When I walked into the correctional facility for the job interview for the vacant teaching position, I remember my mind was racing as I took in the scene. The guarded boom gates. The razor wire enclosures. The heavy metal doors that didn’t open until the one behind was closed. The aerial cameras observing all activities down below. The gun towers. The authorities in blue and the people in prison in green. It was a strange mix. A strong sense of order combined with an undercurrent of explosive danger.

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The female boss of the education unit escorted me through the prison and there was a rush of people  towards the cyclone fence that separated us from the main yard.

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“Miss! Miss! Is parole in? Miss, I need to talk to my welfare officer!” She ignored the pleas. The voices then started addressing me: “Chief! Chief!” No one had ever called me chief before. My new boss began my prison education by schooling me on the new language I’d have to learn – chief, edjo, buy-up, classo, officer shopping, stand over.

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What the hell had I got myself into? A correctional education officer? People are desperate to get out, and here I was applying to get in. I could just turn on my heels and leave. No questions asked. But I didn’t. As I sat nervously at the beginning of that first ever class,

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I would never have dreamed that I would spend the next seventeen years employed as an educator inside the criminal justice system in both adult corrections and in juvenile detention.

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Movies, books, television and the internet are saturated with tales of crime. And true crime outrates fiction. As an author, I have experienced this fascination with crime first hand but, as an outsider on the inside, I also witnessed the consequences, the human cost and the waste.

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I must admit, I never really held a political view on the prison system before working in jails. “Was the criminal justice system effective? Do we have the balance right between punishment and rehabilitation? Is locking people up the best use of social and economic resources?” On that first day those thoughts never even crossed my mind. Of course, I imagined prisons were far from ideal places, but I knew very little of their workings or who occupied the buildings.

I know there are some truly awful crimes and some people forfeit their right to freedom. However, most people I encountered in prison were not innately evil. The majority came from lower socio-economic backgrounds, had little education opportunities and were recidivists – they keep coming back.

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Education is not regarded as the most significant risk factor for reoffending but there is an undeniable link between a lack of education and crime.

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Research shows this is the case not only in Australia but right across the world.

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I was hired to improve peoples’ literacy and numeracy skills to help them gain employment and to become better functioning members of society upon release. As an educator, I soon became very aware of the low level of literacy of most people who are incarcerated in the adult and juvenile systems and how that negatively impacts their lives.

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I met 50 year olds who wanted to be able to read the newspaper, parents who wanted to be able to record themselves reading a book to send home to their children, and others who wanted to study to improve their chances “on the outs”.

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Crime fascinates us and the media glamourises it, but the reality of a life of crime for many is a life of recurring incarceration and wasted human potential. There’s a reason it’s called “doing time”.