Brian Burke: WA Jail time isn’t all guinea pig feasts it’s a soul-destroying, numbing experience

Prisoners eating guinea pigs, cheesecakes in the prison fridge, community working Wooroloo prisoners treated to slap up lunches. Eyebrow raising stuff but — speaking from experience — nothing new. The more things change the more they stay the same. It’s almost as though we’ve forgotten Shafto Lane. Andy Shafto was an inmate at Wooroloo when I was there as a guest of Her Majesty. His problem was a previously ferocious temper that landed him in trouble and in the prison’s gardening gang under Officer Smythe. He was also the wicket keeper in the cricket team. At Wooroloo, education had its own building near the visiting area. Everyone had to have a job and you got “top pay” by enrolling in a course, so a a favourite topic of conversation in the general jail was: “How d’ya get a start at school?” Andy showed it was just a matter of initiative and an apparent willingness to learn soon after he arrived at Wooroloo at the end of a long sentence for bashing someone with a parking sign. Andy was small, quiet and serious with long blond hair and, when you spoke to him, he listened carefully, digested everything and thought for some time before he answered. I liked him a lot. Gardening Officer Smythe encouraged his charges to improve themselves and he readily approved Andy’s request to have Friday mornings off to attend a computing course at the school. So, Andy started the course and was a gardener for four-and-a-half days and a student on Friday mornings. When the gardening boss bumped into the principal from education, it was only a minute or two before he asked how Andy was going at school, saying the whole experience seemed to be doing him the world of good. The principal politely inquired who Andy was. “You know, Andy Shafto, my gardener enrolled in your Friday morning computing class.” “Well,” said the principal, “I know all my students and your Shafto isn’t one of them. And we don’t have a computing class on Friday mornings.” It was quickly established that Andy had never entered the hallowed halls of education, although he’d been seen once or twice on a Friday morning in the general vicinity. The officers at Wooroloo are used to dealing with every cunning stunt, so they didn’t confront Andy but waited until the next Friday morning. Andy walked towards education and, when he got close, ducked quickly into the bush and started to run. The officers followed him a couple of kilometres to the nearby motel, called El Caballo Blanco — home of the dancing horses — where Andy’s girlfriend was waiting for him in a room she had booked. So the bush path Andy took to the motel was called Shafto Lane. The Wooroloo Prison Farm is about 55 kilometres along the Great Eastern Highway from Perth. Established in 1915 as a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients, it was a district hospital until 1970. Then the ward for sick prison staff was kept as the Wooroloo hospital while the rest of the complex became a minimum-security prison for short-term offenders and prisoners coming to the end of longer sentences. The old buildings were set out in a higgledy-piggledy fashion by someone who never thought they’d be a prison. During my time, there was no perimeter fence and freedom was just a two-minute walk through surrounding bush to the highway with many of the prisoners taking the walk to return a few hours later without anyone ever knowing they’d gone. When I looked at the official website describing Wooroloo it said: “The prison’s large industries complex produces goods for the prison system and for external contracts, including prison food, offsetting some of the costs of prisoner management. Prisoners are taught workshop skills and can take part in traineeships to help them find a job when they are released from prison.” With guinea pigs now on the menu it seems not much has changed since I was there and whoever wrote those words should have been in therapy (or in Wooroloo) for using hallucinatory drugs. It was an open secret in the jail that most prisoners who wanted drugs had little difficulty obtaining them. One of the senior officers told me that marijuana and heroin actually calmed down the jail. “They aren’t the problem,” he said. “It’s alcohol and methamphetamines. Those drugs make people aggressive and all they want to do is fight.” As time passes in prison, everybody sort of grows together so that in a lot of cases the prisoners and the officers become very similar. It’s a bit like the observation that psychiatrists often are indistinguishable from their patients. They become familiar with each other, relationships develop and each acknowledges the other’s role with a sort of interdependence. I saw evidence of this late one night when there was a quiet knock on my door and an Indigenous prisoner with whom I’d become friends put his finger to his lips and motioned me to be quiet. Then we watched through a crack in the door as one of the female officers walked down the path to another prisoner’s room. She slipped in and after about 30 minutes came out straightening her skirt as she quickly looked around and walked back towards to duty room. I’ve no doubt she was counselling the prisoner — who worked in the kitchen — to mend his ways. But it’s sad. Frequently, public claims are made (often by politicians looking for votes who don’t know what they’re talking about) that prison life is a doddle, an easy, comfortable, spoilt existence where miscreants who should be punished enjoy a country club lifestyle of relaxation, leisure and good food. Prison life is a soul-destroying, numbing, grinding and lonely existence absolutely hated by 90 per cent of those who are there. The other 10 per cent have personality disorders or other problems that make it difficult to know what they’re thinking. After the Court of Criminal Appeal set me free, no one apologised for the months I’d spent in prison or offered to help in any way. I just packed all my belongings into one cardboard box and went home, leaving Wooroloo tired and worn out with worry. I really didn’t care much about anything and on the way home Sue and I stopped to watch our youngest son Joe at soccer training. That’s when it all got too much and I broke down and cried. Brian Burke is a twice-jailed former Labor premier