and
more people in prison for longer and longer, and One Nation baying from the
sidelines for the death penalty.

Already, despite a massive building program (the criminal justice system,
including prisons, police and the courts, is now the third biggest item on
the State budget, after health and education) there are simply not enough
beds for them all - two and three mutinous prisoners are crammed into cells
designed for one, and mouldering Victorian relics such as Parramatta Jail
are being reopened to accommodate the human overflow.

In the past 10 years, there have been 199 deaths in NSW prisons, and if the
toll so far this year is maintained (16 in the past six months) 1998-1999
will be the bloodiest year on record. Almost half the deaths are suicides,
and at least 10 prisoners have been murdered in the past five years, as
many as in the previous 15 years.

Jim Mellor, an American prison researcher working with the Uniya Social
Justice Centre, has calculated that, adjusted for population, NSW has 10
times as many suicides and other violent deaths as the notorious US prison
system. "Those of us who work in the area," he says, "can't help but
sometimes wonder if deaths in custody are no more than the accepted
necessary casualties of a war waged over partisan political advantage and
ideology."

And that's not to mention the most fundamental flaw in the logic that is
stretching our prison system to breakdown point - that locking up more
people equals less crime. It does not and never has, says every expert
interviewed for this article - not in NSW nor anywhere else in the world.

Throughout the decade of "getting tough", when the prison population
doubled, crime in NSW has continued its inexorable climb in both real and
population-adjusted terms, under the Coalition and the Labor Government
that succeeded it four years ago. Between 1987 and 1997 (the most recent
year for which there are figures) there was a 50per cent increase in crimes
recorded by the police.

This seems to support the view expressed in a 1990 white paper for the
Thatcher Government in Britain that prison, rather than reducing crime, is
merely "an expensive way of making bad people worse". Worse, and sometimes
dead.

FOR anyone who has spent time behind the grim bars and bluestone
battlements of any of Australia's prisons - many little changed in
architecture or attitude since the middle of last century - walking into
the new Metropolitan Remand and Reception Centre at Silverwater is an
eye-opener.

Australia's largest prison, built to house 900 people, is a low-rise
complex of steel and concrete, set among lawns and gum trees and surrounded
by high fences and coils of razor wire. It resembles a budget-price motel
run by someone with a fixation on security - visitors need to book in a day
in advance, produce photo identification, and submit to having a digital
photograph taken and their fingerprints scanned by little gadgets set into
the reception desks.

If it were a motel, it has to be said, it would be the dream of any
operator in the real world outside. The occupancy rate never drops below
95per cent, and sometimes exceeds 100per cent. The cost, reimbursed by the
Government, for accommodating each maximum security guest is $176.92 a day.

Silverwater's facilities are envied by old-timers who remember the
antiquated and claustrophobic older sections of Long Bay, Bathurst or
Goulburn jails - many prisoners have cells to themselves, the cells have
their own bathrooms, and there are (in theory, at least) greater
opportunities for prisoners to work, to learn a skill or to get an education.

The improvements have come at a price. The annual budget for operating
prisons in NSW has grown to $400million, as much as we spend on, say,
protecting the environment. In the past three years alone $110million has
been spent building and upgrading prisons - and another $42million has been
committed to a new wing to house 100 at the John Morony Correctional Centre
at Windsor, on Sydney's outskirts, and an ultra-high-security "prison
within a prison" at Goulburn.

But appearances are deceptive - talk to any prisoner, and you will get a
much grimmer picture of life on the inside of our new-look prisons. Almost
from the day it opened 18 months ago, Silverwater has been crammed to
capacity, with people sleeping on temporary beds on the floors, and
sometimes "warehoused" in security buses until other prisoners can be
bailed to make room.

In the first week of the new year, Silverwater, for a change, had a few
spare beds, but three of the 18 other prisons in NSW - the women's prison
at Mulawa, the minimum security section at Goulburn, and Berrima prison
farm - had more prisoners than beds. Overcrowding is expected to
deteriorate rapidly as the courts resume after the holidays and the
election approaches.

Under such conditions grievances fester. Overtime restrictions mean that
Silverwater is "locked down" one day a week, and even on "normal" days
prisoners are locked in their cells from 3.30pm to 8.30am, eating their
three detested airline-style chill-and-heat meals in seven hours. Justice
Action, a prisoners' rights group, says poverty is another cause of
conflict - prisoners who work are paid $9 to $12 a week, and people have
been stabbed or bashed for as little as a pair of shoes.

In the past 18 months, 12 of the 45 deaths in NSW jails have occurred at
Silverwater - including two in one week last month - and any number of
serious assaults. "The other day," says MIN 102327 Grahame Rogers, the
prisoner we have come to visit, "I saw a guy who had his throat cut from
here to here [he draws his finger from under his right ear to his Adam's
apple] in a fight over a cigarette paper. You can get killed for a pouch of
tobacco."

Rogers is a "pod boss", the unofficial leader of a wing of 24 prisoners,
who has spent 16 of his 46 years in NSW prisons, including a stint in the
notorious "tiger cage" at Goulburn jail, where he was incarcerated for his
own safety after he was falsely reported to have informed to the National
Crime Authority on a drug ring. He survived a murder attempt after someone
plunged a syringe containing a lethal overdose of heroin into him.

A chunky man who works out in the gym, Rogers is dressed in shorts and a
green sloppy joe - unlike many of the prisoners chatting with friends and
relatives in the visitors' room, who are forced to wear "drug-proof" white
canvas coveralls with no pockets and a zip up the back. This (along with
banning oranges and sugar from prisons to prevent home-brewing) was an
innovation introduced by Michael Yabsley, a hard-line prisons minister in
the Greiner Government, who is credited with having started the
law-and-order auction.

The most talked-about killing in Silverwater, says Rogers, was not Drew
Shipton's stabbing, but a shocking case last year when Van Hung Tran, the
so-called Lovers' Lane murderer who raped and stabbed to death a
17-year-old girl in 1990, was himself hacked to death with large
cloth-cutting scissors in the prison tailor's shop.

According to John Doyle, chairman of the prison officers' branch of the
Public Service Association, three members of a Vietnamese gang held warders
and about 40 prisoners at bay while Tran was killed by more than 50 stab
wounds from his head to his testicles as they watched. The killers then
calmly put down their weapons and surrendered.

The horrific murder highlighted what Doyle says is a trend inside prisons
in recent years towards ethnically based gangs controlling drugs, standover
rings and other rackets. As well as Vietnamese, there are Lebanese, Pacific
Islander and Aboriginal gangs - Kooris are so feared in some prisons that
at Goulburn jail they are segregated from other prisoners.

Rogers, who is awaiting the result of a judicial review of his conviction
for two armed robberies for which he says he was framed, is appalled at the
attitude of the new breed of criminals coming into the system. "Before
there was a hierarchy and we [prisoners] had some control," he says. "But
now the place is full of lunatics, ruffians and riff-raff who have no
respect."

THE statistics speak for themselves. The total number of assaults has
increased over the past four years - every week, 20 prisoners and officers
are assaulted in NSW prisons.

A decade and $100 million after the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths
in Custody, suicide - by black prisoners and white - has also reached
near-record levels, with 13 deaths last year, more than in the two previous
years together. A 1997 survey by the Corrections Health Service found that
more than half of female prisoners and more than a third of males had
contemplated suicide.

One of the two deaths at Silverwater in January involved a Vietnam veteran
who hanged himself, leaving a moving note in which he apologised to the
prison officers who would have to deal with his body, but wrote that "you
are soldiers and you have your job to do".

The other death was put down to a drug overdose, which is becoming
increasingly common in prisons, with the ready availability of heroin for
as little as $50 per "cap", amphetamines, prescription drugs such as
Rohypnol and methadone, and what Corrective Services calls GVM (green
vegetable matter, jail jargon for suspected marijuana).

The extent of drug use is hardly surprising considering that (according to
an Australian Medical Association survey) an extraordinary 60per cent of
prisoners have a "drug problem related to their incarceration" which rises
to 83per cent if alcohol is included. An enormous amount of crime is
apparently committed while people are drunk or stoned or trying to get
money for their habit.

Corrective Services says it is trying to stem the tide by staging random
raids and using electronic sniffer devices on prison visitors, whom it
blames for smuggling in drugs - last year more than 150 people were caught.
But Brett Collins of Justice Action says there is widespread suspicion that
prison officers are also involved in supplying drugs, both for the money
and because "it gives them a means of controlling the jail".

FROM her cramped and cluttered office in an anonymous high-rise near
Sydney's Chinatown, Kerry Mumford, Corrective Services' long-serving
spokeswoman, downplays the violence. If you adjust the figures for the
booming prison population, serious assaults, escapes and deaths (though not
murders) are all down - though she concedes a statistician might find fault
with her arithmetic.

She also claims - though because of its illegal nature this can only be a
guess - that the service is tackling the drugs problem in jails. "We can
get them clean," Mumford says. "We hope to send them out slightly less
damaged than when they came in. But we can't be responsible for them after
they are released. We had one guy who headed straight for the pub, drank 68
bourbon and Cokes and choked to death on his own vomit."

Responding to the concerns of people such as Collins, Mellor and Professor
Tony Vinson, a former head of Corrective Services, about prison violence,
she says: "Dear old Tony. I love him dearly, but he's been out of it for 20
years and everything looks so much worse to him now. When he was in charge
we had half the inmates and twice the number of escapes - the jails were
burning down and people were being murdered right, left and centre."

Certainly no-one is claiming the situation is as bad as in 1974 - it
wouldn't want to be. That was the year of Australia's worst prison riots,
when Bathurst jail was burned almost to the ground and 12 prisoners were
shot - a royal commission subsequently exposed a shameful culture of
brutality, deprivation and Dickensian conditions that NSW has been trying
to live down ever since.

Sitting at his desk beneath a photograph of Bathurst burning, Brett Collins
says: "I don't get the feeling there is going to be another major
conflagration like that ... there is more a simmering resentment, a sense
of hopelessness. Morale is at rock bottom. Since there is no hope of
remission now [with the new 'truth in sentencing' regime] all incentive for
people to rehabilitate themselves has been removed."

The reason our jails are overflowing is obvious to anyone who glances at
the inexorable arithmetic of the criminal justice system over the past decade.

If a criminal is caught, the odds of him getting bail have fallen, and the
odds of him getting convicted and getting jailed have risen considerably.
Admittedly that is still a big "if", since crime clean-up rates have
actually been falling under the new-broom regime of Police Commissioner
Peter Ryan - only one armed robber in seven is caught, and only one car
thief or housebreaker in 20, according to the latest figures.

But contrary to the impression given by talkback radio hosts and tabloid
newspaper commentators, judges and magistrates have not become "softer" on
criminals during the 1990s - the opposite, in fact. An analysis by the NSW
Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research found that for every category of
crime, a prison sentence was now more likely - for instance, in 1990 only
27 people out of 100 convicted of assault could expect to go to prison, but
by 1997 that had increased to 49.

Similarly, prison sentences, particularly those handed down by the higher
courts, are considerably longer now than at the beginning of the decade -
and are served in full. The average sentence for murder has increased from
11 to 12 years, for assault from 19 to 21 months, for heroin dealing from
29 to 33 months.

NSW now imprisons about 107 people in every 100,000 - more of its
population than any country in Europe except Britain, and almost twice as
many as in Scandinavia. Russia and the United States lead the world
imprisonment tables, locking up six times as many of their citizens, but
with diametrically different results. While Russia descends into anarchy,
many US cities are celebrating their lowest crime figures in a generation -
the result, say criminologists, of changing demographics and economic
prosperity.

The Premier, Bob Carr, has applauded the increase in the number of
prisoners in NSW, issuing a press release last November to commemorate NSW
prisons reaching record capacity. It said: "The NSW Government will not
tolerate crime. Serious offenders are going to jail, and they are spending
longer in jail. I make no apologies."

However, both Carr and the woman who is campaigning to replace him by
running an even tougher law-and-order line, the new Liberal Leader, Kerry
Chikarovski, declined the Herald'sinvitation to produce any evidence for
the proposition that putting people in prison reduces crime. Dr Sat
Mukherjee, an expert at the Australian Institute of Criminology who has
spent years analysing Australian crime data back to the beginning of the
century, believes he knows why.

"Whenever an election comes along I feel like writing a book called
Conquering Crime by Auction. The politicians say they will put 500 more
police on the beat and impose stiffer sentences and build three more
prisons, but they will never tell you precisely what type of crime they
will reduce by doing this, and by how much. Why? Because they must know, if
they are honest with themselves, that it simply will not work. It is just
about winning an election, that is all."

Paul Wilson, professor of criminology at Bond University on the Gold Coast,
is even blunter: "In spite of this culture of draconian punishment, I fail
to see any evidence anywhere in the world which shows that an increase in
penalties, including imprisonment, reduces crime rates. The two are
unrelated."

Using police data, the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics found that between
1995 and 1997 - a time when more prisoners than ever before were being
jailed - crime continued to rise. In 14 of 16 categories of crime (the only
exceptions were murder and shoplifting) there were increases in real and in
population-adjusted terms. There were dramatic increases in crimes such as
assault and sexual assault, and "robbery with a weapon other than a
firearm" more than doubled in frequency.

Mukherjee says that prison is no deterrent to crime, because of the extreme
unlikelihood of a criminal being caught. Analysing a "basket" of five
crimes - car theft, burglary, robbery, assault and rape - he has calculated
that for every 1,000 crimes committed, 400 are reported to the police, 320
are recorded, 64 are solved, 43 result in convictions, and one person is
jailed. In other words, the odds of a criminal going to jail are 1,000 to one.

His study found that only one type of government intervention could be
proved to have reduced crime in Australia during the past century -
declaring war on someone. During the two World Wars there was a dramatic
fall in crime as hundreds of thousands of young men - everywhere those most
likely to commit crime - were sent overseas to do their fighting and
killing with society's approval.

Nor is prison succeeding in its quaint goal of "correcting" criminals - not
if the recidivism figures are anything to go by. Within two years of being
released from prison, more than a third of criminals are back inside, and
for some crimes, such as theft, the figure is closer to half.

Although no-one is suggesting throwing the prison gates open, prisoners,
prison officers and criminologists all agree on one thing - that prisons
are breeding grounds for crime, particularly where (as at Silverwater)
young first-time offenders are incarcerated with older, more experienced
criminals.

Says "Phil", a former prisoner: "Going to prison is like taking a TAFE
course in crime. I never knew till I went to jail that you could open an
electronically locked car with a TV remote control." There is even
anecdotal evidence of prisoners becoming addicted to heroin while in prison.

Says John Doyle: "Some people should not be allowed to walk the streets
because of the threat they pose to society [but] the majority of prisoners
are only in for 12 months, and you are not going to change anybody's
attitude in that time.

"To a criminal, jail is just an occupational hazard. It is definitely not a
deterrent, but we have to have it because it is necessary for people to
feel comfortable when they sleep in their beds at night that these people
are not out walking the streets."

If prison doesn't work, our politicians should be asking what does. All
sorts of "solutions" to the crime problem have been proposed over the
years, most of them useless. "Garry", one of the former prisoners
interviewed for this article, showed off the scars left by an operation to
burn out hisamygdala, part of the temporal lobe of his brain, in an
unsuccessful attempt to "cure" his violent behaviour.

A good place to start the search would be a 1997 study by the University of
Maryland which was commissioned by the US Congress to audit and evaluate
the $US3.2billion allocated over the past 25 years by the US Justice
Department to crime prevention.

That 600-page study, Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesn't, What's
Promising, audited no fewer than 500 different anti-crime programs, and was
described by The New York Times as "the most comprehensive study of crime
prevention ever".

Unfortunately for the "get tough" brigade, most of the ideas - from
military-style "boot camps" for young offenders to police blitzes on "drug
marketplaces" - come under the "What Doesn't" heading. The few programs
that have been found to work - particularly those involving intervention
and counselling for problem families - are the sort that usually get short
shrift in Australia, often because they are seen as being "too soft" (see
box).

Professor Ross Homel, a criminologist at Griffith University in Queensland
who recently headed a team that prepared a similar study for the Federal
Justice Minister, Amanda Vanstone, has also concluded that jail is an
ineffective way of fighting crime - even draconian measures such as the
"three strikes" law in some American States had proved to be "an economic
disaster".

"Building new prisons is not the answer. The prison population soon expands
to fill them, and they become an important supplier of jobs in rural
communities. Once you get a prison you fill it and you never get rid of it
- - it becomes a tax burden, and it is based on superstition, not science."

According to Homel, overseas studies have shown that the anti-crime
programs that work "are the ones which strengthen families and communities.
Early intervention [by social workers assigned to problem families] can
prevent substance abuse, mental illness, child abuse and suicide as well as
crime - there is a 7:1 cost advantage over prison."

Professor Wilson points to one well-known study in the US in which "at
risk" children aged three and four who received an intensive preschool
program had their chances of becoming a "major offender" (defined as five
or more arrests) reduced from 35per cent to 7per cent. For every $1
invested in this scheme, there was a $7 saving to the taxpayer in the
reduced cost of welfare and policing.

A number of similar programs have been trialled in Australia, but
unfortunately most were wound up before they could be properly evaluated.
Homel's report examines a number of promising programs including simple and
cost-effective schemes for busing Aboriginal children to preschool in NSW,
and a pilot on the Cape York Peninsula for a national scheme to help
teenage mothers.

But these are long-term solutions to what is seen as an immediate crisis.
It would be electoral suicide for any political party to promise to make
the streets safer - in 20 years' time.

While Bob Carr, in particular, is touting some strategies to tackle the
causes of crime, it is his Government's gritty promises to arrest truants,
close needle exchanges, name juvenile offenders and change court procedures
to the disadvantage of the accused that capture the headlines. Chikarovski
counters with proposals to spend millions on a new anti-drug police task
force, and to allow majority verdicts in criminal trials.

They are responding to what their pollsters tell them is one of the most
important election issues - concern over crime, and a demand for "tough"
action right now. The inescapable conclusion is that our politicians lack
the knowledge or the courage to convince the voters that putting more
people in prison will do nothing to reduce crime.

And so another election looms, the rhetoric grows harsher, the prisons fill
to bursting point, crime continues to rise - and people like Drew Shipton
continue to die.