(ii) By Don Franks

What kind of a book about New Zealand prisonlife do you expect from a poetic business executive who has variously dabbled in psychology, karate and little boys?

If you can afford $3.25 for 117 pages, plus a hideous and hackneyed cover design by Graham Oates then be in. For the price of a good feed and several jugs afterwards you get a handful of competently reported prison anecdotes, far too much about the various accomplishments of John Justin and 18½ pages of absurdly silly conclusions at the end.

The first part of the book is the type of thing that has been dealt with in a great many prison novels, the nastiness and stupidity of the "screws", the food, the routine, the frustrations. Of particular interest to vindictive people like me is the question of the author's crime and guilt. "Justin" hovers round this smelly subject for many pages, giving a fairly clear impression but not stating that he was in for molesting children. The hints and asides would have been far better replaced by "I did such and such gentle reader, if you don't like it, well, fuck you."

The author is similarly coy about his innocence or guilt, answering accusers with "I pleaded not guilty". Or consider the following passage. "On the last day of the trial I was found guilty, contrary to my counsel's assurance that the prosecution had no case, by a jury, the foreman of which I had known for years and whose wife had been a member of an organisation of which I had been director....."

You can't help but get the impression that Prisoner was written very largely to get all of this out of the author's system. If you enjoy watching flies pull their own wings off this might be your book. I personally don't mind the odd nearly true confession now and then and some of the anecdotes and bits of description sound fairly accurate. If this was the beginning and end of the book then it would merely be another memorial to Niel Wright's thesis that life and literature are hell under social democracy.

But Prisoner contains something more, a phenomenon just as revolting as the "carbolic food" of Wi Tako. It is infected from cover to cover with that contagious disease of the petty-bourgeoise - amat[unclear: eur] psychology. Throughout the book conclusions are drawn from the selected anecdotes that most if not all prisoners are nutters. For example: "My thesis is that so-called prisoners are the mentally ill. Some are chronically ill, some are suffering from minor ailments. Much could be done about it and if society took this view and forgot its greed in the rat race for position and money for just a little while it could cure the great majority and rid itself of most of its so-called criminals."

This passage may be fairly said to sum up the main message of the book, the rest of his conclusion is mainly repetition and enlargement of it, with a few contradictory statements, presumably to make his "theory" seem more complex.

Well, for a start the prisoners may be "so-called", certainly, but prisoners are prisoners, in New Zealand just as in the Soviet Union, which the author shows such a dislike of.

To call actual prisoners "so-called" is to begin at a position of unreality or a form of liberalism.

To call these prisoners mentally ill is to play right into the hands of the established order. It assumes that our society is so wonderful that only an insane man could break its laws.

This is an obvious conclusion from such silly "logic". So the author covers it up by saying that the real criminals are too clever to be caught. The flaw in his argument that we should convert all prisons into asylums is that society will be as full of criminals as before, a notion that does not appear to disturb our reformer.

"Society" is never defined anywhere in Prisoner. Michael Joseph Savage is at least twice quoted (unsourced) on the question of "society has the amount of criminals it deserves." Surely one would then go on to seek out the motive force of the society in question, its composition, structure and so forth.

But the man with all the answers contents himself with morbidly observing that "if society forgot its greed" then all would be well. But what causes greed? Is it equally existent in every type of society? It is a great pity, but New Zealand society will not forget its greed for the sake of a theory which says that a prisoner who steals a tin of coffee is merely mad.

The "rat race for position and money" is an aspect of the struggle between classes in our society. In a class society such as New Zealand the legal, judicial, and prison system is basically the instrument of the ruling class (in NZ the bourgeoise) to maintain its position of "dictatorship masked by parliamentary forms" (V.I. Lenin State and Revolution).

This is not to deny that our type of society produces much mental illness, which is intensified in the most oppressive conditions of a prison. The author has seen the alienation but not the cause. As the author correctly points out "society cannot solve this problem by shutting it away in little remote corners.... in the hope that the problem will disappear."

Neither can the problem be solved by the suggestions of "John Justin", who as far as I can see has merely constructed an elaborate rationalisation for actions of which he is ashamed.