The Commonwealth and the Victorian state budgets this year were marked by a contradiction. Both committed more money to incarceration — immigration detention centres and prisons; and both limited programs to help the people confined there. Such contradictions are usually signs of a bad policy that flows from shallow cultural values.
The myth of incarceration says that prisons hold only bad and dangerous people. The reality, evident to anyone who spends time in places of incarceration, is that most people there suffer from some form of mental illness, often accompanied by addiction, a great number have also had traumatic experiences in childhood, and almost all have very loose and precarious connections to family and society.
These deficiencies, rather than inherent badness, shape the ways in which they behave.
It requires little insight to guess the effects of incarceration on people with such backgrounds and experiences. Psychologist Patrick McGorry famously described immigration detention centres as factories for producing mental illness. He might also have been speaking of prisons.
To hold vulnerable people in prisons is like keeping alcoholics in a pub. Mental illness thrives there. Nor, for all the dedication of staff and counselors, can mental illnesses and addictions be treated effectively there. If you take away someone's freedom, you also diminish their sense of responsibility for their own betterment.
Incarceration also weakens people's already precarious connections with family and with their local society. In addition to forced separation, the stigma of imprisonment and its erosion of self-esteem erode people's frail personal relationships and their connections with workplaces.
Connections made in prisons can help sustain some prisoners during their sentences. But for others the most significant connections made promote anti-social attitudes and skills.
When people are freed from jails their underlying mental illness and lack of respect for themselves will not have been addressed. They will be unable to maintain or build on relationships already weakened by separation. They will struggle to find work. So they will seek comfort in the bad company and environments where they lived before. As a result of being in jail they will be more, not less, likely to offend again and return to jail.
Prisons are certainly necessary to protect society from the actions of people who seriously threaten it. But most people in prisons wish to live more ordered lives. So given the effects of incarceration it is a mystery why any society would spend money expanding and running prisons that prepare