How To Make Bootleg Booze: What It’s Like To Spend Aussie Christmas In Prison

There are certain things I associate with Christmas. My family come together, we decorate, we eat, we drink, we be merry. Presents are exchanged, and although I know it’s a special time of year, perhaps there are some things I take for granted. I wanted to find out what makes this time of year special, and I thought it would be interesting to get a snapshot of Christmas of people who have either given up their freedom, or had it taken away from them.

Prison life is something that remains mysterious to people who’ve never experienced it directly, or had someone close to them inside. What happens behind the wire fences and grey Besser-Blocked walls? We’ve had a pop-culture snapshot of life behind bars recently through Orange is the New Black, but how sensationalised is this? Does this reflect prison across the globe, or is it specific to the US? And what, if anything, do prisoners get up to when everyone else is celebrating Christmas?

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A Lonely Time: Missing The Family On Christmas

To find out what an Australian prison Christmas is like, I contacted a couple of justice departments around Australia, talked to Justice Action (a criminal justice and mental health activism group) and spoke to an ex-inmate, who wishes for me to refer to him as Tony. He was incarcerated for a “white collar” crime, for want of a better term. Tony is well educated, charming, and quite droll, even when speaking about the tough times he faced in a correctional facility.

“It’s a difficult time, and most people don’t want to be reminded that it’s Christmas. It just reminds most people of when they were out and they don’t want anything to do with it,” says Tony. “There’s no service on Christmas, or any other religious holiday. Somebody would have to get special permission from the outside; basically the officers don’t want to put in any extra effort. It’s hard if something adds a workload to the people working there. Basically, if something doesn’t lessen the workload for them, then it doesn’t happen.”

Tony’s previous Christmases had been spent much like mine — food aplenty, a tree, drinks, his large family all around, typically Australian – but while incarcerated he just ignored it. Most of the inmates didn’t even want to acknowledge the day, especially the career criminals and long-term prisoners. So, rather naively, I asked Tony if they even swap presents with each other on Christmas Day.

“What would we give each other?” he said with a chuckle. “You don’t make friends while you’re there. There’s an absence of trust between inmates. Alliances, yes, but not friends.”

It’s important to note that each state runs things a little differently. In NSW and Tasmania, visits on Christmas Day from friends or family are completely out. Off the table entirely. A spokesperson from Corrections Victoria said that “most” facilities don’t allow visits, but they make an effort to compensate for this by adding extra visiting days in and around that week.

According to Brett Collins from Justice Action, up until around seven years ago visits on Christmas Day were allowed, but the bean counters decided that the added cost of keeping extra custodial officers on to make this possible was prohibitive, and the privilege of Christmas visits was revoked.

“The general feeling from the officers was they didn’t mind working on Christmas. In fact, they liked getting paid for the extra hours and were happy to reschedule their own Christmases to accommodate the inmates,” Collins says. But the bottom line speaks the loudest in these conversations.

I’ve spent time away from family on Christmas while travelling overseas, and bridged the feeling of distance with a phone call. I thought that perhaps this was an option for Tony in lieu of seeing his family. When I asked if phone calls were allowed, though, the flow of conversation stalled. Apparently it’s not just as simple as picking up a phone and saying “Merry Christmas”. Phone calls cost money, and money in prison is complicated.

There was a system at his facility called the Arunta telephone system, in which all calls are listened to by the custodial officers and are terminated at their discretion. Prisoners have a maximum of ten minutes on the phone before it cuts off automatically, you can only make calls to a list of five pre-determined numbers, and no consecutive calls. It cost Tony around $7 for a call to a mobile in this ten-minute block.

You do get an allowance for necessary items in prison, which varies depending on how much work you do. “Prison provides nothing,” Tony says. “If you just sat there peeling spuds you’d get around $35 a week. If it comes down to a choice of making a phone call or being able to brush your teeth for the next week, then you soon sort your priorities out.”

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Eat, Drink, Be Merry Where You Can

The meals at Christmas don’t vary from the everyday ‘slop’ that is served, other than a meagre pudding referred to as a “Plum Duff,” often supplied by the Salvation Army to the prisoners, perhaps along with a calendar. Alcoholic drinks are considered contraband on all prison grounds, but there are instances of prisoners brewing their own, which has caused trouble in the past. Brett Collins alluded to this, telling me that in NSW, sugar in corrective facilities has been banned altogether.

Tony said that while he was incarcerated, he was allowed sugar but wasn’t allowed to stockpile it. There was no yeast allowed in his facility; any dough had to be premade before arriving on the premises as they had prisoners working in the kitchen. He spoke of an incident where several prisoners gathered old rotten spuds and fruit to make some horrendous concoction, brewed over about two weeks in a 20-litre bucket. The intoxicated inmates rioted, which led to outside forces being called in to control the population.

Tony didn’t participate in the riot, just observed. He laughed sardonically as he recounted this: “It’s boring in prison, anything like this that happens becomes your entertainment”. While the prospect of some diversions on Christmas might seem appealing, that year Tony didn’t get a Christmas drink; the opportunity didn’t arise. 

“Prison is all about opportunity,” Tony says. “About eight prisoners broke into an empty cell to brew that alcohol. Those opportunities aren’t always there. So no, no drinks on Christmas.”

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“It’s A Storage Facility”: Rehabilitation And Isolation

As with any population, a typical prison community isn’t entirely made up of Christians or secular people who still hang on to the Christian tradition because it means they get to eat prawns. But for the many prisoners who grew up celebrating Christmas, there’s nothing like missing out on family gatherings to remind them of their isolation. Everyone I spoke to emphasised the stress that Christmas places on the inmates.

The prison system is ostensibly about rehabilitation, or giving inmates the tools they need to successfully reintegrate into society on release. There are two important aspects to this rehabilitation: firstly a job, or at least the prospect of employment once on the outside. More importantly, though, keeping ties with family helps the chances of an inmate’s successful rehabilitation. To cut prisoners off from that at Christmas, as so many Australian prison systems do, works against the whole point of the system.

Brett Collins notes that in places like Scandinavia (which has a very low rate of recidivism) and the UK, prisoners are often released on Christmas so they can spend the day with their families. This keeps the family ties going and gives hope to everyone involved for a future after someone has served their sentence. It helps people correct, it helps them rehabilitate, it helps them avoid going straight back to prison once they’re released. 

The reality in Australia is very different. Tony guffawed at the thought of a “corrective service,” and told me a story illustrating why. After a few months of being imprisoned, he came to trust one of the custodial officers — not to the point of friendship, but he made that alliance. Even though there was trust there, he still referred to the officer as a “screw”. Apparently, this screw was chatting to him one day and quite candidly asked him:

“So, Tony, what do you think [about prison]?”

“I think it’s a storage facility,” Tony said.

“Exactly,” replied the screw.

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Alex Dick does a bit of everything. You can see his bits here or you can bother him on Twitter @AlexanderDick.

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Feature image via Craig Sunter on a Flickr Creative Commons licence.