Brian Bourke interview 10 October 2005

There's people interviewed outside courts when someone's sentenced to a long term, saying that they "didn't get enough". I just feel that no-one can quantify what it's like.

When you think of someone who's sentenced to 10 years imprisonment, that's 10 Christmases out there, you've got somebody who's been leading a relatively normal life and most murderers don't have a trail of prior convictions. You might have this gangland stuff, but generally you don't. Persons deprived of all sexual contact and activity for a long period of time.

If you asked top philosophers, it's a very, very important thing in the lives of people to be restrained for any period. Not to be able to handle and cuddle your kids for a long long period of time. They grow up strangers to you and I've seen these incidents out at Port Phillip and other prisons, the attitude of the kids and then the rejection. I wrote a short story once on rejection and it's just the rejection of people because they're locked away for so long.

There will always be evil people that have got to be sentenced, but I would have thought that 80% of people in gaol today when they're released will never go back again. Surely something can be done to weed that out, rather than just gloat that we're locking people up as politicians do. It's not peculiar to any one party - they're all the same.

I stood for Labor once, I wouldn't vote for them again if I was paid. It's just to satisfy a hungry uninformed media that a big gaol sentence means something, forget about the fellow, forget about the man. I can remember Dick McGarvie saying to me once that you've always got to remember that the fellow you're dealing with in the dock's a human being. When you analyse that, there's a heap in that, that's not something that has any sort of recognition in society today and I think the intellectuals of this nation are very short in their inability to analyse that. There's not much complaint here about the way governments just want to go around crushing and destroying people.

Conducted for the Bar Oral History project by Juliette Brodsky in Owen Dixon Chambers East and filmed by Stewart Carter (People Pictures)