Losing one’s licence is an economic and social catastrophe for those living in regional Australia. Those caught under the NSW’s drug driving laws face an automatic disqualification period of six months. In special circumstances, for example where the offender requires their licence to care for an elderly family member or commute to and from work, the court has discretion to suspend their licence for three months. However, with public transport practically non-existent in regional and rural areas, the lives of those who reside or work away from town often fold inwards immediately.

Today, capital punishment is generally treated as inhumane, retributive and ineffective at deterring crime. And rightly so. But the question we should now ask ourselves is: when will we see prisons in the same light?

There’s a line in a TS Eliot poem that goes: ‘It seems as one gets older, that the past has another pattern and ceases to be a mere sequence’. The passage of time, Eliot pondered, was more an ongoing carousel of events than any linear path.