Joe Caddy, Catholic Priest colleague, Chaplain to Victorian Prisons, was brave enough to write in a Melbourne paper that prisons are not for rehabilitation but for breeding criminals.
I agree. You probably agree. Where does that leave us? Nowhere I suspect.
That's the trouble with good ideas. They need not just one good person but dozens to agitate for change and to keep at it for years, maybe even a lifetime.
Is that persistence possible these days? Just as the abolition of slavery took many young people their whole lives to achieve, so will the reform of our prison system.
Indeed, I don't intend to do more here than raise the question. I feel the need because I've known many people who've ended up in prison. I've watched as they've struggled to recommence living 'outside' without much constructive support. So, they go in and out for years.
There's one bloke I met when I first arrived in South Melbourne Parish. He was 16 then. He disappeared into the juvenile justice system. He came out, and then disappeared into the adult system.
He kept feeding the revolving door for 30 years. I've seen him only every few years, whenever he's 'out'.
He's now spent far more time in than out. He can't survive out. He's almost 50 years but still 16 at heart and an untamed 16 at that.
Joe Caddy's right. Prison is a waste of time and resources in terms of results. Unfortunately while retributive justice rules the roost, restorative justice must wait for 100 Joe Caddy's to launch a campaign for prison reform.
I'm fortunate to have been Priest at South Melbourne for 25 years. I've learned a lot and unlearned even more.
My first years as Priest, in half a dozen suburban parishes, in the 1960s, brought experiences of working with 40-year-old parents and their teenage children. I became part of the parish/neighbourhood support team. Together we looked after our young. If one of them 'strayed' from the herd, we became collectively unnerved.
Some suburbs were better than others at this essential service. This was a lesson in itself. It was safer to be a teenager and more reassuring, too, in one place than another.
Young people need to feel valued as part of a 'place'. Country footy clubs (indeed, all sports clubs) are a good example of helping teenagers 'grow up'.
Occasionally, a local club falls into the hands of untrustworthy people and becomes a bad influence for teenagers. The same occupational hazard stalks all adults working with young people. Some of my own vocational 'profession' have grossly offended against teenagers who trusted them with their bodies, minds and hearts.
I continue my care and concern for the young people at risk and partly to offset the toxic footprint left by a few colleagues. I put that here on public record.
Daniel Grollo of Grocon (a leading Australian developer) used these words, 'offset the social imprint left by developers' as an explanation of his intention to build, without beyond-cost profit, a shelter for 100+ homeless people in Melbourne.
I've been talking and writing about this 'offset' for years. Thanks Daniel, for being creatively compassionate towards homeless people. As with Joe Caddy and prison reform, we need hundreds of Daniel Grollos to make a real difference in the lives of the excluded poor.
After these two examples of intellectual 'mothering' by blokes, let's hear it for the greatest communicators of them all - Happy Mothers' Day!