‘Prison crushes people’s souls’

A retiring Liberal MP has slammed the state’s bipartisan reliance on prisons and mass incarceration.

A retiring Victorian Liberal MP has fired a parting shot at the bipartisan approach to mass incarceration and the conditions within prisons in the state.

During a debate in the Victorian upper house last week, Liberal MP Matthew Bach, the former Shadow Attorney-General, took aim at massive court backlogs that have led to skyrocketing numbers of people in prison on remand.

“Prison crushes people’s souls, and yet because of failures by this government we have a massive court backlog,” Bach said in Parliament. “We have huge numbers of people on remand who just cannot get their case heard in court.

“It is a scandal that in Victoria right now there is such a massive backlog. It is a scandal that so many Victorians, many of them undoubtedly innocent, are languishing in jails tonight.”

The number of Victorians in prison on remand has skyrocketed in recent decades. In 1997, unsentenced people made up just over 13 percent of the prison population. By 2022, this figure was more than 42 percent. As of last year there were nearly 3000 people on remand in prison in Victoria,

There is a general misconception in the public about conditions within prisons, something which is being driven by media coverage, according to Bach.

“I think some of the media conversations fuels perceptions about prison: ‘It’s like the Hilton; you get a flat screen telly; you get food on demand’,” he said.

“I visited prisons. I visited youth prisons. You would not wish a prison sentence on your worst enemy. The government cannot change men’s souls, except to crush them. The government cannot change men’s souls for the better.”

Bach attempted to position criminal justice reform and a reduction on the reliance on prisons as a conservative or libertarian value, rather than a progressive one.

“What I think we should be doing is not creating bigger and bigger government - more powerful government - but empowering individuals and families and communities,” he said.

“That is where I think our policy direction should be going.”

Bach has been touted as a future leader of the Victorian Liberals. But he recently announced he would be quitting politics to move to the United Kingdom at the end of the year with his family, taking on a role as a teacher and assistant principal.