When architects sit down to design a prison they don’t stroke their chins and ponder ways to make it a little more comfortable for the inmates, so it’s infuriating when you hear people on the outside carry on about how prisons are just like holiday resorts. ‘Oh, I tell you,’ self-described ‘taxpayers’ will often say on talkback radio or in the beer gardens of the nation’s pubs, ‘these bloody crims are living in near luxury with colour TVs, sports equipment and even bloody swimming pools!’ Inevitably they’ll all draw the same conclusion: ‘Some of these so-called prisons are more like five-star hotels!’
It’s infantile and it drives me insane.
The truth is the concrete pool at DPFC was built mainly so that in the event the place caught fire the fire fighters had a sporting chance at dousing the flames before a full-blown human catastrophe unfolded. We lived so far out in the backblocks that there was no other decent water supply should a proper fire take hold. The idea that we sat sunbathing around the pool with daiquiri in hand was preposterous.
In summertime the prison was as hot as anywhere else in the state, and then some. Whenever it hit 40 degrees Celsius in the city it was 52 where we were. We had no air conditioning of any description and outside the dry, hard-baked ground was mostly unmolested by trees, so there was virtually no meaningful shade throughout the entire complex. Even in the event a half-hearted breeze managed to start up after dark to take the edge off the overnight swelter, we couldn’t leave our doors open to welcome it in. We were locked in our stifling concrete boxes from 7pm during the daylight-savings months. But thank God we had that glorified fire hydrant-cum-pool so 300 women could frolic with giant beach balls, have hysterical super-soaker fights, drink cocktails and playfully spring off a pink diving board!
For the record, being in prison is not like being in a five-star resort. It’s like being in a prison.
Winters were just as uncomfortable, only in reverse. Prisons aren’t insulated any more than they are well ventilated and the besser bricks in the walls might as well have been giant ice-cubes when the mercury plunged. We weren’t permitted to have fans or heaters because of the fire risk. Not one of the doors in the prison fitted flush to the ground, nor were they sealed with weather strips, so if it was bitterly cold to begin with, it became near Arctic when wind whistled over the plains of Deer Park, under your cell door, across the lino and straight onto you as you huddled shivering under your blanket dressed in prison tracksuit and dressing gown.
During one such frigid winter, however, we were unexpectedly gifted a reprieve from our state of near-hypothermia. A team of workmen arrived in the prison to carry out an upgrade to the Programs building where we typically had psych appointments, pre-parole appointments, counselling and the like. The appearance of men – civilian men in flannelette shirts wielding tools, shovelling, sawing and hammering away – was an obvious drawcard for the women, and while my interest was also piqued by the blokes, my eye was taken by something even more alluring – a beautiful two metre by one metre mound of sand.
When civilians or contractors enter a prison in any capacity, extremely tight security is put in place. Large cyclone wire fences go up around the worksite so there can be no interaction, and officers are stationed down there to keep a general eye on what’s going on. But I’d already fallen deeply in love with the pile of sand and had a plan for our future together all figured out.
While most prisoners might look at sand and yearn for the beach, I took one look at it and longed to be a bit warmer at night. Since a few of the girls were already drawn to the building site to ogle the workmen, we started forming groups of ten to twelve women to mill around near the fence, chat a little and strike up a conversation with the officers.
‘OK,’ I’d whisper to a couple of the girls, ‘you guys go over and have a chat to that officer and don’t forget to ask how his little boys are going.’ Then I’d get another couple of girls to distract another officer with some interesting inquiry or other, and so on until the cyclone fence wasn’t being watched as closely as it might have been. The sand pile sat just on the other side of the fence – close enough for us to reach through and grab big handfuls to shove into the blessedly deep pockets of our tracksuit pants.
We had already organised for some of the inmates who were particularly good at sewing to cut metre-long strips of fabric in a range of garish colours and wait for our gritty, ill-gotten booty to arrive back in the units. Slowly, a range of brightly coloured, sand-filled, hand-sewn door snakes started to appear throughout the otherwise grey prison buildings. This went on for two weeks. We’d wander down to the worksite and start talking to the officers: ‘How’s your day going, Mr Bruce? How are the kids? Bloody cold, isn’t it? B-r-r-r-r! Listen, if I bring you some visitors’ lists could you help get them done quickly?’
Meanwhile, behind him, ten girls would reach through the wire fence and pluck fistfuls of sand from the pile before heading back to our snake assembly line. It was the opposite of The Shawshank Redemption – we were taking soil back into the units. When the pile was all but gone, however, the officers figured out something was up and the questions started. The workmen wanted to know where all their sand had disappeared to and the officers sure as hell did, too.
‘OK, what have you done with the sand?’ they demanded to know.
‘Why are you asking us?’ I replied. ‘Obviously those workers have used it all on the new Programs building.’ But apparently the men hadn’t even started mixing concrete yet. ‘Well, maybe the wind blew it away then!’ I suggested helpfully, palms upturned. ‘I don’t know. Why are you asking us anyway?’ Pretty soon some damning, irrefutable evidence was presented. A lady from the Better Pathways Building Program had periodically been taking progress photographs of the construction and in the background of her pictures a virtual time-lapse history of the great sandy mystery had been unwittingly catalogued. Although none of the shots captured any of us in the act of reaching through the fence or stuffing sand into our trackies, they clearly showed how the pile steadily diminished over a fortnight.
‘So, if the workers aren’t using it,’ the officers wanted to know, ‘who is? And why?’
And just like in The Shawshank Redemption, the whole prison was put on lock-down as the shit hit the fan. Suddenly it was no joke and the prison administration was determined to get to the bottom of it – pronto. The way they put it, ‘If a whole mound of sand can disappear from this prison, then obviously a prisoner can, too.’
‘Uh oh!’ I thought. ‘We’ve got real issues now.’
But by that stage it was too late. All of the units and every cell had its own door snake. And they weren’t shy, timid or camouflaged reptiles either: these things were crafted out of lime green, orange or bright yellow fabric, and adorned with silly, googly stick-on eyes or little moustaches, forked tongues and dopey-looking smiles. People used to get all manner of things sent in for their crafts and hobbies so there was no shortage of things we could use to really pimp up the snakes.
We remained in lock-down for the next two days while every cell and unit was thoroughly searched, and the dog squad was brought through to systematically sniff every millimetre of the prison. Not one of them found a single grain of the missing sand. Yet every time an officer or dog entered a cell or walked through any number of doors in the units, Giuseppe the moustachioed door python or Greg the pale blue ‘special needs’ snake would be staring up at them through a set of wobbly eyes. We even had snakes dangling off the back of delivery buggies, just hanging out and hiding in plain sight. They became known as ‘fuck you snakes’.
After a while the panicked investigations died down but the puzzling case of the disappearing mound was never solved. Years later, I detailed exactly what happened in front of Brendan Money in a way I couldn’t have fathomed at the time of the Great Sand Heist. Apart from it being hilarious in hindsight and a nice win against the system, the whole episode resulted in a massive bonus for the inmates by fulfilling its original intention: from that time on we were a lot warmer when the winter winds blew in. The irony is I’ve been to one or two resorts and five-star hotels in the years since my release and not once have I encountered a door snake. Funny, that.
While the manufacture of ‘fuck you snakes’ had been an illicit industry, there was no shortage of sanctioned, organised enterprises at DPFC to keep the women occupied and ‘contributing to society’ in some small measure. Nowadays I’m reminded of it every Anzac Day when I pause to remember not only the fallen but also the women who are incarcerated throughout Australia. If you’ve ever been approached by an RSL member outside a train station or stopped at one of their makeshift tables outside a shopping centre to buy a little plastic pin-on badge for Anzac Day, it’s more than likely an inmate had her hands on it long before you did.
Every January, women in the prison would be assigned work sticking Anzac badges onto the little commemorative cards for volunteers to sell to the public. About five months beforehand the girls would get boxes and boxes of these badges and bits of card – hundreds of thousands of the bloody things. It was done inside a shed at the height of summer. If you’re looking to place a bet on two women belting into each other, just rock up to that shed after about three hours of work. It was so hot and mundane that someone inevitably snapped. And these women were paid at the lowest rate in the prison of $22 per week. I, by comparison, was one of the lucky ones with the highest pay of $36 per week for my job as peer support worker.
Less fraught but no less challenging was working in the prison ‘garden’. I used to wonder why they even bothered since the soil there was as hard as cement. The only place where grass grew – and even then it struggled to survive – was a little patch in the middle of the compound. Yet as an inmate you could attempt to do some ‘gardening’ if you so wished. When I first arrived in prison, a major furniture manufacturer was using prison labour to have its wooden chairs sanded before they were sent somewhere else to be finished. And I don’t mean in a proper workshop with power sanders and ventilation shafts – women were literally rubbing back raw wood by hand with bits of sandpaper. That scheme was shut down after a while because prisoners started getting respiratory illnesses thanks to all the sawdust and flecks of sandpaper they were inhaling every day.
In addition to being skilled at hand-sewing, quite a few of the girls were absolute whizzes with the sewing machines, so there was also quite an industry at DPFC churning out tracksuits for the men’s prisons. Then there were the jobs that kept the prison itself ticking over; women worked in the kitchen chopping vegetables, others delivered the food to all the units on the back of a little buggy. There were billets who were the overall keepers of the various units; responsible for the food ordering, for the chemicals to clean the linoleum floors, and so on. Some girls were simply cleaners whose job it was to keep places like the Visitor Centre shipshape.
One of the quintessential prison jobs was working in the laundry. It’s also one of the most trusted positions. My friend Sue, who lived with us in C2B, worked in the laundry and through her we usually got the drop on whether a girl was about to re-enter the prison. The laundry was something of a filter and a weigh station in the ebb and flow of human flotsam between us and the outside world. Sue was part of a chain of steps involved in accepting new or returning inmates. Typically when someone leaves police holding cells, for example, the prison knows they’ll be arriving and whether their clothing size is small, medium or large. Based on that, Sue would be told to prepare a box containing a pair of socks, a bra and a tracksuit. Laundry workers also usually knew the inmate’s name because they are generally processed into prison clothing first before they go off on the other admission steps like psychiatric evaluation and medical assessment. So, with Sue in the laundry, and by parsing other administrative information that would find its way out, she’d come home to our unit and say, ‘Guess what? Glenda is on her way back.’ Or, ‘You won’t believe who you’ll be seeing later today!’
And first thing every day I would start my job. As a peer support worker my duties were anything but mundane. Sometimes I could find myself emotionally sanding back a chewed-up human being; other days it was like sewing someone’s shredded heart back together a little or pulling pins out of her soul. Sometimes it was all I could do to keep from crying.