Opinion Piece by Eleni Psillakis

Article – Opinion piece by Eleni Psillakis

Prison Should Be About Rehabilitation. So Why Are We Making It So Hard?

When we talk about people in prison, it’s easy to think of them as separate from the rest of society. But they are not strangers. They are people from our communities. Your community. My community. They may be someone you know, someone you love, or someone whose path crossed yours without you ever realising it.

For women in prison especially, the statistics tell a confronting story:

• More than 70% have experienced family and domestic violence.
• Up to 98% have a documented history of trauma and physical violence.
• Around 65% have a diagnosed mental health condition.
• Nearly half did not complete Year 10.

These are not just statistics. They are indicators of significant disadvantage, trauma, and unmet need long before a woman enters the prison system.

Given this reality, you might assume that prison provides access to evidence-based programs that support mental health, physical wellbeing, resilience, and personal development. After all, many programs are readily available in the community. Programs such as myCompass from the Black Dog Institute, NSW Health’s Go4Fun, and the Healthy Eating Active Lifestyle (HEAL) Program are designed to help people improve their wellbeing, build resilience, and make healthier choices.

Yet these types of programs are often unavailable to people while they are incarcerated.

This is difficult to understand when the evidence is clear. Programs that support mental health, physical activity, nutrition, self-esteem, and life skills are proven to improve wellbeing. They can create the foundation needed for positive behaviour change in other areas. For many people, they also provide education and skills that were never available to them in the first place.

Access to healthcare is another challenge. Waiting to see a medical or dental professional in prison is not comparable to spending a few hours in the waiting room of a local clinic. People can wait weeks for appointments while managing pain, illness, or deteriorating mental health.

Meanwhile, daily life in prison offers few opportunities to take control of one’s own wellbeing. Fresh food options are limited. There is little education around making healthier food choices through the prison “buy-up” system. Exercise facilities and equipment, particularly for women, can be limited, along with programs that teach practical ways to stay active within the constraints of a prison environment.

Specialist mental health services are also stretched by staffing shortages and demand.

I experienced this firsthand. As part of my sentence, I had orders requiring ongoing psychological support while in custody. Prior to sentencing, I attended weekly psychology sessions in the community. Those sessions were transformative. They were central to my rehabilitation and recovery.

During my 11 months in custody, I received just two psychology appointments.

The support that was helping me address the underlying causes of my behaviour simply disappeared when I entered prison.

This raises an important question: if rehabilitation is one of the goals of imprisonment, why are some of the most effective rehabilitation tools so difficult to access?

The economics make little sense either. It costs approximately $180,000 a year to incarcerate one person. In comparison, wellbeing and education programs cost a fraction of that amount. Yet many community organisations trying to provide these supports, both during and after incarceration, struggle to secure ongoing funding.

When people are released, they often return to the community carrying the same challenges they faced before prison, alongside new barriers such as unemployment, stigma, unstable housing, and limited access to healthcare. For many, professional support remains financially out of reach, particularly when a criminal record makes securing employment more difficult.

We should all care about this, because nearly everyone in prison will eventually return to the community.

The question is not whether people come back. The question is in what condition we want them to return.

If we genuinely want safer communities, lower rates of reoffending, and better outcomes for individuals and families, then providing access to evidence-based health, wellbeing, and rehabilitation programs should not be controversial. It should be considered essential.

Some of these changes are neither complicated nor expensive. The evidence already exists. The programs already exist. The need certainly exists.

What’s missing is the will to make them available.