The DPFC was an endless series of hard surfaces and dull tones. What little carpet it had was paper thin, all the benches were hard, the concrete walls were hard, the paths and the grass were hard and even the women were hard. All this architectural and emotional brutalism was daubed in barren shades of beige, grey and dark blue – everything except the children’s play equipment that is.
Under Victorian law, a mother who is serving a custodial sentence in a maximum-security prison is permitted to care for a child under the age of five inside the prison, in circumstances where there hasn’t been either a violent crime or a child-related crime committed by the mother. Sometimes children are born to a mother in prison; other times the mother of a child will apply to bring them in if they’re living in the community. The children must be kept with their mother at all times under a strict regime that forbids fighting or any dirty urines. Mothers are extra regularly and randomly urine-tested to ensure they are free of drugs, and this is overseen and supported by the Parenting Program within the prison. If the mother gets sick, an approved carer is appointed and is the only other person the child can be left with. The carer must also be drug free, of good conduct and well known to the child.
Obviously if a woman is pregnant when she’s brought in and gives birth while she’s incarcerated (children are delivered at a hospital, not in the prison), then the baby will stay with her in most cases until she’s released or the child is four, going on five. The child must leave by the age of five so that they are ready for school in the community. Tragically the majority of the babies born to women at DPFC came into the world as tiny, howling heroin addicts. The mothers would be brought back into the prison while the poor bubs remained in hospital until they had withdrawn. Only then were they reunited behind the razor wire.
Other women who already had children on the outside were allowed to bring them into the prison to live permanently with them rather than face the prospect of long-term separation or foster care.
While the average taxpayer might reel at the thought of young kids being locked away behind a six-metre-high prison fence, I will go to my grave believing it is the best policy for both mother and child. In too many instances – like the cross-generational child-rape nightmare inflicted on people like Tara and her daughter – the alternatives can be beyond horrifying. At least in prison the child is with their mother who is surrounded by other women and has access to myriad support programs to help her look after them. And unlike the cruel world on the other side of the fence, there was never a time in DPFC when a child was in any danger whatsoever – there were literally hundreds of women to protect them.
Children softened the prison in the most beautiful and palpable ways. Even the hardest of surfaces yield a little when they reflect the chiming, melodious sounds of little people at play. Sharp edges were knocked off the inmates, too. Women would gather around just to watch the children gambol on the grassed areas near the cottages, and I noticed they shelved their foul language and became the sweetest versions of themselves. There was no fighting or raised voices, just ladies – many of them mums themselves – happy to revel in the innocence of childhood.
I pointed this out to Brendan Money. ‘These children are having an amazing effect on the place,’ I said. ‘But they could really use some decent play equipment.’ As always, he was already organising things.
Brendan Money was an excellent administrator who knew a good initiative when he saw one. Soon enough some funding was made available for some play equipment in bold shades of red, green, yellow and blue. It included a slippery dip, a tunnel, climbing frames and a sandpit, and was set up right next to the long-termers in the C area. On a bleak, grey compound that had been devoid of colour for many years there suddenly stood a shining plastic citadel that gave the children a place to frolic and the inmates a place to dream of better days. And it was an enormous relief to hear women speak without swearing for once.
By watching court coverage in the media I had a pretty good grasp of the cases involving women in Victoria – particularly the high-profile ones. Over time I got to know which women were connected with particular criminal interests outside and inside DPFC. Putting the wrong person in the wrong unit could spell trouble and I would sometimes have to alert Brendan Money and the governors to potential flashpoints when it came to placements on the compound.
The same applied with high-profile cases involving women who were charged with a serious crime for the first time – because some were particularly vulnerable to being taken advantage of. I kept detailed computerised journals on who was coming and going. The minute I was called on to welcome a new arrival I was well prepared because I’d studied the form, their prior histories on previous sentences and their prison networks: ‘This is who the girl is. This is where she lives. Here’s what she’s in for and this is what her nature is like, according to evidence reported in the media.’
Renate Mokbel and Tania Herman were two women who I did some homework on – mostly by paying attention to the media reports but also by reading the mood towards them among the other inmates. By my reckoning both of them were at risk in DPFC but for different reasons. At the time of her incarceration ‘Melbourne mother of three’ Renate Mokbel possessed one of the most infamous surnames in the country. Her brother-in-law, the notorious Melbourne drug lord Tony Mokbel, sat at the top of Australia’s Most Wanted list alongside a whopping $1 million reward for information leading to his arrest. Tony had skipped bail and secretly fled the country in 2006. While that might have been good news for him, it spelled disaster for Renate who was jailed for failing to pay a $1 million surety for him.
When Renate arrived at the prison she was naturally considered a rock star of the criminal world – particularly among the drug users. Tony Mokbel was a marquee underworld name; a high-volume trafficker who was considered the last man standing in the brutal Melbourne drug wars that had claimed the lives of more than thirty people. As the most wanted man in the land, his face was plastered all through the media. Renate, however, was just a lovely suburban mum.
In the beginning I focused on finding a strategy that would allow her to settle in without becoming a target. The last thing a rock star needs in prison is groupies. I knew that everyone with even a whiff of a drug habit would try to befriend her and, pretty soon, they’d look for ways to stand over her and pressure her to get drugs into the prison. It took me about two minutes to deduce Renate was a complete clean-skin, just like me. In spite of her cocaine-laced surname, she had never once used drugs and – as far as I could see – she was merely a victim of having the wrong surname. Since Renate’s mum was dying of cancer, this mostly left her teenage children struggling to look after their little brother, who was just two years old. Renate was a thoroughly delightful and disarming woman who could sometimes come off as a bit of an airhead, so I nicknamed her ‘Bubbles’. We bonded straight away over our many shared interests – the biggest being a desperate longing for our kids. She, like me, cared for nothing else.
Renate was anxious to get her little boy in to live with her in the prison. For that to occur I needed to get her out of Remand and into the C Units as soon as possible. That would be seen as a privilege because you’re supposed to pay your dues in A5 before ascending the pecking order, but as far as I was concerned I’d changed the culture enough that I didn’t care about ‘the code’ anymore. I made an appointment to see Brendan Money and start the process. ‘You know who Renate is and what she represents to a lot of the women in here,’ I said. ‘She’s going to be much, much safer up in our unit than being at the mercy of A5. They’ll rip her to shreds in record time. Everyone will want a piece of her, but I know she’s got absolutely nothing for them. She’s a complete and utter squarehead. She’s one hundred per cent clueless and vulnerable in here. She doesn’t need that kind of trouble right now and, frankly, neither does anyone else.’
He didn’t disagree and after several weeks and a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, we arranged for Renate to move into the unit and squeeze into the double room with Wendy. ‘Alright,’ I said to Renate, ‘step two is you’ve got to make yourself Brendan Money’s best friend. You have to stop being so shy. He needs to see that you’re strong enough to withstand anything that goes on around you; that you’re smart enough, that you’re savvy enough, friendly enough and an excellent mother who will have no trouble taking care of your son. He needs to see that in you and you need to start doing it now.’
Renate followed my instructions to a tee but the biggest obstacle to getting her son into the prison was the media. Her family name attracted so much press hatred and public mistrust that such a move would have been dressed up – wrongly – as ‘Special Jail Privilege for the Mokbels!’ There would have been a huge public outcry and the Herald-Sun would have campaigned to stop it happening. In the absence of the arch-villain Tony to sink their pens into, the media pack salivated over Renate’s case, which brought the glare of publicity onto the prison, too. We had to wait four months until the journos had moved onto the next saga to arrange to have Renate’s little boy brought into DPFC under the cover of darkness.
I became one of Renate’s ‘back-up mothers’ in the event she fell ill and needed help looking after her boy. Having Renate with me made my prison life all the more bearable because we were so like-minded. We’d laugh at the same things and weep at the same things too. She would get off the phone from her older kids Jade and Robbie in tears, and I would get off the phone from Sarah and Shannyn in the same state. We became very close. Since we had both been dealt with by detectives from the Purana Taskforce, I even told her the story of how they had set off my vibrator while searching my room – something I swore I would never reveal to another soul as long as I lived. Bubbles thought it was hilarious.
Renate’s boy blossomed in prison. He was a sweet, funny little man and although he had twigged that we weren’t living in a normal house, he thought we were all ‘at work’. He would write/scribble on some of the cards I sent to my girls because he realised that they couldn’t come and visit me at work and he wanted to help. He had about thirty great aunties who treated him like a little prince. I can honestly say prison was the best place for him – right alonside his mother.
It was a bitterly cold day in June 2007 when news broke that Purana Taskforce detectives had arrested Australia’s most wanted man, Tony Mokbel, in Greece. He had been posing as a local fisherman and wearing an absurd wig. The stupid-looking mug shot flashed around the country in breaking-news bulletins as Renate and her son were still asleep. ‘Renate,’ I whispered, trying not to wake the sleeping boy. ‘I have to tell you something.’
‘Hmm?’ she said sleepily.
‘They’ve found Tony. He’s in Greece and he’s wearing the most ridiculous-looking wig.’
It was a surreal moment when I truly wondered how I had gone from a quiet suburban life to being at the centre of such infamous events, but it certainly wasn’t the first.
I was also quite fond of Tania Herman – another squarehead newbie – who found herself thrown in with the lions at DPFC. Tania had been charged with the attempted murder of a Melbourne woman, Maria Korp, in what became known as the body-in-the-boot case. Tania was the mistress of Maria’s husband, Joe Korp, who had hatched a plan to do away with his wife and live happily ever after with Tania. He convinced Tania to strangle Maria, but after Tania choked the woman unconscious she panicked and bundled her body into the boot of Maria’s car, which she abandoned in Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens. Four days later Maria was found – still in the boot and barely clinging to life.
Joe and Tania were subsequently charged with attempted murder. Tania pleaded guilty but Joe maintained his innocence. After six months in a coma, Maria Korp’s life support was turned off, but the charges were never upgraded to murder due to a deal prior to Maria’s death. Nevertheless, Tania was eventually sentenced to twelve years in prison. I had been following the case in the media and knew Tania’s situation was a delicate one. The other inmates weren’t upset that she had attempted to kill another woman, but weren’t happy that she had confessed to everything and thereby ‘given Joe up’ in the process.
I conferred with Brendan Money about her pending arrival. ‘As far as the men’s prison is concerned she’s given Joe up so she’s going to have to go to Protection,’ he said.
I felt it was unreasonable that a woman who had confessed to the crime and taken the consequences on the chin was going to spend the next twelve years locked away from other human beings because of the daft ‘code’. Some knucklehead in the men’s prison had got word through to his girlfriend at DPFC that Tania was some kind of subhuman and I was supposed to respect that as word from on high? No way! Besides, just about every person in prison broke ‘the code’ whenever it suited them anyway.
‘Can’t you please let me work with her instead, Brendan?’ I asked.
‘Kerry, it’ll be your worst nightmare, trying to keep her safe every day for years,’ he cautioned.
‘Just let me try and assimilate her into the compound, please?’
‘OK, but at the first sign of problems you’ve got to let me know,’ Brendan insisted. ‘If it becomes an unsafe situation – I need to know. She cannot be at risk on the compound. I’m trusting you.’
No pressure! Although looking after Tania wasn’t my ‘worst nightmare’, it certainly wasn’t without its challenges. As I chaperoned her around the compound one woman yelled out, ‘You’re a dog, Herman! You’re a rat, dog motherfu–’
‘What the fuck has it got to do with you? It’s not your sentence. It’s not your business,’ I bellowed back at her. By the time I felt comfortable speaking to prisoners like that I had already written five parole letters for them, looked after them while they were withdrawing and got them access visits with their kids. No one was going to challenge me directly, not because they were afraid of me but because they respected me.
I steadily changed the culture around Tania in the prison and she ended up doing her entire sentence on the compound. Some old-school crims tried to flex their muscles about it but I just kept telling them the code was crap. ‘Some guy who has belted the crap out of you for your whole life – you’re going to listen to him about the code? The men have got their own code and it’s a dickhead’s code. We’re women, we’re smarter. Tell me I’m not right.’ Fewer and fewer people could. Over time DPFC became less of an animal house and more a place where people got their kids in, and did programs to better themselves. As strange as it sounds, the prison became quite a nice environment.
On the day of Maria Korp’s funeral, her husband, Joe – who had been freed on bail – hanged himself inside his garage. It was huge news in Melbourne as the body-in-the-boot case had dominated headlines for months. Again, it fell to me to be the messenger. Tania was in Medical at the time and had no idea what had happened.
‘Tania,’ I said gently, ‘there’s something I need to tell you. Joe has committed suicide.’
I’m not at liberty to say what her response was.