There is a coastal lookout two kilometres from the Albany Regional Prison. It is a spectacular lookout. Limestone cliffs fall into the Southern Ocean and in the distance you see West Cape Howe, Western Australia’s most southerly point. Below the ocean is all crystal blue and raging surf, and those black patches and dots are sharks and stingrays and schools of salmon.
My best mate, Sam, lives just around the corner from this lookout. But Sam does not get to see this view. Not at least for the next fourteen years.
He is eight years into a minimum 22-year prison sentence for murder.
Today, the closest thing to a lookout that Sam can see is the mural of the Porongorup Ranges painted on the wall in the courtyard of the prison visits room. Three razor wire fences overshadow the painting.
Now, here comes Sam, bouncing out of the holding cells and into the visits room. He is lean and sprightly, wearing prison-green shorts and a t-shirt. He is sporting two cuts under his right eye and an under-cut hairstyle. We make a manly embrace. Sam goes off to make us hot-drinks at the kitchen counter.
Sam is one of the only people I consider a true friend. I know I could trust Sam with my life, because I have before.
One night, when I was seventeen, I was with five mates in Fremantle celebrating an eighteenth birthday. It was 2am and we were paralytic drunk. We had been refused entry to every venue in town and we were loitering in a park.
Unbeknown to me, one of the boys in our group had found a phone on a park bench, and pocketed it.
That phone belonged to a musclebound Turk. He and two of his mates came looking for it. We were prime suspects. They approached me first and asked if I had stolen it. Being young and full of Dutch courage I squared up to the men and told them to get fucked: don’t come and falsely accuse me of being a thief.
The men bashed me and robbed me of my gold chain and my iPhone.
They kept circling our group, clearly not satisfied with my belongings as a substitute for theirs.
I snuck away and called Sam’s number from a payphone and told him what had happened. He drove to meet me. He warded the men away with a hockey stick, and found out who in our group had taken the phone. He gave it back to the men. He got my phone and my chain back for me. He told me to get in the car and drove me home.
Sam and I in a prison visit in 2013.
Sam comes back to the prison visits table with two cups of instant coffee, mine in a foam cup, his in a blue plastic mug. He sits on the other side of the melamine table.
Sam is sorry for what he has done. I know he’s sorry. He doesn’t need to tell me and I don’t need to ask. There is an understanding between us men and we don’t always need to speak to say something. Sam knows, I know, that ice has taken him to a place he can never really come back from. He made a mistake. A dirty, whopping, irreversible mistake that destroyed countless lives, including his own. He understands and accepts that now he must pay for that mistake, and that the sentence he has received is fair and just.
This all goes without saying.
I ask Sam how he’s doing. Eighteen months ago, when I saw him last, he told me about his journey to self-atonement: exercising three times a day, meditating, studying Middle-Eastern History, counselling other prisoners, and working in the gym and studying environmental science.
But lately, he says, things haven’t been so good.
“You have good days and you have bad days in prison,” he says.
“The bad days can easily become bad weeks, bad months, bad years. It’s a constant struggle to stay in control of your own mind. I feel, not hopeless, but it’s hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel.”
“It’s like walking around with two cinder blocks on each shoulder. I feel I’m a burden on my parents and the people I love, my sisters and brother, my nieces and nephews, my cousins and my Aunties and Uncles. I worry that my parents are getting older and I’m not there for them. I worry about how I’m being institutionalised and how I can ever go from being someone who is respected in jail to just another ex-con out there. I worry about all the lives that I changed with one senseless act.”
Sam does his best to stay philosophical, if not positive, about his sentence. But it is almost impossible at times, he says, because jail is a place defined by self-abasement and bullies and irresponsible kid-brains; people who believe their crimes are the faults of the police or the victims or anyone but them.
For the last eleven months, Sam has shared a two-by-four-metre cell with one of those people.
“He was a user, on the subbies,” says Sam. He’s referring to Subutex, an opioid replacement therapy commonly abused in prisons.
“Every morning he’d be up, guzzling water and trying to flush his system so he didn’t return a dirty piss test. He had that typical ‘woe-is-me’ kind of attitude and he was always trying to beat the system.
“After he got knocked back on his parole, he just locked himself in the cell – our cell. Didn’t wanna come out. Stayed in there all day, just lying there in the dark smoking ciggies. It’s like, “fuckin’ hell, mate. I live in here too, you know. Can’t we put some music on or the telly or something? Yeah, you got knocked back on your parole. You’re still injecting drugs in jail, what do you expect?”
Sam did his best to help carry his cell mate through his sentence. He does what he can to carry many of the other men in the prison because that is just who he is, and he is liked and well-respected for it.
But jail is also an inherently violent place, and maintaining relationships and feelings is a volatile business, says Sam.
“One of the most difficult things is to not get drawn into it all - the politics and conflict. I try to always be polite and friendly to everyone, but you can’t be too friendly because then people expect you to get involved when things go off.”
“A man has to be prepared to fight to feel in prison. You know this world, bro, you know what it’s like. People get a lot of things confused. They mistake kindness for weakness, fear for respect, confidence for arrogance.
“I don’t believe men should not cry or show any emotion. I won’t hide that part of me from myself.”
“On the same token, I’m not going to be anybody’s punching bag. If someone wants to take me for a weak cunt, or try and stand over me… whack.”
Sam punches his fist into an open palm, I become aware of the words inscribed on his tattooed forearm - integrity, justice, only God can judge me.
It helps Sam to navigate this world by imagining he is a lighthouse. He imagines himself as that stoic and immovable structure, standing tall on his own outcrop. Observing. Shining his light over a dark and angry sea.
The other prisoners notice Sam’s light. Sometimes they come up there into his lighthouse and knock on the glass windows and ask for his guidance. Sam is by nature a compassionate man and he feels obliged to help, but he is also frustrated by the seeming futility of his efforts.
“What good is it trying to help people who can’t help themselves?” he says.
“I don’t mean to trivialise anyone else’s jail, but a lot of guys get five years and think it’s a catastrophe,” says Sam.
“They get out and a few months later they’re back in again. They’re wasting every chance they get. It gets me down, bro, makes me think ‘what’s the point?’”
“But then I remind myself that if I can help one person stay out of jail and change their life, then it’s all worthwhile.”
Sam hopes he can make a difference because hope is all he has to get him through. He hopes for others and he hopes for himself too. His main hope is to one day get another chance to do some good outside of these prison walls.
He often wonders what that first day of freedom would feel like. He imagines it to be like experiencing everything again for the first time. Swimming in the ocean, falling in love, eating a decent meal: maybe steak with béarnaise sauce and crispy roast potatoes and a fresh salad, one that all those selfish pricks in the kitchen haven’t stolen the carrots and the onions and all the good bits from. He imagines even the simplest of tasks that me and you take for granted, like crossing the road, to be total ecstasy.
He asks me: Can you imagine life for the first time, aged 50?
I can’t imagine it because I don’t know what a life-sentence feels like. But I can imagine myself in Sam’s position, because this was almost me.
Author as a teenager in 2010.
I was fortunate to realise early enough where ice was taking me. It was either here or the cemetery.
But why shouldn’t I be in here? What is it that determines who gets another chance and who doesn’t? Is it just fortune or is it fate? Are our lives are charted to a pre-determined course, or is there such a thing as true free will?
If there is anyone who is qualified to answer this question, it is the prisoner. It is Sam. Hell, he thinks about it enough.
“I wonder how things might have been different,” he says.
“I wonder what might have happened if my parents hadn’t put me into after-school care and that old pervert hadn’t touched me up. Or if that doctor hadn’t prescribed me dexamphetamine in Year Two. Would I have been on the gear if that hadn’t happened? Or what if I did go to meet Rosalie [Sam’s ex] when she called me on the night of the murder?
“I think about all these things all the time. It’s enough to send you insane. But I try not to think about it too much, because if I wasn’t in jail who knows if I would even still be here.”
Looking over the table, it breaks my heart to see Sam sitting there on the other side. He is my older brother, my uncle. He has a heart of gold and he is bright and wise and caring and compassionate, and all of his potential has landed here in this scrap heap.
I tell Sam I miss him.
His eyes well up with tears.
Mine do too.
Sam wonders if there was any good that has come out of this, or was all this suffering just in vain? I remind him that yes, there was some good. This murder was a pivotal moment in my life. It was then that I realised this is where ice can, and will take you, and this is not where I or anyone really wants to go. This murder helped me to control of my life. I feel compelled to truly live because there are so many others who can't.
Sam asks me about my life and how I’m doing. I tell him about my girlfriend and the bush block in Yallingup where we’re living together. I tell him about the garden where we grow vegetables and the beach just down the road and the little tinnie we bought and take offshore on the calm and windless days to catch fish. I tell him about the disability support work that I’m doing and the book that I’m writing.
I tell him about my struggles, too. About my relationships with my parents and my siblings and the difficulties we all have in transcending past hurts. About the damage that ice did to my emotional development, and how I didn’t realise how damaged I really was until I found myself in a relationship. About how I struggle to find self-forgiveness and to rediscover joy and appreciate all the simple things in life, just like Sam does.
“You know, you should give yourself more credit, bruz,” says Sam.
“You’ve come a long way. You’re doing good things – working with people less fortunate and giving back. I’m proud of you and it makes me happy to see you doing well.”
The clock is running down on our visit. I try to describe that coastal lookout to Sam and promise to send him some A4 photos I took of the sunset down there last night. He wants them to hang on his cell wall. It is all he has to try and imagine the world out there.
The prison guards call ‘Time’ and Sam and I stand up and hug. I tell him that I love him, and that I’ll always be here for him because he is a true friend and he was always there for me, drugs or no drugs.
I go to sit back down at the visitors table, confused about where I am supposed to go next. Sam corrects me.
“You gotta cruise, bruz,” he says.
“I gotta stay here.”
Back outside of the prison gates, I get in my car and drive back to that coastal lookout. It is early evening now and I crack a cold beer from the car-fridge and watch the sunset. The sun disappears behind the Cape and the sky changes from orange to pink to deep red. Soon it is night. In the distance there is a flicker. A light sweeps across the ocean, searching, scanning. Warning.