| How books are helping often violent prisoners turn into better men |
Nine men, some of them heavily tattooed and all of them in identical bottle-green, prison-issue sweats sit at a rectangular table in rapt silence. It's 1.30pm – story time. Susan McLaine, a petite and softly spoken volunteer, reads from a typed a4 sheet, carefully pronouncing each syllable. She doesn't project or exaggerate her inflections; this is not a performance. McLaine reads to the men in her capacity as a bibliotherapist, for whom literature is a therapeutic tool.
Today's text is The Other Room, by Rob Parkinson. The short story's nameless protagonist is a "bohemian writer", recently divorced and living in the basement of what used to be a grand hotel. Hangers on distract him with "chatter and booze and fags" and a clamour in his head troubles him when he's alone. One day, the writer finds an extra room walled off during a conversion, which becomes his haven. "He would sit in it … and make himself very quiet and still and just do nothing for an hour or two at a time."
The story is about transcendence and McLaine hopes it will resonate with her listeners.
Susan McLaine runs a book program in a Victorian prison.
"In a way, it's a little like you guys in here," she says, kicking off the discussion. "You don't have space to yourselves, do you? How do you relate to this story, being in here?"
One man's other room is the vegetable patch in the prison garden. Another plays "black man's blues" on a communal guitar to distract himself. Some men say they avoid solitude for all the anxiety it invites. Then *Darren, who is 40 and buff with a shock of dark hair, confesses: "When I used to do drugs, I'd be sitting around bored,
I'd go on a rampage and end up back in prison. When you're working, you don't think about drugs or anything else."
Darren is one of the group stalwarts. He's serving his fifth prison sentence. Last December, he entered Port Phillip maximum security jail over charges related to a botched drug deal. He's receiving treatment for anxiety, a condition he likens to volts of electricity coursing through his body, that made him shake and weep uncontrollably.
"I feel my work is getting prisoners to think about the choices they made": Susan McLaine, bibliotherapist.
"I feel my work is getting prisoners to think about the choices they made": Susan McLaine, bibliotherapist. Photo: Gary Medlicott
After one of the groups, I sit with Darren and his social worker Sarah Harvey, at a table in a tidy, L-shaped common room onto which the cells open. Darren points to the tabletop, which he wiped down in preparation for our meeting. Cleaning, he says, puts him in a similar frame of mind to bibliotherapy. He doesn't read because he can't focus on the written word, but he enjoys hearing poems and stories read aloud. "It takes my mind off things, stops it from racing," he says.
G4S, the administrators of Port Phillip Prison, allowed me to sit in on three bibliotherapy sessions held at St Paul's, a 28-bed mental health unit run by St Vincent's
Correctional Health Service. The group was supposed to meet weekly, however a riot in early July at the nearby Melbourne Remand Centre over a smoking ban threw the schedule off track. For two weeks, Port Phillip Prison was in lockdown and prisoners spent much of their time in their cells.
When the bibliotherapy group resumed in late July, I witnessed an angry incident. A man complained aggressively that he had been denied access to services. He sniggered as another group member spoke and eventually stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
After his departure the mood softened. One man spoke of his experience at another prison group – Narcotics Anonymous (NA). His reading was poor and he struggled to make his way through lengthy testimonials by recovering addicts contained in the NA literature. But a mate, with whom he attended both NA and bibliotherapy, had helped him out. Taking his cue from McLaine, the mate had read the testimonials aloud.
McLaine later listed the anecdote among two highlights of her prison service. The other was being presented with a Hallmark thank you card that the men had taken the trouble to source from the outside. Aside from the incident after lockdown, I witnessed no other disruptions.
McLaine has a gentle manner, but there's no question who is in charge. She allows discussions to meander, then reins them in again in the interrogative: She'll ask about the characters' motives, or single out a line in a text for dissection. In her groups, there's no backchat; men talk one at a time. And some address her as
"Miss" McLaine used to work in libraries and part of her job was to broaden readers' literary tastes. In 2010, she studied bibliotherapy in the UK. The therapeutic technique had been gaining currency in Europe and the US, but McLaine is regarded as a pioneer in Australia. Upon her return to Australia, she coordinated the Book Well, a joint State Library of Victoria and VicHealth program that trained 20 bibliotherapists. More recently, she worked with homeless men.
McLaine has volunteered at the prison for two years and in that time she has never inquired what the men in her group are in for. "I feel my work is getting them to think about the choices they made and will be faced with making again when released. Not by discussing what they have done but by getting them to begin to explore
their own inner experiences from a safe distance."In sessions, texts are a springboard for such exploration. McLaine doesn't discriminate between high and low brow material.
At one session, she read a poem by Pablo Neruda. At another, it's The Time-Sweepers, a story by Ursula Wills-Jones about little blue men who sweep up wasted time. It pleases her when men ask for reading material to take away.
One man, shy, clean-cut and bookish, requested poetry by Mary Oliver and McLaine obliged. When I spoke to him after a session, he told me he had autism and was
receiving treatment for depression. Of McLaine, he said despondently: "I think she wants to help us more than she can."
Professor James Ogloff, director the Centre for Forensic and Behavioural Science at Swinburne University, says that although recidivism rates vary from state to state, about half of offenders re-offend within two to five years of their release. Rehabilitation is a broad-ranging concept that seeks, ultimately, to turn prisoners away from crime. At Port Phillip, everything from work and study initiatives to more targeted treatment programs for drug, alcohol and violence, fall under rehabilitation.
According to Ogloff, aside from the broader rehabilitative aims, programs such as bibliotherapy address prisoners' wellbeing and, as such, have a "humanity" to them.
"There are some in the community who feel that prisons aren't harsh enough. But when you visit a prison, you get a sense of what it is like. You see that prisoners are taken away from society and put in an environment that is regimented," Ogloff says.
I sought Darren out, because he spoke candidly and unselfconsciously in the bibliotherapy group, frequently drawing on personal experience. During a discussion on relationships, he said: "Some people can be so confident in themselves, but not really. I do that with my wife, but deep down when I look in the mirror I don't have confidence."
I asked Darren about the rehabilitation he received over his five sentences. He said he attended anti-violence and anti-drug programs and seen "that many" prison councillors and psychologists. But he attributed his biggest breakthroughs to sheer will.
Darren is up for parole in October and plans to walk out of prison and never look back. He has, of course, pledged to stay out of trouble before, but on those occasions he was still in possession of a list of amphetamine contacts.
Now, he says, he's destroyed the list and cut off contact with people from his drug past. Waiting for him on the outside is a job as a house painter, courtesy of his brother-in-law, two small children and a wife with zero-tolerance for drug use. He's been married to her for four years, and intends to stay married.
Darren, who welled up twice during our conversation, is full of self recriminations. He blames his anxiety, for the most part, on 20 years of amphetamine use. He says he should never have put himself in the situation that led to his most recent arrest. He's troubled by memories of lying to his wife and on one occasion, throwing her
out of a car in an "ice rage".
Listening to Darren, cynicism is tempting. Is he reciting a script with a view to early release?
His social worker Harvey thinks not. "I'm positive about Darren and that's a rare thing to say. There are people who leave here and I think 'I'll see him again,' but I don't think that about Darren."
Responsibility is a word she uses frequently in the context of rehabilitation. I ask Darren what this notion means to him. Does he view his crimes in a different light? Darren responds with an anecdote from his drug dealing days. He knew his parents-in-law were furious at him for operating a "milk bar" selling amphetamines. But Darren told himself that addicts would feed their addictions with or without him, and at least he was scrupulous enough to sell drugs that were pure. Today, Darren no
longer mounts this defence. "It's a cop out," he says.
*Darren is a pseudonym. G4S requested that prisoners' names are changed.
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