Sisters Inside: The power of standing on your own two feet

None of this was obvious to me in early 1990. I wrote my piece for the gathering in the prison gymnasium and rehearsed it with my mates. But when I stood up in front of this group, I began to realise what I was saying: that I’d taken responsibility for Dad’s death. I was 29 and for 15 years I’d believed I’d killed my father.

For the first time I really confronted it. I broke down completely, sobbing. Someone came up to me and offered to finish reading it, but I said: “No, I’ve got to do this.”

Afterwards, everything changed. I realised I wasn’t a bad person, that I did not need punishment. I realised I was the victim of a system that betrayed young people and shoehorned them into a life of imprisonment, grief and marginalisation.

My adolescence was lost. My first days in detention set the blueprint; I spent most of my teenage years in and out of Wilson. My uncontrollable anger and outrage fuelled others’ anger against me. I endured isolation and humiliation. I was vilified as wild and beyond redemption. Looking back now, I am no longer surprised at my violence, the petty crime, the mistrust of anything mainstream or “straight” in the world. From the age of 13, I had been set up as one of the underclass, a receptacle for blame.

But since my revelation, after my imprisonment at Boggo Road for drug trafficking in 1989 – under the Bjelke-Petersen government’s draconian mandatory life sentences - my path has been determined and unrelenting. I wanted to ensure that my own children did not get caught in the quicksand that awaits many children of prisoners, and to work towards the abolition of prisons.

My mantra is that prison doesn’t work. More than 60 per cent of women released from prison return to prison. That’s a 60 per cent failure rate. If any of our other big institutions or government departments ran those kinds of figures, they’d be shut down.

Lives are ravaged and sometimes destroyed even by short prison sentences. The jailing of two high-profile women in Queensland last year – former chief magistrate Di Fingleton and former One Nation leader Pauline Hanson – has brought the problem to the public’s attention. When Hanson was released she spoke tearfully of her desire to hug her family – women in prison are traumatised, they are strip-searched if they want to touch their children or partners when they visit. These were just two ordinary women. Did the community feel safer because they were locked up? Is it really about public safety? Or the kind of punishment that keeps hurting for the rest of your life?

Since my release, I have graduated with a degree in social work and am nearly through a law degree. Last year, I was awarded an OAM for services to women in prison and the community, and won the Queensland Telstra Businesswoman of the Year Award – Community and Government.

Sisters Inside now employs 12 full-time staff and I am its director. The power is in the hands of those inside, not the do-gooders on the outside. This way Sisters Inside provides the support I never had. Of course, there will always be women who fall through the cracks with us, too, but that will be their choice. They know they can keep coming back to us and we have women who do keep coming back. Eventually it will be all right for them. Other organisations – the do-gooders, the helpers – will turn them away because they’ve failed once, or twice. Not us. We’re not here for the thankyous.