Every year, almost 20,000 people leave prison in New South Wales, but less than 3 per cent of them get a bed in a supported accommodation program. The residents of Rainbow Lodge are among the lucky few – but one slip-up could land them back inside.
At midnight on January 26, 2009, Mark Doyle was released from Junee prison in southern NSW.
He’d completed a two-year stretch for a string of break-and-enters.
The 41-year-old walked out with only the clothes on his back and a clear plastic bag containing his release papers.
No-one was there to greet him.
Doyle, a softly-spoken man who suffers chronic rheumatoid arthritis, took in the night sky.
A veteran of the NSW prison system, he’s known inside as “Doyley”.
His crimes, never violent, have always been in support of a lifelong drug habit.
The prison at his back, he hurried along the long country road that leads to Junee train station, darkened paddocks to either side.
He made the last service to Sydney. Among his documents was a voucher for 14 days’ accommodation at a grim, fluorescent-lit hotel near Central Station.
Checked into his room and sitting on the bed, he watched daylight creeping into his room.
The elation of being freed from prison evaporated. Doyley was lost, and lonely.
“I had nothing,” he says.
Hours later, he was using heroin again. “I was out on the street within weeks.”
By autumn, he was back inside.
Doyle’s story is no aberration.
The crimes perpetrated by a large portion of the prison population are to fund drug use; four out of every five of those with a history of injecting drug use are under the influence at the time they commit the offence that puts them away.
Laurence Boney estimates his drug addiction has seen him in jail every single year of his adult life; he’s only 29 years old.
Last August, after leaving Wellington jail, near Dubbo, he too was accommodated at the same hotel where Doyle had been put up 14 years earlier.
The establishment was, by now, notorious among ex-prisoners as a drug-den.
“When I first walked in there,” he says, “the first thing people ask, do you want to buy anything?”
The menu was the usual: “Heroin, ice, oxies, endos.”
The hotel is one of dozens contracted by the government to provide emergency accommodation.
Of course, they are not all riddled with drugs. But none offer what ex-prisoners say they need to remain sober, and to avoid reoffending.
“That’s failure,” Boney says. “You’d rather be on the streets.”
New South Wales spends more than $2 billion a year jailing offenders, but only a fraction of that money on supported accommodation programs that keep them from returning.
Just 2 per cent of the 20,000 people who exit jail every year get a bed in such a program. Half of those who miss out end up homeless.
Meanwhile, the state’s recidivism rate has been climbing steadily for more than a decade. Is it any wonder why?
‘We take the men no-one else takes’
Mark Doyle and Laurence Boney are among the lucky few.
They both later obtained a place in a residential program in Sydney called Rainbow Lodge.
Doyle is now three months into his stay; Boney graduated in December.
Run from a two-storey Edwardian house in inner Sydney, the lodge’s name is no hackneyed nod to hope and redemption: It is named after Alfred Ernest Rainbow, a pioneering judge who had spent his career campaigning for jail reform. The lodge opened in 1964, the year after he died.
Today, it’s a 24-hour-a-day professionally supervised home. With ten beds, it’s also the largest of its kind in NSW.
Caseworkers provide assistance with the footings of life: obtaining 100 points of identification, reopening bank accounts, registering for Centrelink.
When they’re ready, the men are eventually helped to find their own home.
But Rainbow Lodge’s mission is far broader.
It seeks to empower its residents to chart a new course, away from the habits of a lifetime. They attend life-skills workshops and cooking classes and make regular visits to nearby gatherings of Narcotics Anonymous. The lodge aims to build “personal accountability”.
Its gate is not locked, and the men can leave any time; they themselves must make a daily choice not to breach their parole conditions. The participants are allocated chores on a weekly roster — from cleaning the bathrooms to cooking nightly meals — and they’re told it’s all, or nothing.
Sitting down together for dinner every night is mandatory.
The program is arduous, and only one in two succeed in completing it. But to meet the residents and to hear their stories, is to understand why.
These are men damaged by their past, then by their mistakes, then by the prison system itself.
They’re also people with nowhere else to go.
I asked the lodge’s manager, Claude Robinson, about Rainbow Lodge’s central philosophy.
“We take the men no-one else takes,” he says.
Robinson should know. He was once one of them.
‘A desperate crime’
Eighteen years ago, the 36-year-old, short and stocky, mouthy and shrewd, his upper arms inked with imperial dragons, was released from Goulburn jail to the lodge.
It was the spring of 2006, and he’d just completed a four-and-a-half-year sentence for robbery and drug supply.
He signed his paperwork in the office kitchen, and was shown upstairs. He was given room 4B looking east past a vast grey ironbark.
Robinson had suffered a tragedy while inside prison — his parents had both died. But for the first time in a long time, he was hopeful.
Now, he wasn’t just free; he also had a $60,000 inheritance.
“I remember that last six months in Goulburn,” he says, “vividly thinking that this was the moment that I’d waited for my whole life, that I was going to have an opportunity to change things”.
But five weeks after the money came through, he quit the lodge, overcome by the lure of heroin.
“The reality was, unfortunately, that within six weeks of getting out, I’d shot up all that money, in the Astoria Hotel in Kings Cross.”
Every day, full of remorse, he promised himself he’d stop. “I’d wake up with my girlfriend and go, I’ll stop using when there’s $20,000 left, when there’s $10,000 [left].
“And then I woke up that last day, and there was no money left. And I was just filled with such dread and terror.”
His thoughts splintering, Robinson careered through the door of a nearby Centrelink office with a plan.
He explained to the man behind the counter that he needed the government to front him his next welfare payment, because he was on the run from parole, and otherwise he’d be forced to mug somebody.
“I was so insane,” he says, “I thought they would go, ‘oh, that’s a really good idea’.”
When the man laughed, Robinson jumped the counter and robbed him.
“A desperate crime,” Robinson says. “I still think of that man … all he did was go to work that day. I had no right to do what I did.”
By the time he made it back to the Cross, the shame caught up with him.
Robinson passed the man’s money and phone to his girlfriend, and kissed her goodbye. He walked over the road to the plain-clothes police who had been looking for him, and handed himself in.
Fourteen days later, at Sydney’s central remand prison at Silverwater, Robinson approached a prison officer he knew, and asked to see the drug and alcohol welfare unit.
The officer smiled: “About time, Robbo.”
‘These are men who have been let down’
In March 2007, Peter Townsend was delivering an intensive drug and alcohol program at Long Bay jail called Ngara Nura, when he had a new offender join the program who caused him no end of frustration.
“Claude Robinson was a pain in the arse,” Townsend says.
“There was just constant misbehaving … endless talking back and giving officers shit.”
But there was something about Robinson that made Townsend persist, and he fought to break through to him.
“I saw in his bastard-mindedness a willingness to make change in his life,” he says.
Townsend’s colleague, Annabel Mayo, says Robinson stood out as bright, and determined: “He hadn’t been defeated by the experience of incarceration.” (Townsend and Mayo both now serve on the Rainbow Lodge board.)
Within two-and-a-half years, Robinson got clean, left prison and gained formal qualifications as a community services worker.
He took a job as a youth counsellor, first with the City of Sydney, then with Parramatta Mission, before winning more senior roles at the Salvation Army and Taldumande Youth Service on Sydney’s northern beaches, where he was responsible not just for 65 young people, but also a $2.8 million budget.
In 2015, he returned to Rainbow Lodge, this time as a board director.
Six years later, he was appointed its boss.
He is clear-eyed about the assignment: the care of broken men.
“These are men who have been let down by the people we are brought up to believe should love and protect us,” he says.
Many of them neglected or abused as children, the lodge residents’ long histories of drug use and crime can usually be traced to chaotic, dangerous childhoods.
A 2019 Queensland study found between 25 and 60 per cent of prisoners are likely to have had contact with child protection services or been hospitalised for mental illness.
“Then, as a society, we have criminalised their trauma response, which is drugs and alcohol, and put the emphasis back onto them,” Robinson says.
“The community has abdicated its responsibility for letting them down as children.”
Mayo says returning prisoners to society is a “messy business”, that few can do well.
“Sometimes, the obvious conventional responses, Claude understands immediately that they are counterproductive.”
Townsend believes Robinson has transformed the organisation.
“I think he is visionary.”
‘The things that I’ve seen … I wouldn’t wish on the worst enemy’
One of Robinson’s initiatives was the introduction of weekly psychological therapy for each resident.
In addition to the ordeals of childhood, by the time they reach the lodge, the men also have to process the long and dangerous stretches of incarceration behind them, where violence is routine.
Michael Pitt, 44, came to Rainbow Lodge in April after pleading guilty to several counts of aggravated break and enter. He has spent the past 30 years in and out of jail.
“The things that I’ve seen in there,” says Pitt, “I wouldn’t wish on the worst enemy.”
“It’s a different ball game in there,” he says.
“You can’t slip, anything could happen at any time. Someone could have a bad phone call. Someone could just bump into you.”
The reason for Pitt’s vigilance — even at Rainbow Lodge he adhered to his two-hour-a-day jailhouse workout routine — was made out by an explosion of violence at Silverwater prison, just six days before he got out.
The trigger was the disappearance of a bottle of milk.
Its owner, hearing talk of who had swiped it, feared he would appear vulnerable should he not retaliate.
“He grabbed this blade, and went and stabbed him five times,” Pitt says.
“He was screaming, blood was everywhere. It was horrific.”
Corrective Services NSW confirmed the victim, having been stabbed by a “makeshift shiv”, spent the next two nights at Westmead Hospital.
“Little things like that, getting stabbed over a milk. It’s not right,” Pitt says.
Pitt went to the man to render first aid, but trying to help can be dangerous.
Another Rainbow Lodge resident, 47-year-old Ben Walker, knows this all too well.
In November 2021, at Goulburn prison, he says he stood up for a “weaker kind of inmate” being forced to divert his “buy-up” — weekly grocery money deposited by his family — into the hands of a gang of other prisoners.
They didn’t enjoy Walker calling them out for their bullying. He shrugs: “They took it very personally.”
A few days later, while in the yard, he noticed a change. “I saw the moves happening. I saw them going to where I knew the blades were being held … and I knew exactly what their intentions were.”
Two men approached him. He says he was stabbed in the temple by one of them — who Walker then knocked out, likely breaking his jaw — then in the ribs by a second man who attacked him from behind.
The three were put in segregation cells beside each other.
“Every time they brought the lunches around,” Walker says, “I would yell out to him, you know, ‘how you going with chewing that lunch?’ He’d try to say to me, ‘yeah, not a problem’. But I knew,” Walker laughs, “I knew he couldn’t chew properly.”
Corrective Services does offer a “Violent Offender Treatment Program”. Pitt, however, says it makes little difference.
“We get worser and worser,” Pitt says.
“Then we come out here, and they expect us to go good.”
Little political appetite for reform
In NSW, the percentage of people returning to prison within a year is more than 42 per cent.
There is evidence that long-term reintegration programs like Rainbow Lodge can reduce recidivism by more than two-thirds, yet the political class has shown little appetite for reform.
Year after year, the state’s corrections budget climbs. It is now in excess of $2 billion. But only a small fraction of this money — $3.7 million, according to the government’s published contracts — is set aside for community-run supported accommodation programs.
Last year, Rainbow Lodge’s share of this money was $832,670. Funding is a persistent anxiety.
For years, Robinson says, successive NSW governments have declined to fund any First Nations-focused reintegration programs proposed by the lodge.
So, in early 2022, when the NSW District Court introduced the Walama List, a new long-term trial of culturally informed sentencing, Robinson saw an opportunity.
The Walama program aims to reduce the over-representation of First Nations people in jail.
Eligible participants, having pleaded guilty, enter into a 12-month conversation with Indigenous elders and the presiding judge, exploring the reasons for their offending, in the hope it might prevent the committing of future offences.
When the scheme was finally launched, however, no money had been set aside to provide accommodation, or cultural programs, for those participants granted bail.
Robinson seized the moment. He went cap-in-hand to Sydney MP Tanya Plibersek, obtained $15,000 of Commonwealth funding, and transformed a storage shed on the property into a double room.
Next, he knocked on the door of the Paul Ramsay Foundation, promising to create an infrastructure of “culture and community” at the lodge to support the Walama List men. Six months later, the foundation wrote out a cheque for $980,000.
The money changed everything.
Robinson has since hired a roster of Indigenous elders to deliver workshops and daily support to the Walama men, as well as Rainbow’s other First Nations residents.
Lodge workers now transport new arrivals from jails across the state.
They often do so in the company of Trent Hagan, a Walama participant who, for his fatherly attentions, and his long stint at the house, has been dubbed “the mayor of Rainbow”.
In addition to weekly cultural connection workshops, once a month, Robinson also brings to Sydney from the NSW north coast a transformational four-day program called “Healing the Warrior”. Many of these Indigenous services are run by respected men who have themselves survived time in jail.
For Nathan Schmalz, a Torres Strait Islander who has been trapped in the criminal justice system for the better part of 20 years, this proved the breakthrough.
‘I don’t want to go backwards’
Schmalz is something of a test case for the Walama List experiment.
Anthony Brookman, a prosecutor, has described his crimes as “among the most serious”.
Last year, he pleaded guilty to more than two dozen offences, from stealing cars to committing a serious assault.
Four weeks after he was first bailed to Rainbow Lodge last November, he disappeared for six hours.
The staff called the police, and when they arrived at the lodge, Schmalz ran. It appeared certain he would be returned to jail.
But on December 4, the 38-year-old appeared at court for his breach hearing, and was given a second chance.
“Here, we will hold you accountable,” says Robinson. “We take our obligations to the court and to the community really seriously. But we’re not going to cease working with you.”
Since then, Schmalz has stayed the course.
He has begun working for Prisoners Aid NSW, transporting and recycling polystyrene, and has remained sober.
He credits his new-found discipline to the connections he has forged with the elders employed at the lodge.
“They have got lived experience,” he says. “At Rainbow Lodge I was around people that understood my path, the journey that I’d been on, the struggles that I’m going through.”
By last month, Schmalz’s commitment had sufficiently impressed Judge Warwick Hunt that he agreed to vary his bail conditions, allowing Schmalz to move into his own flat for three nights a week.
For the first time in two decades, Schmalz is beginning to feel like the chaos might be disappearing from his life.
“Six months ago, I was in a box,” he says. “If someone said to me then that I’d be in society and have a job, functioning normally, I would have told them to go jump.”
Tension remains, however. He still has a long way to go on the Walama program, and much to prove. At its conclusion, the judge may yet sentence him to another term of jail.
“In the past I’ve had no regard for anything,” Schmalz says. “And now I do, I’m accountable, I sit there and think about what my choices are, and the consequences of my actions.”
“I don’t want to go backwards.”
What does it take to repair a damaged life?
According to the state’s regular audits, Rainbow Lodge is meeting every target that’s been set for it.
A recent in-depth study found those who complete its program are half as likely to be charged with new criminal offences.
Nathan Schmalz’s journey, at the lodge, and through the courts, seems a stark illustration of why it might be working.
Yes, the obvious: stability of accommodation, help with the basics of life, the patience of professional staff.
But perhaps more than anything else, it demands the return of dignity to those who would otherwise be cast aside.
“That connection of one human to another sometimes is all we need,” Robinson says.
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Credits:
Reporting: Linton Besser and Ronan Sharkey
Photography: Brendan Esposito
Additional photography: Sissy Reyes, Linton Besser
Digital production: Dan Harrison
A Four Corners and ABC Investigations production