I was wandering around the compound one afternoon when I experienced my first Code Aqua. This requires every inmate to return to her cell immediately for a head count and imminent lock-down. In just five minutes, a bustling prison yard teeming with people can be transformed into a ghost town as the women are systematically caged in like battery hens. Code Aqua can be called for any number of reasons, from a fight getting out of control to an escape attempt, a death, serious injury or any whiff of a riot. On this day Code Aqua was triggered by the discovery of speed in the sugar supply. ‘Absolutely ingenious,’ I thought to myself. Perhaps those responsible hoped it would make our time go faster. Now every grain of amphetamine sugar had to be removed from DPFC. It took all day and we were without regular sugar for the next month.
I was constantly amazed by how the women managed to get drugs into a maximum-security prison. They were downright brilliant. Apart from contraband banked halfway up their vaginas, hypodermic needles would be hidden up there, too; cut down into mini sawn-off syringes that were dismantled and hidden inside the little plastic toy containers you find inside Kinder Surprises. One girl even managed to smuggle in her favourite singlet, her jewellery and enough heroin to do the entire prison for a month. I was learning that often women with massive shipments inside them did so to repay old debts on their return to prison.
The banking system posed a big problem for the prison administration. Fortunately for the inmates, the officers’ hands were tied. It would be prohibitively costly to X-ray every single woman upon arrival and, even if they did have the funds for such a system, they’d need a warrant to do it. If officers had a strong and valid reason to suspect a new arrival had swallowed drugs instead, they’d put her in an observation cell in Medical and leave her there. Also known as ‘wet cells’, these Spartan boxes are under twenty-four-hour surveillance and there’s nowhere to hide anything. The blankets are made out of Teflon so there’s not even the option of ripping one up to make a noose and stage a ‘suicide attempt’ in a bid to get out. After about three days, an inmate’s body would naturally expel everything. Since there’s no avoiding the laws of nature, girls would either have to flush whatever came out down the toilet or they’d be caught with it.
There had once been other less disgusting ways to get drugs in. Apart from hiding them in drinks and nappies, back in the days when the prison was privately run (before the government took over the running of it in 2000), partners and friends of women would apparently just lob heroin- and marijuana-filled tennis balls over the fence. They say the compound could sometimes resemble a warm-up court at the Australian Open.
I could always tell when a shipment of heroin arrived in DPFC. You could walk out onto the compound on a Saturday afternoon and it would be eerily quiet. All the girls would be off their faces and they knew if they dared come out of their unit and stagger about the place the officers would recognise the signs straight away. Punishment for drug use was usually a fine and a stint in ‘the slot’, another little prison within the prison where girls were locked up for twenty-three hours a day in solitary confinement.
Four days after the opiate wave flooded through the place, all hell would break loose as the girls started to come down and hang out. The screaming would start and the fights would erupt. I got so used to reading these chemical and psychological indicators I could predict changes in the behaviour of the prison population almost down to the hour.
While heroin was the most popular, it was certainly not the only narcotic in DPFC. Women would get high on speed, cocaine and assorted pills. Ecstasy was big in prison during the Noughties, too, as was marijuana. Each group behaved according to their drug of choice. The heroin girls were the easiest to manage when they were stoned; half the time they were ‘on the nod’, too numb to even hold their heads up. The cocaine kids tended to be higher-class girls; women who worked at the exclusive brothels or the girlfriends of high-flying crims who were importing coke. They tended to just babble like four-year-olds. The women on speed seemed the worst of the bunch. They tended to be aggressive and would pick at their skin and have sores on their faces. Later on, as the ice epidemic took hold, girls would come in so juiced up we weren’t allowed in their cells until they’d withdrawn because they could be totally unpredictable and shockingly violent.
In my opinion, however, the worst drug in the place by far was the one they handed out at the Medical Unit. Methadone rots the teeth, leads to excruciating headaches and generally ruins a person’s health. Rather than face the horror of a cold-turkey withdrawal from heroin, girls would opt for the government-approved synthetic alternative to try to wean off it. If a girl had a $2000-a-day heroin habit on the outside, she would begin with, say, a 160ml dose of methadone, which, by the way, is just as addictive as smack. Over the first two weeks that dose would be lowered to 150ml, then to 140ml for a month or so, 130ml for six months, and so on. Even those tiny adjustments would trigger a wave of terrible withdrawal symptoms. As a result it wasn’t uncommon for a prisoner who started on a 160ml dose to take five years to be weaned off altogether.
At any given time at least eighty per cent of inmates in DPFC were on some kind of medication, dispensed daily in Medical. Some were prescribed valium for anxiety, some needed antidepressants, some were on the methadone program, others were prescribed Largactil – a powerful and stupefying anti-psychotic drug that put women into a kind of waking coma. I could always tell when someone was on it because she’d develop ‘the Largy shuffle’ – a pathetic, bombed-out gait which was about as fast as your average garden snail.
Alarmingly, women would take anything they could get their hands on, happily trading their stash for whatever pills the next girl might have scored from Medical. Chemical cocktails were tipped down throats with gay abandon, causing who knows what damage. The sister of a famous AFL player came into A5 one day and proved to be seriously deranged. ‘Drug fucked’, they called it. She was only twenty or twenty-one at the time but was so scrambled by poly-drug use that she spent her days walking in circles deep in conversation with herself. She’d often plonk down next to me for hours on end, sensing that I cared about her and would protect her. Being in such close proximity to wrecked people like her reminded me how grateful I was that I’d never fallen into the bottomless sink-hole of drug abuse.
While it was all well and good to be stoned on the Victorian Government’s supply, there were harsh consequences for anyone caught using contraband. The officers, better known as the ‘Piss Police’, conducted urine tests, and anyone who failed was hauled to Governor’s Court where one of the prison governors questioned them about where they got it. (This was really just a formality because most of the time the code of silence kicked in.) Offenders were then escorted to the slot for solitary confinement.
Still, the women had ways of staying one step ahead. One day I was struck by the strange contents in the food supply crates outside the unit. The first one contained carrots, cabbages, some crappy cuts of meat and sixty-five lemons! ‘Who ordered sixty-five lemons?’ I asked. It was explained to me that pure lemon juice flushes traces of drugs out of the system. ‘It might be hard to force it down the hatch,’ one girl told me, ‘but your next urine test will come back squeaky clean.’ It seemed to take a while before the officers cottoned on – they must have thought we had some killer recipes using lemons.
One girl came into DPFC charged with importing a gutful of cocaine. She’d arrived on a flight from South Africa and the Federal Police had nabbed her at Melbourne Airport. She was X-rayed and rushed into surgery because the packages she’d swallowed were degrading and she was in danger of dying by the mother of all overdoses. Doctors cut her wide open, retrieved the narcotics and sewed her back up so she could face the music. Once she had recovered sufficiently she was shipped out to Deer Park where it was my job to receive her.
‘Hello,’ I said smiling. ‘I’m Kerry. How are you feeling? Have you got a good lawyer?’
‘Why? I don’t need one,’ she replied.
‘Possum,’ I said evenly, ‘you’ve been caught red-handed bringing several kilos of cocaine into Australia. It’s a fairly serious thing here. You might want to think about getting a lawyer.’ I was being completely level with her, trying to prepare her to face the reality that she was unlikely to get out any time soon without good legal counsel. But she just looked back at me with a slight air of disbelief.
‘What do you mean? It’s my word against theirs!’
I couldn’t believe her naivety. ‘Didn’t they slit you open from your throat to your vagina?’ I asked. ‘I’m guessing their word is pretty good.’
‘Yeah, still, it’s their word against mine. I’ll plead not guilty and see how I go.’
I shook my head. ‘Really? Look, you might want to get a lawyer because the police are –’
‘Nup!’ she cut in. ‘They’ve got nothing.’
‘It sounds like they’ve got quite a bit of evidence …’
‘Only the cocaine.’
‘That’ll usually do it – but give it your best shot anyway,’ I said before walking away.
Needless to say she was with us for a while.
On the opposite end of the drug-smuggling spectrum was a darling lady from South Australia. She was sixty-five and had been on her own since her husband died years earlier. As sometimes happens, she went online and met a nice, upstanding Nigerian fellow and the poor thing agreed to fly over to South Africa to meet him. He told her he loved her, that she was the woman of his dreams and how they would always be together. He promised that after she returned to Australia they’d make arrangements to get married.
Of course they would!
When she got off the plane in Melbourne she, too, was caught with a huge amount of narcotics carefully hidden in her luggage. Unlike Miss Cocaine Guts, the South Australian lady was the very definition of an unwitting drug mule. It was heartbreakingly sad to see this lonely, vulnerable and innocent woman locked up with actual criminals. Anyone and everyone could see she’d had no idea about the drugs – everyone except the Australian Federal Police.
I was so angry that her life was ruined by a scammer looking to make some easy money but too gutless to risk his own hide in prison. I pushed hard to contact her family and get a defence moving. Every day she’d come to see me and say, ‘Thank you, dear,’ but part of her held on to the fantasy that had been sold to her. I just wanted somebody to do something to catch the real perpetrator. Finally, frustrated that I could do nothing more, I sat down with her. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘why don’t you let me give the prison your Nigerian friend’s name so we can put him on the visitor list? That way if he wants to come to see you the prison will have cleared it.’
‘Oh, he’d be horrified if he knew I was in prison,’ she replied.
‘Well, at least you’d have the chance to see him again,’ I said, trying to sound optimistic about the faux romance.
With that she gave me the bastard’s name and I promptly wrote to her family and shared it with them. Thankfully she was eventually released and the charges dropped – but not before she’d lost several months of her life to a prison cell. I hope it spelled the end of her internet romances.