The prison was like a giant filing cabinet for malfunctioning humans. Everyone was labelled and sorted into their specific genus or subgroup. Inmates were assigned status according to an age-old social algorithm that took account of everything, from the nature of their crime and the length of their sentence to their criminal pedigree, their personality, propensity for violence, their trustworthiness, sense of humour and their personal failings.
The units were organised into seven main sections. A5 was like a massive sorting drawer where new arrivals were kept in single lock-down cells while they settled in and were sorted. After that they were moved out of A5 and generally into the B Units, which contained twelve open cells. A6 was the Psychiatric Unit; A7 was Protection; A1 was a single-cell lock-down unit where women were released from the slot. And then there was the slot itself.
The C Units were the most comfortable in the prison – reserved for women who would be in DPFC for a long time. Also known as ‘the cottages’, C Units were individual buildings, about the size of a holiday shack, where five women lived communally together and were even allowed to cook their own food.
In prison, everything and everyone was clearly labelled with either numbers, letters, colours or shapes and assigned a place in the hierarchy – the officers were no exception. Like any other tiered organisation, the prison was managed from the top down. As general manager, Brendan Money sat atop the structure. He delegated the day-to-day running of the prison to a group of three to four prison ‘governors’. The governors wore impressive shiny uniforms with a crown on their shoulder to really signify who was in charge. I dealt a lot with Governor Wayne Blyth and Governor Tracy Jones (now the general manager) and I have a great deal of respect for them and warm memories. We went to them when the three-pippers blocked us or the two-pippers appeared to have slipped into a coma. They were no fools and were fair in their dealings. I also enjoyed their humour.
The governors, in turn, managed the officers who managed us. These Corrections Officers – the people we had to interact with most on a day-to-day basis – were also categorised according to rank. The most junior officers were identified by a single dot, or ‘pip’, on their shoulders while the more experienced officers had two dots and the veteran Corrections Officers boasted three. In much the same way that prisoners of different status behaved according to their ‘rank’, the officers also varied depending on how many pips were sewn onto their shirts. The junior officers tended to try to make friends with the prisoners but whenever an inmate was pulled into line by a ‘one-pipper’, they normally treated the officer with a measure of contempt. ‘You’re just a newbie, so why don’t you fuck off?’ they’d snarl. Given that new officers were minted after just six weeks’ training, it was understandable that inmates felt they needed to earn some respect before they started dishing out orders. When they became two-pippers, however, the tables turned. Suddenly they didn’t want to be our buddies anymore. In prison, two can play at that game and our attitude was, ‘We’re not going to help you along the way so you can fuck off too.’
If they survived long enough, an officer would become a three-pipper and their evolution from ape into an actual human being would be complete. The senior officers were generally a pleasure to deal with; people like Miss Johnson who were calm, fair, intelligent and professional. Even so, I rarely trusted the officers with serious or sensitive information. I would always either go to the governors (mainly Tracy Jones or Wayne Blyth), Mr Bennett (the head of prison security known as the Collator), or the wise and unflappable Brendan Money. All knew how to protect information – particularly when a leak could jeopardise someone’s safety. Once I worked out where everyone sat in the pecking order – both the crims and our keepers – it was relatively easy to negotiate the prison system. Soon I was on the move.
The Remand Unit is the most volatile place in DPFC, by far. A good thing it’s fenced off from the rest of the prison. Fortunately the average inmate was transferred out of there and into one of the other units after seven or eight weeks. I ended up staying for eighteen months. Not only did I want to remain in A5, management was happy to keep me in there because it was obvious I was having a positive impact. Throughout that time I became firm friends with Andrea Mohr, the lovely German peer support worker who’d comforted me on my first day. Because of her job, Andrea could access A5 at will and we spent a fair bit of time together. She was funny, highly intelligent and – as a former international drug courier – quite well travelled and exotic. I truly adored her and always will, but all too soon (for me, anyway) they had to let her go.
As a long-term inmate, Andrea had spent the last leg of her sentence in the C Units – one of the six self-contained ‘cottages’ at the south end of the compound. Since they were reserved mostly for women serving long sentences, the cottages housed plenty of murderers. Actually ‘cottage’ is probably too cute a word to describe them; they’re fairly Spartan boxes built out of concrete besser bricks and topped with an iron roof. There was a kitchen and a common area with a TV, and a hallway with five small cells running off it. While the women had a certain amount of autonomy, there were still surveillance cameras mounted everywhere and the prisoners were locked in their cells at 7pm in summer and 5pm in winter, like everybody else. Even so, cottages were considered the top of the tree when it came to a small measure of privacy and respect among other inmates.
Andrea tried to get me to move into the C Units whenever a place became available, but I always demurred, preferring to stay in my trusty old cell in A5. When a bed came up in her cottage in C2B she really put the pressure on. It was up to the other inmates in her unit to pick and choose who they accepted. The reason was obvious: women living under pressure in such close proximity needed to get along reasonably well. Just as in polite society, you wouldn’t choose to rent a flat with someone you dearly wanted to punch in the face. It was most unusual for women to move from Remand, bypass the other A and B Units (where the bulk of the inmates lived) and go straight to the cottages. But I had more than paid my dues in Remand and was one such lucky girl.
Andrea had taken me under her wing and vouched for me among the long-termers. She was also aware of the work I was doing to help the women in A5. ‘You really should do the peer support training and make it official,’ Andrea said one day. I completed the next twelve-week course in prison peer support, but the fact was I had already done much of it on my own initiative in A5. In reality, no matter what training you had, the only way you could be a peer support worker in DPFC was if you had the respect and trust of the other inmates. Now – after nineteen months of holding their trembling hands, mopping their brows, writing their letters and standing up for their rights – I did.
I felt more supported and valued in prison than I ever did in free society, and although my move to the cottages was assured, the women in A5 begged me to stay. It was strange to think that to most Australians I was a faceless low-life criminal – someone to be shunned – but in my tiny world behind the razor wire I was not only important, I was doing some real good. I was helping to improve people’s lives. Even some of the officers would confide in me, and I repaid them – as I did the inmates – by never breaking a confidence. Compassion and a sense of humour are good character traits to have, but trust is the most valued commodity in prison.
As a freshly minted peer educator my role became formalised. Each day I would be paged to Reception where any number of girls might have arrived overnight or during the day. I would meet with them and explain what would happen as they entered the system at DPFC. I was allowed to sit with them in their cells, even in the Medical Unit which was a strict no-go zone for other prisoners because of access to drugs. Most of all, I would reassure them that they were going to be safe. After that, anything could happen in a day in the life of a peer support worker. I’d be called on if someone had overdosed, if they were refusing to leave their cell, if there had been a fight, if someone had self-harmed, if they were going berserk, if someone was having a breakdown, if a prisoner in the slot had requested me or if an inmate in Protection was having problems and needed support. And, inevitably, there were all those girls in withdrawal to look after, and endless parole and legal letters to write.
Some days I would receive girls who had been transferred from the Youth Training Centre (YTC) – and I mean ‘girls’. On those days it was hard not to feel frustrated and angry because the world was so cruel. While in reality they were at least eighteen years old, some inmates from YTC could have passed for thirteen. Some were Wards of the State and some hadn’t even been convicted of crimes, but all of them were studies in neglect and sadness. They always proved to be a handful, too. At YTC they had been at the top of the tree but now they were in the Big Girls’ School, so they’d try to run riot in a silly, youthful attempt to convince everyone they were tough and cool. ‘Drop the attitude,’ I would snarl at them. ‘We’ll look after you in here but you have to cut the bullshit and behave as you’re told.’
It always took me two to three times as long to settle the YTC girls in. These poor kids had just about grown up by the time they were fourteen, and often had kids of their own by fifteen. I sure knew that was an easy mistake to make. When they arrived in prison at eighteen they were pretty much old-school crims. Many of them had lived hard on the streets from the time they were ten or younger, and life had turned them into vicious little girls – on the outside at least. As soon as I’d sit down, take their hand and say, ‘How can I help you?’ they’d dissolve into tears. Some of them were so small their feet would swing in the air as they sat on the edge of their bed. Others were clearly still developing and I wouldn’t have been surprised if they believed in the Tooth Fairy. ‘It’s going to be OK,’ I’d tell them. ‘I won’t let anyone else hurt you. You’ll be safe in here.’ But I knew that promise only extended as far as the front gate. Once they were released they’d be on their own. Some would come back to prison. Some I’d never see again. Others would die out there.
Whenever I met a new arrival the first thing I would do would be to suss them out for any injuries. ‘Hi, I’m Kerry,’ I’d begin and give them a warm smile. ‘I’m a prisoner here. I’m one of you. How are you feeling? Are you hurt at all?’ I’d assess her physically as I went. I might touch her arm or hold her hand. ‘I’m here for you,’ I’d continue, ‘and I don’t care what you’ve done. You don’t have to tell me a thing, but whatever you say in here stays with me, OK?’
I’d scan for track marks or other tell-tale signs of drug addiction or indicators of a mental disturbance. Some women remained pretty quiet in the cells while others saw me as a sounding board and suddenly felt compelled to unburden themselves. On those occasions Reception was just like confession at St Joseph’s in Leeton, only I was cast in the role of Father and the women’s sins were very, very real. I was given first-hand accounts of crimes ranging from shoplifting to multiple murder. Some women went into the goriest of details. Some even told me where they’d dumped their victims’ bodies. A few nights after one such chat I was relaxing in front of the 6pm news, watching police fish a corpse out of a pond on the city outskirts, when I sat bolt upright. ‘Oh my God! That must be Neale!’ I figured I was possibly the only person in Victoria who knew that if Neale hadn’t been such a frightening, wife-beating monster he might not be so dead.
Naturally there were a lot of women I welcomed at DPFC who I couldn’t stand. That’s not a judgement – just a statement of fact, and I’m quite sure I wasn’t everybody’s cup of tea either. But there were more than a few who I really liked. Despite their miserable life stories and the shit cards they had been dealt, some women were just really pleasant human beings. They were fun and smart and, somehow, they remained optimistic. One woman I got to know had first been raped when she was six but she still had ambitions for a better life. Like a lot of women in prison, a white picket fence featured prominently in her dreams. To me the fact she was still breathing was miracle enough. She was typical of the women I was most drawn to – the lowly ones who were never given the first chance; the women who could have been forgiven had they given up long ago. I was fiercely protective of them and I wanted to be there for them, always. That was wishful thinking, and God only knows what eventually happened to that woman. I don’t know how long someone like that can keep her chin up. I truly hope she’s happy and safe somewhere behind a white picket fence, but I doubt it.
At the other end of the spectrum were women who would never find peace, or even know what it was; the ones who would likely never fit back into society. When I first met Sarah Cheney she appeared totally sane to me, despite the fact she was in prison for viciously attacking a random woman with a knife at La Trobe University. Sarah was being kept in Isolation and I spent time in there talking with her about her parents, her life and how she was trying to work out where she was in the world. Within two days she appeared to go completely insane. Sarah managed to get her hands on some paperclips and tried to use them to gouge her eyeballs out. It was just the beginning of violence towards herself and others in DPFC. In hindsight I was lucky I got her on a good day. According to one recent press report she’s now considered ‘Australia’s most dangerous inmate’ and she’s still in Isolation today.