What Michelle Wright learnt from working with prisoners

Read a piece by Michelle Wright about her time spent with prisoners which helped inspire her new novel Good Boy.

In 1982, as an eighteen-year-old, I spent four months in Melbourne’s notorious Pentridge Prison, acting with the prisoners’ theatre group in their production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. During this time, I got to know some of the men well and got a small glimpse at life inside a maximum security prison. In the conversations I had with the men, both during the play and in the letters we exchanged afterwards, they shared their insights into what had brought them to prison, their backgrounds, their crimes and their experience of the justice system.

The men I got to know in Pentridge were often charming, funny, courteous, articulate and interesting. And yet they were in there for committing serious crimes, some of them horrific. This contradiction troubled me deeply and still does. It led to my lifelong interest in notions central to criminal justice and incarceration, such as regret, remorse, retribution, rehabilitation and redemption, many of which I explore in my novel, Good Boy.

What I learned back then and what has stuck with me all these years is the complex, contradictory and often incomprehensible nature of these men. The brief time I spent with them confirmed my belief that I couldn’t begin to know them until I’d heard their story. It also confirmed the realisation that what I was getting was a necessarily fragmented and curated version of their lives.

Getting to know the prisoners also led me to reflect on the decisions they’d made in their lives—especially the bad ones. Many of these decisions had very serious consequences—some that could never be undone, that had life changing impacts on others. I asked some of the men what had led them to make those decisions. Their answers weren’t always easy to untangle. But I realised that, in regards to my own bad decisions, I didn’t always truly understand the tangled threads of thoughts and emotions that drove me to make them. I think that probably applies to most people. We’ve all been asked, ‘Why did you say that? Why did you do that?’ And we’ve all answered, ‘I have no idea.’ If that was the case with me, how could I begin to understand the bad decisions these men had made?

I realised that to get anywhere close to knowing the prisoners—to truly understand what led them to make the decisions they did, I would have needed to be with them through all the crucial moments of their lives. This inability to really understand these men strengthened my desire to explore the lives of others through fiction. First as a reader and later as a writer. I realised fiction was one way of getting closer to understanding—by enabling me to live alongside other human beings, to see through their eyes, to be inside their mind. It’s not a perfect or complete insight, but I think it’s as close as we can hope to get.

Good Boy by Michelle Wright is out now.

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Good Boy

by Michelle Wright

Good Boy movingly explores the bonds between dogs and their humans, and how hope might move us beyond punishment and towards redemption.

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