Prisoners to Train as Crocodile Handlers in Australia

Stephanie Peatling in Sydney, Australia
for National Geographic News

October 25, 2006

Many ex-cons struggle to find any job at all—let alone one that seems akin to joining the circus.

But as part of a new project in Australia's Northern Territory, five former inmates are already learning what the state government calls "new life skills" in a crocodile-handling and farm-skills course being run by the city of Darwin's correctional center (map of Australia).

The course, which is to be offered to other former prisoners, is the "first of its kind in Australia and will give prisoners the real-life skills that they can use back in their communities and help them with their rehabilitation," said Syd Stirling, the Northern Territory's minister for justice.

Prisoners will be trained not just in crocodile handling but also in aquaculture, fence repair, and other skills that could help them find work on the territory's vast ranches.

Down on the Farm

The 11-week course comes with nationally recognized qualifications as well as work experience at the Darwin Crocodile Farm.

"It's very hot, it's testing," said farm owner Mick Burns of crocodile handling. "A lot of people aren't comfortable in and around crocodiles."

The prisoners have "only been starting off with the smaller animals, and as they get more familiar with it—and probably more acutely aware of some of the dangers—the animals will start to get a bit bigger."

Burns says training more people in crocodile farming would be a benefit to the Northwest Territory's lucrative crocodile industry, which pulls in tourists and harvests the reptiles for leather and meat.

The Darwin Crocodile Farm alone has some 36,000 saltwater crocodiles, giving the five inmates plenty to work with—such as cleaning the reptiles' pens, working in the meat room, and feeding the crocodiles raw chickens.

Aborigines

Aborigines and other indigenous Australians have a relatively high rate of relapse into criminal behavior. But Stirling, the justice minister, hopes the skills that indigenous prisoners learn will help them buck the trend by improving their job prospects.

"You've got to change the offender," Stirling said, because it was likely that "many of the factors that led them into trouble in the first place are probably still going to be existing in the communities to which they return."

"The best way to [change behavior] is to give them some skills that can translate across a number of industries," he said.

"Crocodile-handling skills, you might say, are not much good in the desert. But the other skills—the broad range of fencing and those sorts of skills—are transferable to other industries."

Farm owner Burns says he would be happy to employ any of the five people who are currently participating in the trial program.

"The benchmark for employment out here is a capacity to work within the rules that we have here, [such as] regularly turning up," Burns said. "And if they stick to all that, we're more than happy to employ them."

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