(Editor’s note: Bernie Matthews, a long-time resident of rural and regional Australia, journalist and former bank robber, was all set to start a regular blog for OurPatch when he was unexpectedly detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure at the end of April. Still keen to post his blog, Bernie has sent in his first entries written by hand. We will be publishing them over the next few days, with future postings hopefully to follow. Here’s his first post (please note that Bernie is not receiving payment for his articles).)

Hello out there, it’s Bernie Matthews at this end. The state calls me prisoner 101904. And this is my patch – cell 182 at the Metropolitan Remand and Reception Centre, Silverwater, Australia. I am no stranger to prison. I have served nearly 18 years of my life behind walls and razor wire for armed robbery and prison escapes – three of those years served for crimes I did not commit. Collateral damage to the life of a career bank-robbing criminal, some would say. But I haven’t always been a criminal.

In 1993 I became the first Australian ex-prisoner to be admitted into Australian Journalists Association of the Queensland Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (freelance journalist section) without tertiary qualifications or conventional work experience in the journalism field. I was admitted into the AJA based on the quality and quantity of published work I produced during the period 1977-93.

In 2004 I became the first ex-prisoner/ freelance journalist to be short listed for 3 journalism awards at 2004 Queensland media awards. I won two of those awards. The third award, the best investigative journalism award, was won by the Channel 9 program A Current Affair and although my entry –  ‘DNA and the Justice Game’ published in the 2004 winter edition of the Griffith Review, ‘Making Perfect Bodies’, was pipped at the post in that category it gave me some satisfaction that I was up against the big guns in journalism and could hold my own against their experience and journalism skill. Not bad for a lad from the wrong side of the tracks.

In 2005 a New Zealand journalist, Donna Chisholm, deputy editor of the New Zealand paper Auckland Sunday Star-Times, wrote a feature on my life as a career bank-robbing  journalist. The feature won her New Zealand’s equivalent to the Australian Walkeys Award for journalism, called the Qantas Journalism Award. I had become a bank-robbing career criminal who could write. That paradox stymied the stereotypical perspective of criminality.

In 2006 I graduated with a bachelor of mass communication majoring in journalism from the University of Southern Queensland and later the same year I wrote my first book Intractable: Life Inside Australia’s First Super-Max Prison, published by Pan McMillan Australia. Intractable was my autobiographical/historical account of the NSW prison system from 1969 to 1980, at a time when I was serving 18 years for armed robbery.

And now I am back again. Possible for the last time, a dicky ticker (heart disease) reduces my life expectancy at a daily rate, but there’s a saying on the yard- “If you can’t do the time don’t do the crime.”

And that sums it up. Prisoner philosophers cut straight to the chase. No embellishment. No political correctness. No bullshit. It’s all black and white behind these walls. Another planet, out of sight, out of mind to the general public. And now that I have traveled the full circle of prison – parole – and more prison I will try to use my skills as a writer in my patch to give a rare insight into a world some call the land of the living dead, others call it the college of knowledge – the university of crime.

One undeniable fact remains though, prisons in Australia fail in their obligation to society because they fail to rehabilitate. You can take the man out of the prison but you cannot take the prison out of the man. And perhaps that is why the return rate to Australian prisons is so high.