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Letters

Prison Means Business

By
Freshie

Freshie writes from a prison in NSW.

Allison Saeng via Unsplash

Prison doesn’t rehabilitate people. People rehabilitate people.

If prison rehabilitated people, people wouldn’t come back to prison.

I saw, as soon as I walked in, how broken and greedy this system is.

I am on remand at a private prison. Everybody has a dollar sign on their head.

Calls cost $2.00 for ten minutes. Now imagine there are 1,000 prisoners here making one call each per day (minimum, definitely more). That is $14,000 per week, just preying on our need to stay connected.

Then there is food. We get given 300ml of #LITE milk in the morning, a wrap with a handful of chicken, a sandwich with one slice of ‘meat’ or two tiny sausage rolls for lunch, and a dinner like you would get on an aeroplane, plus two pieces of fruit (sometimes four) per day, and a children’s pack of cereal.

This must be the legal bare minimum, and most of it is cheap or inedible, leaving you feeling hungrier. Not to mention, they give it to us at 2:30pm for dinner and lock us in at 3:30pm.

This makes it necessary to pay for groceries every week, which is another hand-in-your-pocket technique to make us pay.

One thousand prisoners x $50 buy-up weekly (on average, usually more) makes another $50,000 per week.

Everyone has a dollar sign on their head.

Prison is a business.

Remember, prison doesn’t rehabilitate you.

Only you can do that.

Prison doesn’t rehabilitate people. People rehabilitate people.

If prison rehabilitated people, people wouldn’t come back to prison.

I saw, as soon as I walked in, how broken and greedy this system is.

I am on remand at a private prison. Everybody has a dollar sign on their head.

Calls cost $2.00 for ten minutes. Now imagine there are 1,000 prisoners here making one call each per day (minimum, definitely more). That is $14,000 per week, just preying on our need to stay connected.

Then there is food. We get given 300ml of #LITE milk in the morning, a wrap with a handful of chicken, a sandwich with one slice of ‘meat’ or two tiny sausage rolls for lunch, and a dinner like you would get on an aeroplane, plus two pieces of fruit (sometimes four) per day, and a children’s pack of cereal.

This must be the legal bare minimum, and most of it is cheap or inedible, leaving you feeling hungrier. Not to mention, they give it to us at 2:30pm for dinner and lock us in at 3:30pm.

This makes it necessary to pay for groceries every week, which is another hand-in-your-pocket technique to make us pay.

One thousand prisoners x $50 buy-up weekly (on average, usually more) makes another $50,000 per week.

Everyone has a dollar sign on their head.

Prison is a business.

Remember, prison doesn’t rehabilitate you.

Only you can do that.

Topics
This
letter
was originally printed in the
July 2026
edition of About Time.

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