Inside Mary Wade Correctional Centre in Sydney’s western suburbs sits a small, high-ceilinged room lined with desks and computers where inmates learn tools that could unlock a second chance at life on the outside.
The classroom in the minimum-security prison is normally occupied five days a week by prisoners, from early in the morning until about 3.30 in the afternoon, who follow schedules not dissimilar to those observed by students in universities and schools nationwide.
It houses an education program called Take2 that equips inmates with coding and software skills to help them find employment post-release.
The group is reserved, but inmates take turns displaying projects that they’re working on.
One is developing a fitness and meal preparation app, inspired by his work as a personal trainer; another is mapping out a website that will collate resources about the impact of climate change on Australia’s environment.
Take2 founder and chief executive Cameron Smith rolled out the program in two correctional centres in Auckland before bringing it to Australia.
Growing up with a single mother in a low-income household, Smith knew hardship intimately. Though he has never been in the system himself, he says that coming from a disadvantaged background has shaped his view of education as “a ticket out to something different, something better”.
That was the genesis of Take2.
Josh, an inmate whose full name has been withheld for privacy reasons, says the program has changed his life. The 37-year-old has already faced extraordinary obstacles, losing both parents at an early age. “Mum died … [when I was 19], Dad at 20,” he tells the Herald.
Left untethered and vulnerable in a formative period of his life, and looking for something to fill the void created by the death of his parents, Josh turned to drugs, triggering what would be a decades-long battle with addiction – and an even longer one with the justice system.
Josh was 19 when first jailed. Repeatedly, he would be released only to reoffend and wind up back in jail. The cycle lasted 18 years.
“I lived a life of addiction. Just didn’t have any prospects, goals. There was nothing I wanted to do with my life, you know,” Josh says. “So I’d get out of jail, go back to the same area, no employment, straight back on the drugs, straight back around the same people … Just a cycle. You know, both my brothers, same thing.”
Having encountered a life that would harden most people, the softly spoken inmate chokes up when talking about the Take2 program and its impact on his life and view of himself.
For the first time, Josh says, he can envision a future – something that was beyond the bounds of his imagination before he became a student in the course.
“This is a passion … and I’ve never really had a passion or anything that I’ve enjoyed doing before now,” he says. “The one thing that I really lacked before coming here was self-esteem and self-worth. I never found anything that I thought I was good at.”
The cycle of reoffending in NSW
In Australia, the story of recidivism is common. Between 42 and 43 per cent of ex-prisoners in NSW will return to jail within two years of release, according to data from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR).
In 2024, 49.3 per cent of Australians released from sentenced custody reoffended within 12 months.
A spike in reoffending rates since 2014 is partly due to increased police proactivity in responding to domestic violence offenders, says BOCSAR executive director Jackie Fitzgerald, but other factors are at play.
“It is a big jump over time … One of the drivers behind this in NSW is that the prisoner cohort is becoming a more risky cohort, so we are seeing that the custodial population are moving towards a kind of increasing severity.”
Among young people aged 18-24, recidivism is higher. In 2024, 62.5 per cent of young people released from sentenced custody reoffended in the following 12 months.
Young people offend more often and at a higher frequency than older people, Fitzgerald says, highlighting the need for earlier intervention. “We call it the age crime curve … It is a difficult group, and it’s a difficult group to intervene with, and behaviour change is hard.”
Fitzgerald says that research conducted by BOCSAR demonstrates a correlation between inmates who undertake vocational traineeships and a lower risk of reoffending. “I think that traineeships, and the employability of people post-custody is being found to be really effective, so it’s a really great focus for programs in Corrective Services,” she says. “Strategies that look at the reasons why people are reoffending and try to address those are really welcome.”
Dr Mindy Sotiri, executive director at Justice Reform Initiative, says rates of recidivism prove the prison system’s failure.
“What we can see really clearly from recidivism rates all around Australia is that the more time that you spend in prison, the more likely you are to go back to prison. So your risk of return increases the more contact that you have with the criminal justice system,” Sotiri tells the Herald.
“There’s lots of reasons for that, including the institutionalisation process that happens when people go to prison, the disconnection from employment, disconnection from education, disconnection from family, but also the dehumanising environment inside prisons.”
Not only is the system failing its prisoners, Sotiri says, but it is hitting the pocket of Australian taxpayers too. Australians spend about $7 billion a year locking up adult prisoners, and an additional $1 billion a year locking up minors.
The burden on prison systems is only intensifying too. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, overall prisoner rates have increased year-on-year since 2023.
Education programs can prevent recidivism, data shows
If even a fraction of Australia’s investment in prisons was used to fund alternative education programs, Sotiri says, we would see better outcomes for inmates as well as a more efficient investment of taxpayer dollars.
“At the moment, we spend nothing on the programs that we know have a really strong evidence base … There is no doubt that if we were to invest anything like the amount that we are currently investing in this failing system in organisations that already are showing amazing results on a very small scale, we would absolutely see incredible cost savings,” she says.
Robust research on the efficacy of prison programs in reducing the probability of reoffending is fairly scarce in Australia as most inmates who cycle through the system are on remand, meaning they stay in prison for short periods while awaiting sentencing, but never get the chance to participate in a program.
But available data suggests that education programs are effective at preventing recidivism.
‘At the moment, we spend nothing on the programs that we know have a really strong evidence base.’
Mindy Sotiri, Justice Reform Initiative
Prisoners who complete educational and vocational training programs are twice as likely to remain offence-free five years after release, a study by the University of NSW found.
The largest meta-analysis ever conducted on educational studies in correctional settings in the US suggests that prison inmates who receive general educational and vocational training are significantly less likely to return to prison after their release. They are also more likely to find employment than peers who did not partake in education and training.
Professor Eileen Baldry is an Australian criminologist who has taught social policy, social development and criminology to university students for three decades.
She says Australia should model its prison system on Nordic countries such as Norway, Denmark and Sweden, where recidivism rates are consistently low.
In these countries, “the punishment is the sentencing, but prison is not a punitive environment”, Baldry says.
“In prison, the intention is to support someone, to protect their life … In Australia, the approach is the opposite.”
For Joe Kwon, who was sentenced to 13 years in prison at the age of 21 for his involvement in a drug gang, education was a ticket to freedom. “I thought in my head that being a career criminal was going to be the trajectory of my life. And prison seemed to me like a university for criminals, and I was learning from other criminals,” he tells this masthead.
But halfway through his sentence something changed. “Everyone who ended up getting out … They ended up dead, or went back into custody. And I was like, is this a cycle? Is this the life that I want to be involved in? And I looked around the yard, and the common denominator wasn’t just because of some sort of childhood trauma and disadvantage, but it was the lack of education,” the 38-year-old says.
Kwon completed his HSC while incarcerated, and applied to study at UNSW while he was still inside. He recalls the day he received his acceptance letter from the university.
“I took that letter into my cell, and as soon as I opened that letter up, it said, congratulations, you’ve been accepted into the University of NSW. And I just sat in that cell that day, like literally bawling my eyes out because no one understands the feeling of freedom that I was feeling … For me, education not only gave me hope, but it actually set me free,” he says.
Kwon now runs Confit Pathways, a not-for-profit organisation that aims to reduce recidivism, particularly among young people, by providing mentorship and education programs to incarcerated youth. He is also co-founder and director of ConX, an organisation providing reintegration resources for people leaving custody.
Despite its presence in almost every youth justice facility across NSW, Confit does not receive government funding.
In 2016, NSW slashed the numbers of prison teaching staff from 152 full-time positions to just 20, and outsourced the positions for cheaper, lower-qualified or external educators as part of the controversial “Better Prisons” model. The Minns government is now reviewing that model.
The $500 million criminal justice package handed down by the Minns government in the 2025-26 budget did not include any additional investment in prison education programs.
Like Confit, Take2 is not government funded. It is an independent educator that relies on philanthropic funding.
Take2 facilitator and instructor Nick Saltis says the changes he saw in Josh after just 12 months in the course were extraordinary.
“Him coming in each day and becoming a better person, that doesn’t happen through one moment or one conversation … He’s a really good example of the ripple effects of what just 12 months in the program can do.”
Josh has used his class time to build a program designed to assist ex-inmates by compiling resources needed for reintegration in one place. If he’d had access to something similar, he says, it might have prevented him from becoming snagged in the cycle of reoffending.
“There’s not really a list of services for people post-release,” Josh says. “So I’m creating a website that collates everything: you can filter through it, you know, by age, race, whether you’ve got kids, whether you’re male or female … I’m proud of that because that’s something that’ll help other people post release.
“There’s so many people who I’ve met in custody, who have come from broken childhoods, addictions, things that were outside of their control, that I think, given the right opportunities, that they’d be able to make something of their lives, you know?”
Josh will be released at the end of this month.
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