Minister Scott

Dear Premier,

perhaps I should be a junior minister!

In case anyone wonders, as a Minister I am beholden to my unofficial Principle Policy Advisor Dr Wendell Rosevear.

Truth be told, my fascination with prisons was born after I had to read "Discipline and Punish" by Foucault for a university assignment. After reading "Discipline and Punish" you start to see the whole system of law, policing and imprisonment in a new light. Not a very practical light, but a new and strange light. What made me suggest that QueenslandGovernment.com should have a Minister from Prison Reform? My belief that prisons in Queensland are far too arbitrary; that they are not what the purport to be; and they have no moral right that excuses the incontrovertible harm that they do.

I will accept that prisons in Queensland do some good, but would argue that too often the good in question is merely that of sparing the rest of us from the tricky problem of finding a better solution!

I have spent several hours thinking over this policy statement and have re-discovered that the more you think about prisons, the harder they are to understand. It is tempting to assume that the practice of imprisonment indicates the existence of a contract between lawful society and the individual. Thus if the individual does something unlawful, the lawful society sequesters the individual. The question I cannot answer for myself, even after long thought is this: After sequestering the individual in question, is the lawful society still bound by a contract of lawful behaviour toward that individual? Some of our prison practices would seem to suggest "no", some others would seem to suggest "yes".

Whether it is philosophically accurate or not, I believe that it is valuable to answer the question "yes" because this implies that the contract between the lawful society and the lawful individual is less likely to be an arbitrary case and more likely to be a reflection of a universal aspiration. It is about now that some of you will be wishing I had read more moral philosophy and less history, so I will stop that line of thought.

On the more practical side, one of my close friends is Dr Wendell Rosevear, who some of you may know through his Medal of the Order of Australia, his work as a G.P. in prisons, his awards from the AMA and Brisbane City Council, or indeed from his participants medal from the Amsterdam Gay Games Marathon! Wendell, for those of you who don't know, is one of those rare individuals who actually believes in redemption. Not merely the rather narrow salvation promised by most door-to-door religions, but in redemption as a process that anyone can begin to make themselves a better person here and now.

For the record, Wendell does believe in an ideal imprisonment which gives an offender an opportunity to reflect upon the past act and prepare for a better future. His fight is against those imprisonment practices which prevent this. For the record, I am not so sure. I have made the mistake of reading Foucault, and so have the idea that perhaps we already have the ideal prison, where arbitrary brutality and institutionalized recidivism are what our society secretly craves.

Nevertheless, despite my fears, I am with Wendell on the necessity of prison reform. Even if our society is hypocritical, we must start by at least voicing an aspiration for change. That start, by chance or design, may work to unravel the hypocrisy.

One of Foucault's more accessible arguments was that the reason 200 years of prison reform has left us still wanting more is that deep down our society desires to maintain a criminal class. An analogy might be made of a barbaric teacher routinely flogging the class dunce to keep the rest of the students in check. Whether Foucault was correct in his conclusion about the nature of society does not prevent us from using this analogy to test our imprisonment practices. Many of them would appear to prove Foucault correct: Wendell gave me a few examples last night.

Every convicted criminal has his or her Medicare Card cancelled. This is because the Federal Government refuses to maintain a state ward. The prisoner is thus prevented from visiting a bulk-billing doctor. The Medicare Card will not be reissued when the prisoner enters a half-way house, even though the prisoner will be working and paying the Medicare levy on his or her income tax. Wendell is a bulk-billing doctor. When one of his patients transferred from imprisonment to a half-way house, the prisoner had no way of paying for Wendell's services. Wendell offered to consult for free in a recent instance. The prison refused to allow this.

From a sociological perspective it has been argued that theft is an unlawful income most likely to be resorted to when a lawful income is less attractive. Unemployment benefits are an example of a lawful income. Unemployment benefits are subject to a literacy test. Failure to attend literacy classes means unemployment benefit is cut off. When lawful income is reduced to zero, unlawful income becomes more attractive. When you consider that literacy is not necessary for many lawful incomes and that unemployment benefits make it easier to gain lawful employment, you begin to wonder who benefits from this policy?

A further example from Wendell's experience is of a prisoner convicted of a child sex offence. Enrolment in a rehabilitation program was part of the prisoner's sentence, and something the prisoner desperately hoped would be a redemptive process. Half-way through the rehabilitation program the prisoner was faced with the choice of completing the rehabilitation program or transferring to another prison to be nearer his terminally ill mother. He chose his mother over his own parole. Some might see this as evidence of substantial progress towards rehabilitation, particularly of his interpersonal relationships. His parole review panel felt differently and his failure to complete the program, which was simply not available in the prison he had transferred to, was the reason he was refused parole. He has not been allowed to transfer back to the prison that offers the rehabilitation program.

It is situations such as the one above that make me react with the argument that there must be some assumption of contract, reciprocity and obligation to guide the process of imprisonment between society and the individual. One of the first topics the University History Department covers in the subject "Crime and Punishment" is that there is no consensus on what imprisonment is supposed to achieve. As contradictory as this is, I do not feel it is the most important problem. The most important problem is the immediate physical harm that is befalling prisoners already in society's care. It is possible we will never know why we are putting people in prisons, but we are unlikely to end a cultural institution merely because we cannot explain it. I feel the most important place to direct energy is in extending the concept of mutual obligation to the application of lawful behaviour in imprisonment.

I could go on forever about how strange our system of imprisonment can be. Hopefully I have explained my fascination, if nothing else.