Some inmates had no business whatsoever being locked in a prison.
Janice appeared to have Down’s syndrome and had the intelligence of a ten-year-old. The problem was she kept committing adult crimes and, since she was actually thirty-five, the courts kept sending her back to prison. We first got acquainted in the cells beneath the city where we’d both faced court earlier in the day. As sometimes happened, the Brawlers were stretched to capacity so we got stranded underground past lock-down at 7pm. That’s when I was told we weren’t going to make it back home until much later and were instead going to spend some time at the Melbourne Custody Centre. The very name sent a chill up my spine.
The Custody Centre was a notorious and terrifying place. As the main reception point for people arrested in the city, it’s a world unto itself and considered something of a wild frontier compared to the relative order at DPFC. The officers there must have been hand-picked from those who scored the lowest in the psych test and highest in brutality. They were cruel, all of them, and they were allowed to be. Nobody else really knew what happened in the Custody Centre or even cared. At the various court holding cells around Melbourne there was usually someone present from the Salvation Army or the Red Cross but not at the Custody Centre – no one was allowed in there except for mean-spirited police and Corrections Officers, and prisoners they could bash with impunity.
I couldn’t show Janice how scared I was; she was already crying about having to ‘go for a ride in a dark van’. I was fiercely protective of her and I feared she would attract the attention of the psychopath officers at the Custody Centre. As we were marched inside I clutched her hand as if I was walking her to pre-school. It was like stepping onto another planet: the air was different, the light was different and the walls seemed to moan. The officers slumped against the main counter as if they were hanging at the sleaziest bar in Australia. They leered at us and one even adjusted his tackle right in front of Janice. We were ushered into a large damp holding cell that had a blackboard on the door chalked with the words ‘Babysitting two women’. Once inside we were assailed by the reek of an open toilet that was overflowing with sanitary pads and faeces. Over the next couple of hours we had to listen as the officers belted the crap out of a guy in the cell next door. This only made Janice cry even louder.
‘Janice!’ I hiss-whispered. ‘Janice, you need to shut up! They’ll come for us if you don’t be quiet!’
This only made matters worse. Janice regressed into being a blubbering baby. When she got really nervous or upset she would suck her mouth in and out and make a little popping noise like a cartoon fish: ‘Mwop-mwop-mwop-mwop …’
‘What the fuck is going on with those fucking things from the County Court?’ an angry voice boomed down the hallway.
‘Janice! Shut up!’ I pleaded as urgently and quietly as I could.
But the poor thing kept right on with her fish impression. Terrified that we were going to invoke the ire of the slap-happy policemen, I clamped my hand over Janice’s mouth. ‘Shhh!’ She started biting my fingers so I pressed against her mouth even harder. And each time she’d stick her tongue out through my fingers. I couldn’t believe it; what had started out as a daytrip into court had ended in a stinking inner-city gulag where I was in danger of smothering a fellow inmate to death or being bashed by Victoria’s lowest law-enforcement officers. Finally, they beat our male neighbour into silence, which only brought Janice’s sucking sounds into sharp relief.
‘Don’t you fucking make me come down there and open that door,’ the voice thundered again. ‘Trust me, that’s the last thing you want.’
I could not have agreed more. As if by miracle, a Brawler arrived soon after to drive us back out to DPFC in the late evening. We had spent just over two hours in the Custody Centre. It had felt like a year.
At Deer Park the disturbed and particularly needy inmates tended to flock to me like moths to a flame. Janice went a step further. The following day, she pretty much adopted me as her mother. Wherever I went, she wanted to go. Whenever I lit a cigarette, she immediately sparked one up, too. Whatever make-up I put on, she would put on. It quickly became the prison joke. I warned people not to tease her or touch her under any circumstances. ‘She’s not really an adult,’ I said. ‘She shouldn’t be in here.’ I couldn’t understand why she was in prison in the first place.
‘Janice,’ I asked her as we sat and lit another smoke at precisely the same time, ‘what are you doing in here? What was your crime?’
‘I needed a smoke,’ she began, holding hers up as if to underscore she meant a cigarette. ‘I went in to this store and I saw they left the cash drawer open. I jumped the counter, got the money and took off. I got caught really quickly, though. Someone must have given me up.’
‘Riiight, so what kind of store was it?’ I pressed.
‘Don’t really know, but when I walked in there were cameras everywhere, lights bleeping and that. I think it was a camera shop.’
It had, in fact, been a security and surveillance equipment retailer. No fewer than forty-three operational cameras captured Janice’s brazen heist, which she had been oblivious to. ‘I honestly don’t know how they got me,’ she said with a puzzled shake of her head. ‘But they came around and arrested me real quick.’
‘Janice,’ I said as we stubbed out our smokes in choreographed unison, ‘it’s going to remain one of life’s great mysteries.’
It goes without saying Janice hadn’t been born with a penchant for crime. Her parents had given up on her and she was sent away. As a vulnerable teenager, she was easily manipulated and ended up being raped by a man who deployed her to commit thefts and burglaries to finance his drug habit. And now she was in jail paying the price for his wanton evil acts.
The more I stuck up for Janice, the more I became a god to her, and whenever she fucked up, I was the person the inmates would complain to. I remained her ferocious defender – even when she urinated in the prison pool. Of course, nobody would have known about it had Janice not told everyone. The other prisoners were furious and even the long-termers were losing patience. ‘Kerry, you have to do something,’ they warned. So I took Janice aside and sat her down like a mum with a little girl who didn’t know better.
‘Janice, you can’t wee in the pool – ever. OK? What’s going to happen now, sweetheart, is I’m forbidding you from going into that pool for two weeks.’
‘OK. I’m sorry, Kerry.’
The pool wasn’t really much of a concern at DPFC. For a start, no one had any bathers so if you went in it’d be in shorts and a shirt. It was often off limits because the officers didn’t want to bother supervising us and most of the time inmates were too busy anyway. If you weren’t working you were being mustered or lining up for medication or having visiting time. Weekends tended to be the only time there was an opportunity to really use it, but weekends were usually when the drugs were in so girls didn’t go swimming for fear of drowning. Besides, nobody liked to think they were paddling around in urine.
Two weeks later, Janice came running up to me with a towel over her shoulder. ‘Kerry, it’s been two weeks. Can I go back into the pool?’ she asked.
I had forgotten all about it. ‘Oh my God, of course you can. But remember, you cannot wee in the pool. And if you do, don’t tell everyone. Got it?’
‘Got it, Kerry.’
Janice kept coming back to prison, time after time. I’d get wind of it before her arrival, because the officers knew it would be a good idea if I was mentally prepared for the extra responsibility. Her second visit to Deer Park was punishment for a stunt she pulled at Frankston train station. Janice was bored and lonely and thought she could solve this by using her mobile phone to ring 000 and say there was a riot in full swing and people were being killed on the platform. The police sent ten patrol cars and a helicopter to the scene. Janice thought it was just terrific … until they traced the hoax call to her phone.
At least when she was in prison she had me, which pretty much guaranteed no harm would come to her. The authorities said they had no other options; they couldn’t just let her loose on Melbourne to commit robberies and cause chaos. Somebody could get hurt, including poor Janice. They couldn’t rightly put a thirty-five-year-old in YTC, either, because the mean, street-smart little girls in there would eat her alive. Even so, after her second arrest I went to Brendan Money. ‘I know it’s complicated but she shouldn’t be in here,’ I said. ‘She’s a ten-year-old in a maximum-security prison.’
‘Kerry, the law with regards to Janice is clear. I know it’s not a great situation but right now there are no other options,’ Brendan replied patiently.
‘Well, I’ve been thinking about that,’ I said. ‘What if you and I approach the judge and ask him to release Janice and tack her three-month sentence onto mine. I’ll gladly take one for the team. She shouldn’t even –’
‘Kerry,’ he cut in, smiling wryly at my gesture. ‘Come on. It’ll never happen.’
He was right, of course. Besides, I was about to find out I’d underestimated just how long my own sentence would end up being.