Red Dirt Prison

A brief look at my time working at the Alice Springs Prison

I’ve hated every job I’ve ever had. I’ve been working since I was 17 and just turned 46 and I’ve long since lost count of how many jobs I’ve had. The working man’s life is not for me, I am not suited for it and it would be in everyone’s interest, employers included, if I could find a way out of wage slavery so please buy my books.

One of the most fucked up jobs I ever had was working as a Prison Officer in Alice Springs.

I keep meaning to write about this in my fiction. So far the only time I have was in my second book Remembering the Dead and Other Stories where I had a single story called Life Means Life on this topic.

It’s not because there isn’t juicy material that would make great fiction, there’s plenty of that. Rather it’s because there is no way to write truthfully about it without sounding massively racist. Given the woke Karens and gaggle of white women pretending to be indigenous who run most of the publishing industry in Australia it’s just not a smart career move.

But my time on Substack has convinced me that the cultural tide is turning so maybe it’s time to start telling these stories. So here goes.

The first thing to understand about working in a prison is that, like the military, it bears no resemblance to the Hollywood version.

For starters I never saw anything remotely resembling a “gang” while I was working in a prison. I never saw an escape attempt or heard of contraband being smuggled in.

Why? Because the prisoners weren’t smart enough to do these things.

This is the big truth about prisons and the people in them. Insanely low IQs. I mean knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing caveman type shit. Dumber than a sack of hammers. A year of working as a Prison Officer will convince you that eugenics is a good idea.

This then teaches you the truth about the bulk of crime in our society. It is committed by morons. I concede that in the top levels of the drug trade there are smart and highly organised people but you and I will never see those people. The sort of crimes that might affect us, our houses being broken into, a woman’s purse being snatched, a rape in a dark car park, these are committed by people with astonishingly low IQs.

I have personally witnessed a prisoner who shat himself if he wasn’t told to go to the toilet. I have seen an entire block of prisoners (about 40 men) without a single literate person amongst them. I have seen the dull, open mouthed stares as I walked into the block.

Of course this complicates things for people with ideologies. For starters there is the racial question, if crime is linked to low IQ and certain races are massively over-represented in prison then some awkward questions are going to be asked. Better to believe that education is the answer. I witnessed numerous education programs in prison and I never saw one that made a difference.

This is probably the first disillusionment that most Prison Officers go through. You realise that we are not going to make a difference. The job is entirely futile unless we start sterilising these people and we are nothing more than uniformed baby sitters for retards. You can either accept that, collect your salary and overtime and not give a fuck, focusing instead of family and hobbies, or you can try valiantly and fail to make a difference or you can find some other job.

What every Prison Officer also learns is that Correctional Services, like every other government department, is a haven and a magnet for parasites. The tax payer’s tit is always going to attractive for certain types and they are more numerous than you can imagine.

My worst personal experience of this: we had a prisoner who was a chronic recidivist. He was never out of jail for more than a few weeks. He had brain damage from sniffing petrol and was completely unable to fit in with society. His usual crime was a handbag snatch in a shopping centre followed by a swift arrest.

So some social worker types gather around this lad in prison and attempt to fix him. They attempt a form of art therapy where this retard is encouraged to draw his feelings. He gets released. Within a few weeks he is back in prison but this time for rape. The social workers decide that this counts as success since he didn’t do his normal crime and they submit a report to someone high up in the NT government that shows a promising rehabilitation rate to their program. Someone in the NT government reads this report and approves their funding for the next five years.

Your tax dollars hard at work.

Being a Prison Officer is a job you can only do if you don’t give a fuck. If you actually cared about the troglodytes in your custody you would be unable to do the job. It would get to you too much. A successful Prison Officer (if hanging on to such a futile soul destroying job can ever be termed success) is a man with no fucks to give. He goes to work, he does things by the book to avoid trouble, he gets paid, he goes home. End of story. Not a single fuck to give.

Most of the guys who do it long term are married with kids and are doing solely to feed their family. Most start counting down the years until retirement after a few years hanging on to the dream of getting out.

Just like the prisoners they guard.