There are no votes in prisons. What goes on inside them is usually invisible to the voting public. They house people who have committed crime or who have been accused of committing crime - so the sympathy of the voting public is limited.
But just occasionally, the curtain is drawn back and what we see is truly shocking.
The findings of the coroner about the suicide of Luke Rich reveal how money was not spent and, as a result, a man died, alone and unable to call the mother who now grieves for him.
The coroner's language is calm but chilling: "The territory chose to accommodate newly-arrived detainees in a physical environment they knew to be, in one important aspect, unsafe."
The crucial flaw was that there was a gap behind a bar in a door through which a prisoner could - and in Luke's case did - thread a sheet.
And the non-spenders of money knew about it.
A separate "critical incident" report had outlined how the flaw at the Alexander Maconochie Centre had been identified after a previous suicide attempt.
A request for urgent money had gone up the line: high security doors were "no longer fit for purpose and present a safety risk to detainees and custodial officers". The cost was assessed as $610,000 for 42 doors ($14,300 each).
But back came the response. There were "budget constraints" so only some of the doors were replaced - and clearly not the one on which Luke Rich ended his life.
Ever since it was opened in 2008, there have been problems at the ACT's prison.
In 2022, the ACT's Inspector of Correctional Services reported: "The big issues of detainee boredom, lack of any education, and a perceived decline in staff/detainee relations are chronic and cannot be attributed to the pandemic alone."
An obvious question arises: is the ACT too small a jurisdiction to justify its own prison?
The death of Luke Rich also reveals spending priorities.
There was $8.5 million for a "complexity and systems thinker" to help the Canberra Institute of Technology. There was $78 million for a government computer system which had "multiple failings at all levels".
A fraction of those sums would have made the cells safer. $14,300 would have fixed the door on which desperate, lonely, isolated Luke Rich took his own life.
