Institutional Incarceration: From Chains to Credentials

Earlier today I was standing in the shower in my home in East Fremantle, Western Australia. As the water droplets stimulated the top of my head, my thoughts drifted to the date itself. Australia Day 2026. From there, my thoughts turned further back to Port Arthur, a place I had visited only two weeks ago.

Fremantle and Port Arthur.

Two places separated by ocean and time.

Once joined by purpose.

Fremantle and Port Arthur were destinations for convicts deported from England in the 1800s.

Back then they called them penal colonies. The phrase sounds too gentle now, like a softened sentence in an old schoolbook.

But what if these were never colonies at all. What if they were acknowledged as being... forced labour institutions?

Seen that way, suffering was not a side effect. Suffering was the entire lesson plan.

In those places, a seven year old child could be branded a criminal, chained, loaded into a ship’s hold, and sent across the world for stealing a toy. Not because the child was wicked. Not because the child understood crime. The child was hungry. The child had no toys of their own. That child existed inside a system that decided hunger itself was the crime.

Seven years old was the age of accountability.

The child did not steal out of malice.

They stole out of emptiness.

The punishment was not for the act.

The punishment was for the need.

Van Diemen’s Land. Even the name was built to terrify. And that terror was not symbolic. It was policy. Floggings. Solitary confinement. Execution for anyone who showed the strain.

The convicts built the cathedrals, the government houses, and the roads that still stand today. Every stone carries blood and sweat and lash marks. The architect received the statue. The stonemasons were forgotten.

That is the extraction model.

Capture the knowing from those who have it.

Punish them for having it without the right papers.

Claim credit at the top.

Erase the hands that actually did the work.

But there is another truth that must be spoken.

Before the convicts arrived, before the chains and the ships and the ledgers, there were the First Nations peoples.

They were not transported.

They were erased.

Where convicts were punished, First Nations people were displaced.

Where convicts were exploited, First Nations people were dispossessed.

Where convicts were controlled, First Nations people were declared invisible.

Their crime was not hunger.

Their crime was existence.

They did not enter a forced labour system.

They entered a forced forgetting.

Language taken.

Law overwritten.

Land renamed.

Stories silenced.

For the convicts, suffering had an end date.

For the First Nations peoples, suffering was designed to be permanent.

The empire called it settlement.

History called it progress.

But the geometry was conquest.

This was not just extraction of labour.

It was extraction of memory.

Extraction of identity.

Extraction of belonging.

If the convict camps were universities of brutality, then the frontier was a curriculum of disappearance.

And still, First Nations knowledge survived.

Not in buildings.

In songlines.

Not in certificates.

In kinship.

Not in archives.

In bodies and memory and land.

Their knowing was never credentialed.

It was lived.

Their science was never accredited.

It was relational.

Their geometry was not angular.

It was circular.

Not hierarchical.

But connected.

What the empire could not measure, it tried to eliminate.

And yet it remains.

Every road built by convicts crosses land that already knew how to listen.

Every institution stands on a foundation that once held law without walls.

So when we speak of broken systems, we must speak of both.

The convicts who were brutalised.

And the First Nations peoples for whom the brutality never ended.

One was imprisoned by empire.

The other was erased by it.

In many ways, theirs was far worse.

And any new geometry of humanity must begin here.

Not with credentials.

Not with institutions.

But with recognition.

Because the deepest injustice was not punishment.

It was denial of knowing.

That geometry never vanished.

It simply changed clothes.

Today’s universities, healthcare systems, and accreditation bodies follow the same shape, only with softer language.

Central authority.

Enforced compliance.

Punishment for deviation.

Advancement only through demonstrated conformity.

Dropout or noncompliance recorded as failure.

Education and treatment become forced angular correction.

The only difference is branding.

Incarceration became enrolment.

Cell block became classroom.

Warden became dean.

Parole board became examination committee.

Recidivism became noncompliance.

They tell us it is different now.

They tell us education is a choice.

Try walking away without credentials and watch what happens. No legitimacy. No work in your field. You are branded a dropout. The modern word for criminal.

That is not freedom.

That is coercion wearing a consent form.

The colonial project did not end.

It evolved.

First, indigenous knowledge was erased and the land declared empty.

Then convicts were forced to build the infrastructure.

Now compliance with credentialing is enforced and called meritocracy.

I am fifty one years old.

No formal schooling past fifteen.

Ancestors crushed by the same empire.

I grew up in scarcity.

The same age seven hunger those children knew.

I dropped out.

Institutions dismissed me not because I was wrong, but because I had no papers.

So I built anyway.

Twenty plus years ago it began with Weblocs. The original website included an image of a spiderweb holding everything together. Distributed load. Tensile structure. I could feel the geometry then, well before I had the language for it.

Today there is a home owned outright in East Fremantle.

Through two and a half years of regular discussion with medical professionals, including my psychiatrist, and other therapeutic collaborators the Spectral Binary framework is acknowledged as being a noval framework worthy of futher development and validation.

The output (beyond these words).

Fifteen to twenty interconnected applications built on proprietary frameworks for emotional tone analysis.

Technical infrastructure tested across multiple domains.

And the institutions - they'd struggle to recognise any of it as legitimate.

Not because it is wrong.

Because their reference frames demand credentials I was never given.

That is not my failure to create something meaningful.

It is their gimbal lock.

Consider Maggie Simpson. Pre verbal. She sees structural truth the adults miss. She responds accurately and is dismissed because she cannot speak institutional language.

We laugh at the satire.

We do not admit that we are Maggie.

Spectral Binary measures emotional geometry across four spectrums. Warmth. Certainty. Intensity. Coherence. It treats emotions as mathematical structures rather than moral failures. It reveals relational misalignment instead of pathologising the person.

A seven year old taking a toy was not criminal.

They were experiencing scarcity.

A neurodivergent person failing to regulate is not disordered.

They are experiencing geometric difference the system cannot recognise.

This is not about me being legitimised.

It is about proving authority was never required.

Clinical outcomes without credentials.

Geometric precision without formal training.

Therapeutic validation without approval.

The convict system did not end because institutions grew kinder.

It ended because maintaining brutality became more costly than recognising humanity.

Credentialing is now collapsing under its own impossibility.

You see it in incarceration rates.

In mental health crisis.

In quiet quitting.

In every person who knows the system is broken but cannot yet name it.

I am not waiting for permission.

I am building evidence that makes permission irrelevant.

This is not revolution.

It is geometry asserting itself.

And geometry always wins.