If you treat inmates like animals, they’ll act like animals. What happens when they get out of jail? Would you want them living in your suburb?

In the third episode of Behind the Walls: Daily Life, crime author and former journalist Michael Duffy learns how inmates – and staff – spend a typical day at prisons including Cessnock, Dawn de Loas and Bathurst correctional centres.

Macquarie Correctional Centre prison officer Liz Sears tells Michael:

“Essentially our job as a prison officer is to make our community safer, and in order to do that we need to give these inmates as much chance as possible to re-enter society and be safe, because they will be living next door to us.

“We are not giving them any more than what they deserve or any more than anyone else on the outside deserves, we are just giving our community as a whole, the chance to be safe.”

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