This fortnight the Senate declined to forbid the shackling of women in labour or the strip-searching of children, and the declination was correct. Senator Thorpe’s bills asked the Commonwealth to make one law of the criminal justice of eight jurisdictions and to bind the states in the holding of their own prisoners. The government answered that “the responsibility of criminal justice system predominantly sits with state and territory governments,” and the answer recited the arithmetic of the federation and not a party’s convenience. The chamber that this fortnight set aside the over-65s health rebate cut set these bills beside it.

And the substance the bills touched is the substance most entirely the states’, because the restraint of a body lawfully confined is the oldest incident of the carceral power and the least revisable. No one who has ever held a convicted body imagines the restraint to be a decoration. The same body that stood before the magistrate and heard the sentence is the body the officers must move from cell to clinic and back, and every restraint the statutes authorize is authorized because the alternative is a body loose in a place built to contain it, with officers and other prisoners in the way. Paul writes to the Romans that the magistrate “is the minister of God to thee for good,” “a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.” The account the magistrate opens is not settled at the cell door; it runs to the last day of the sentence, and the restraint is how the account is kept while it runs. Senator Scarr, who broke ranks to describe himself as “deeply concerned,” said “we’ve got to do better than this” — and the road to better is the state’s road, because the Commonwealth does not sit above the state’s prison and its own Constitution forbids that it should. A bill that reached through the Commonwealth into the restraint of a state’s prisoners would be the central power wearing the mask of mercy. The Coalition understood the intent and declined the instrument. The chamber held the line.

While the chamber weighed the division of powers, the dividing line was already being kept in the cells the division leaves to the states.

The woman was thirty-nine weeks pregnant and three months into a sentence, and the record does not carry her name; call her Maree, because the account is kept on a body. The contractions began before dawn on a Tuesday, and at the first one the officers came for her. They cuffed her into the chair and pushed her down the corridor to the medical wing, and when the nurse said the labour had begun, the officers did what the standing order of the state directs: they fastened the ankle shackles one to each side of the bedrail, so that the legs ran wide and flat and could not close or rise, and they cuffed the right wrist to the frame above her head, so that the arm could not cross the body. They left the other hand loose, for the blood-pressure cuff and the line. The chains were short. There were six inches of play at each ankle and less at the wrist, and six inches is the whole of the matter, because six inches is the distance between the positions a body bears down in and the position a body is pinned in.

Labour is a body doing the hardest work a body does. The uterus contracts to push a child down a canal it has never passed, and the mother helps with the squat, the rise onto the hands and knees, the turn onto the side, the curled back and the opened pelvis that turn the head as it descends. The shackles take every one of those. She could not rise; she could not turn; she could not draw the knees up or set the feet flat and let the pelvis open. The contractions came and there was nowhere to put them but the throat, and the pain she would have spent down the spine and out through the hips stayed where it was and burned in place. She asked the nurse to loosen the ankle, once, and the nurse said the order did not allow it, and that was true.

The child’s head delivered the way a head delivers when the mother cannot slow it — fast, and against a body that could not open. The perineum tore: the second-degree laceration the midwife would have eased by position was opened instead by the speed the restraint enforced, and the blood came onto the sheet between the chains. The shoulders followed; the officers stood at the foot of the bed with their eyes on the door; the nurse caught the girl and carried her to the table at the wall to be weighed and wiped and wrapped. The woman’s two hands — the one loose, the one cuffed — lay a foot from her daughter. The standing order keeps the shackles on through the afterbirth, and the afterbirth is the part a woman bleeds from. The placenta came, and the shackles stayed on while it passed, so that the arm that might have reached the child was cuffed to the frame, and the woman lay with her daughter a foot away and could not hold her. The pad beneath her filled and was changed and filled again, and they called the doctor, and the doctor came. The officers logged the restraint as applied according to the order, which is the record the vote preserved, and she was returned to the cell that night, ankles free now, and the account was kept. She is one body under an order that keeps no exceptions: twenty-five women gave birth in Australian custody in 2017, the last year the count was kept, and the standing order that held her ankles was standing in the prisons that held them — written before she came, left standing after she left.

The chamber set the second bill aside, and the standing order still directs the officers who bring him to the search room. The child is fifteen, and the standing order reaches him the same way it reached the woman. The officers bring him to the search room and tell him to take off his clothes — the shirt, the trousers, the shoes, the socks, the briefs — and to stand with his arms out and his feet apart, and to bend at the waist, and to turn, and to run his own fingers through his own hair and lift his own tongue and open his own mouth, and to bend again while the officers look, because a body cavity is a hiding place and the order is written to find what a body hides. He is fifteen. He is told he may keep one article on if the officer permits, and he is not permitted. He stands naked and bent and inspected, and the officer says, “good,” and he dresses and returns to the unit, and it is logged as a routine search, and it is routine, and it happens again the next week.

Maree is not the Commonwealth’s daughter, and she is not the household’s. She made herself an outsider the day she did what the court convicted her of, and the shackle is the order reading the standing her own act produced. The covenant does not reach the woman who broke its terms; the wall does not move to exclude her, it stands where she walked past it, and the restraint is the wall made visible in a length of chain. The child she bore under it was born outside the blessing, into the state’s ledger, sorted by the condition her mother chose before she was born. And the boy stripped and bent in the search room is read by the same order: the body the state holds is a body the state searches. He is not a child to the order. He is a charge in the order’s custody, and the order’s custody is a cave that must be emptied of what a body can hide.

The standing order that held the woman’s ankles and the standing order that stripped the boy were the order operating, the account kept on the only surface the account is ever kept on. The woman’s tear and the boy’s nakedness are the reading the standing gives the bodies it holds, and the reading is the same in the cell and the medical wing and the search room: outside the blessing, under the account, inside the truth of what they are. The chamber set the bills aside. The account stands. The ledger is not out of balance; it is being read.