Photo: Yvette Barry
Good Weekend
The Sydney Morning Herald/The Age
13 February, 2010
It's an idea that's brilliant in both its simplicity and its potential to create happy endings for jail inmates and their families. Erin O'Dwyer visits Hobart's Risdon Prison to see its Reading Together program in action.
EVEN from the mouth of a man who has spent seven of the past eight years in jail, the words of Dr Seuss are shiny with innocence. He reads with confidence, tripping over just a few sentences, trying his best to bring the story to life. He learned to read on the inside.
“How you going, me boys,” says Troy, leaning low over the bulbous black microphone propped on the table. “I’ve got another book for you. It’s the one you wanted. It’s Green Eggs and Ham. It’s one of them Dr Seuss books, which I reckon you know. But alright, I’ll start her off for youse…”
This is an edited, shortened version of Inside Stories, a feature story by Erin O'Dwyer. Read the complete story in the February 13 issue of Good Weekend, in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. For more information about the Reading Together program, listen to Erin's radio documentary Bedtime Stories online at ABC Radio National www.abc.net.au/rn/360
His short calloused fingers turn at the title pages roughly as he begins to read: “Do you like green eggs and ham? I do not like them, Sam I am. I do not like green eggs and ham.”
At 34, Troy is jail hardened and wary. He is shackled as the prison guards bring him up from his cell to the education unit at Hobart’s Risdon Prison to meet me. A biker’s goatee hangs off his chin and his head is shaved. He is dressed in prison-issue calico dungarees and a fluorescent yellow windcheater. He tells me he has two boys. They are turning 9 and 12.
“It’s just hit me, missing the kids,” he says. “I worked out that by the time I get out I will have done nine out of the last ten years in jail. To me, it doesn’t seem like much. But it’s a lot of time away from your kids.”
Phone calls and letters to his two boys are the only things that make the daily lock-downs and cheek-by-jowl living conditions bearable for Troy. His boys are also the reason he is sitting here today, in Risdon Prison’s education unit, reading a children’s story book aloud, while guards sit at the door and a prison educator officer sits by his right shoulder, urging him to put more expression into his voice.
Risdon Prison is frequently described as one of the country’s most notorious jails. It’s known for its infamous inmates – Port Arthur killer Martin Bryant and criminal-turned-celebrity Mark "Chopper" Read. It’s the scene of routine riots and sieges. Prisoners’ groups claim human rights abuses on an almost daily basis – from food and clothes shortages to prisoners being charged rent on their cells. But a simple reform program that costs no more than the price of a few postage stamps per prisoner is beginning to chip away at the kind of crime and punishment issues that jails, statistically speaking, fail to scratch the surface of: intergenerational crime, unemployment and low levels of literacy.
In August 2008, the Reading Together program in Risdon Prison began with nothing more than a mobile phone voice recorder and a pile of borrowed library books. By now, more than 100 prisoners have read almost 150 hundreds of books onto CD for their children.
The stories are sent to the inmates’ children via estranged partners and grandparents, and, with the help of community groups, to children in care. For the children and families at home, it’s a chance to mend relationships that were lost or broken, or that never existed at all. Wives and partners put their children to bed at night with the sound of their fathers’ voice. Older children take the books for show and tell at school. For prisoners, it might be the first time they have read a story aloud to their children. For some it might be the first time they have read a story at all.
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