Ben Harvey: Jail time is about to get harder as WA prisons ban inmates from smoking cigarettes

At first blush the decision to bite the bullet and ban smoking in WA prisons looks ill-timed. The Government is locked in a bitter dispute with prison officers over overtime; riots are breaking out like spot fires; a COVID hangover is upending rosters; and a core group of teenage prisoners are running rings around guards and jail bosses alike. The decision to grant prisoners a relatively hefty pay rise for the work they do inside while short-changing the people who guard them is upsetting the staff. And there’s been a wave of unflattering headlines. The call to allow a purple circle of inmates at Wooroloo to host a late-night soccer party at the behest of a one-time bikie boss failed the pub test. Ditto the decision by senior Freemasons who are jail bosses to assign two bikie associates and a notorious drug dealer the task of creating a wooden carving of a Masonic symbol. So why risk more unrest and controversy by banning smokes? Perhaps the Government knows there is no good time to enforce a tobacco ban, so why wait. WA and the ACT are the only jurisdictions that allow smoking in jail. The ladies are the first to be forced to quit. The sale of tobacco ends at Bandyup Women’s Prison in less than three months. Maybe prison bosses think women will be less likely to riot. Good luck with that: more than 80 per cent of inmates at Bandyup smoke. On October 31, 161 already testy women are going cold turkey. And the 5000 smokers in the 17 other detention facilities that dot WA will be stubbing out in the coming months and years. That’s a lot of people getting irritable all at once. Who knows how they will react. The threat of wholesale rioting is the reason we’ve continued to let out prisoners light up. It should have ended years ago and not for public health reasons — for industrial relations reasons. We’ve been willingly exposing prison staff to passive smoke. WorkSafe warned the department it needed to end it in 2014. Joe Francis, who was corrective services minister at the time kicked the can down the road to Fran Logan, who kicked it to incumbent Bill Johnston (pictured). Bill actually had the guts to own the problem, probably figuring that one more drama isn’t going to make that much difference. He would also know that there’s only been one documented riot that coincided with a smoking ban. That was in Melbourne in 2015. Plus, Bill is not so naive to think the ban will mean people won’t smoke in jail. They just won’t be able to buy their cigs at the canteen. Tobacco will join the long list of contraband that enters the jail system inside someone’s rectum. Think about it. We can’t stop 14-year-old students vaping in classrooms; what hope do we have of stopping 5000 hardened criminals, many of whom are experts at smuggling drugs, from sneaking a fag? Crims on the east coast have already worked out how to game the system. They call it “teabacco”. All you need is a nicotine lozenge and some Earl Grey. They all know how to do this, so I’m not letting the cat out of the bag here. You crush the lozenge, mix it with tea leaves and wrap them in the thin pages of the Bible you have obtained from your prison ministry. Prisoners across the State spend $10 million a year on smokes. Tobacco accounts for half of all canteen sales. They will be better off financially and medically but the public health upside is a by-product (as it was when we stopped people smoking in pubs). This change is primarily aimed at making sure we comply with the Work Health and Safety Act. WA Prison Officers Union secretary Andy Smith has lobbied for this ban for years. He should be celebrating this win but he’s preoccupied with trying to work out whether he is in fact the secretary of the WA Prison Officers Union. Andy was late in submitting some paperwork and there are questions about the validity of his position because elections haven’t been held within the four-year limit. The reason we know about the union’s dirty laundry is because Johnston used Wednesday’s Question Time to air it. Andy has been a gigantic pain in Bill’s arse over the past few weeks and the minister has had enough. He took Andy to task for criticising work practices of fellow union members. The gallery at Parliament House was treated to the unusual spectacle of a former State Secretary of the Australian Labor Party selling out one of his comrades by bagging him for selling out his comrades. Johnston’s not the first Labor politician to drop the workers of the world uniting rhetoric when they have to pay the bills. The threat of wholesale rioting is the reason we’ve continued to let our prisoners light up