Opinion | 'Hunter prisons are a significant but shadowy economic sector'

Yet the modern prison is anything but repetitious. Cessnock prison is a good example. Churn rather than stability defines its every day.

Churn results from the composition of the prison population. In NSW, many prisoners are on remand, in and out seeing lawyers, and attending court hearings. Some await sentencing, rising at dawn for the long haul in a corrective services van down the motorway to Sydney. Others are shuffled off for assessment for long-term placement. For some there are parole hearings, and so on.

Cessnock was selected as the NSW prison for expansion of maximum security accommodation because it’s a good place to handle churn.

While far enough from Sydney’s increasingly sanitised outer suburbs, a Cessnock location means prisoners can front court hearings and other appointments without expensive overnight stays.

Open plan dormitories at Cessnock prison are also a response to churn. It’s easier to shove prisoners into module bed spaces than take the time to assign them to a cell, an actual bedroom, with walls for privacy, a roommate and possessions. Churn and humane living conditions are a dreadfully inconvenient combination.

Churn also means prison management can cut back on education and training activity. Ask a prison education officer – in confidence, of course, given the level of fear and loathing in corrective services – and they’ll tell you of the impossibility of running an education program in a churn prison like Cessnock.

Prisons in the Hunter are a significant but shadowy economic sector. No one talks about them as assets. No one gives their social and environmental behaviour the scrutiny other industries get.

There is no public discussion of what goes on in our prisons, no questioning whether they are places of reform not just punishment, whether good is being done.

Our silence hands the prisons agenda to the shock jocks. Loud-mouth commentators like 2GB’s Ray Hadley call daily, successfully, for greater bail restrictions, quicker pathways to conviction and tougher sentencing. Hadley’s squawking leads to more people spending more time in prison.

Yet the way we run our prisons, especially the neglect of reform measures, means higher recidivism. The prison population grows and Cessnock prison becomes the largest maximum security prison in Australia.

But we have no public surveillance of this place; nor of its little sibling, the low security St Heliers prison near Muswellbrook. According to the recent prisons census Cessnock housed an average 872 prisoners last year, 80 of whom were women; while St Heliers averaged 269, all men.

Supervising these lock-ups, says the 2016 census of population and housing, is the job of the Hunter’s 532 prison officers. Add in suppliers of food, utilities and the like, prisons fill a lot of Hunter pay packets.

The NSW government’s intergenerational report says prisons will be in the top four growth areas for public sending over the next 40 years – behind health, education and transport. A full-time prisoner costs $110,000 annually in keep. This is the fiscal consequence of a macho stance on crime.

But the science tells us this is money badly spent. Quality research says that custodial sentences for many offenders are no more effective than community orders in reducing the chance of re-offending.

Business as usual – rule by Ray Hadley – isn’t working in NSW. Almost six out of 10 adults and juveniles convicted of criminal offences in our state re-offend within 10 years, most within two years and invariably for the same offence.

In other words, when we put one offender in prison for a year, not only do we throw $110,000 down the drain, we commit to spending another $110,000 down the track, then another, each time the offender returns to prison – one school teacher salary, one nurse salary, down the drain every time.

Humans seem to reach by instinct for harsh punishment as a solution for misbehaviour. The growth in the Hunter’s prison population is a response to this raw instinct. But the evidence tells us there are better ways to respond.

And with the savings?  Let’s spend them on things that lift the human spirit not drag it down.