JourneyOnline
I WAS IN Boggo Rd pre-Fitzgerald as a 17 and 18-year-old and then again just after Fitzgerald.
I watched Fitzgerald unfold, I got out of prison and my life changed. We started Sisters Inside. I studied social work and more recently became a lawyer.
Throughout all of this time I’ve watched and wondered just what happened about our dreams and hopes that what Fitzgerald was recommending would lead to a more compassionate, coherent, and sensible world. But somehow it hasn’t.
Instead it seems to have come full circle to today. In fact I believe the way prison is, and the way we treat the most marginalised of our fellow citizens, is worse than before Fitzgerald.
In those days we knew that the people in prison were usually there because of serious offences. In those days prison was brutal and bad stuff happened there.
Now it is much more difficult to expose the horrors being done and inflicted on people.
It is almost impossible to see it through the veneer offered by the marketing, the rules, the imagery, the public media, and the architecture of our new prisons.
Prisons look nice; people claim they are like resorts. This cannot be further from the truth.
Do you have any idea of what it would be like to lose your freedom, to be vulnerable to the whims of a system that brutalises?
People who were in prison when I was would go so far as to say we’d prefer the old Boggo Rd still be there, not because it was pleasant but because we could protest against the brutalisation, we could go on the rooftops, we could get information to visitors, the media had more access, as did lawyers and advocates.
It is time for us to think outside the bars because the bars are dividing our community; they remove the marginalised and often the innocent.
We are now, more than ever, massively increasing the imprisonment of Aboriginal women, of people with mental illness, people who are poor, those struggling with alcohol and drugs, and even people with learning disabilities.
Now many people are there because our vast middle class doesn’t want to look at those who are unsightly.
There were changes after Fitzgerald in the men’s prison, it was obvious and stood out; management was changed, improvements started.
But not in the very small women’s prison because it was not in the public eye, but after a murder in early 1990 changes came, including problem management.
Over the past few years I have seen a young Aboriginal woman (along with many others) ruined by the criminal justice system, but she is the most beautiful person with a great heart but who has been exposed to the system.
She is caught again and again by a system that is not oriented to rehabilitation but seemingly to ensuring people re-offend. Now I am afraid that she has been broken by the system and no one sees it or understands it.
Is this what Fitzgerald wanted?
Debbie Kilroy was incarcer-ated at 13, a mother at 17, witness to a violent murder and jailed for drug trafficking at 28. 12 years later she was awarded the Order of Australia for her fearless campaign for the rights of women prisoners through her organisation Sisters Inside. In 2004 she was awarded the Australian Human Rights Medal and in 2008 was admitted as a lawyer
Photo : Debbie Kilroy. Photo courtesy of Sisters Inside Inc
