Criminalising poverty and homelessness is criminalising our people

The overrepresentation of our women in prison is both a cause and a consequence of family violence, poverty and homelessness. First Nations peoples are disproportionately forced onto inadequate, below-poverty-line Centrelink payments and into substandard housing. Even more so, First Nations women are forced onto punitive and discriminatory programs such as ParentsNext, which not only fail to provide a sufficient social-security safety net for women to feed and house themselves and their children, but also deprive women of their basic rights through punitive mutual obligations. 

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women have been clear about the way paternalistic welfare policies harm us and our communities - the unlivable rates of payment, lack of cultural safety, the punitive, discriminatory and onerous nature of ‘mutual obligations’ and compliance frameworks, the high proportion of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander social security recipients being breached and losing their payments and the racial discrimination at the heart of the Community Development Program.

Instead of providing adequate housing so that women and their children can live safely and with dignity, too often women are forced to choose between remaining in unsafe or violent households or waiting years for public housing to become available. Decades of evidence demonstrate the relationship between homelessness and incarceration, and homelessness and family violence. Consistently research has found that one in three people in prison experienced homelessness in the month before their incarceration. Thousands of women are forced to return to unsafe homes or become homeless every year due to inadequate housing.

At the heart of our struggle for justice is a fundamental denial of our basic rights - to live with safety and dignity in a secure home, free from violence. Punitive and discriminatory government policies have put this modest aspiration out of reach for so many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women - forcing us into poverty, prisons and unsafe homes. 

Photo credit: @buffie.creative

Our communities, our culture, our solutions

Government decisions have led us here, and now they need to get us out of here: by stepping up in delivering essential services and stepping back to hand us the decision-making power over our own lives. 

For too long, Government policies have treated us as a problem to be solved - and not as the source of cultural strength, lived experience and expertise to design and implement early intervention, prevention and support services by and for our people. This doesn’t mean just funding one program, or one service. It means recognising the wealth of knowledge, culture and community connections held by First Nations women and people and investing in our expertise to develop our own business, economic opportunities and social enterprise. It means adequately funding our specialist legal and family violence prevention services. It means removing the government-imposed barriers to our people thriving, such as punitive poverty payments and inadequate, insufficient housing. 

We have laid out a blueprint for what’s needed to reduce the disproportionate rates of violence against, and incarceration of, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in our report Pathways to Safety. Prioritising place-based, community-controlled services designed and delivered by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is an essential part of a holistic self-determined strategy to reduce violence and achieve healing, greater community strength and community-led economic development.

What we need now is governments and allies to listen to our solutions and back our plan for safety, equality and justice. 

Dorothy Armstrong: Lived experience

Before I went into custody my children and I were in transitional housing because of the abuse we suffered. Then my ex-husband took off with the kids, literally moved overnight, and I was distraught. I met another man who completely trashed my housing and I wasn't able to go back because of him. I had no options left to me and I ended up being charged and in prison. 

Initially I didn't know where my ex-husband had taken my children, even though there were Family Court Orders. I have brain damage because of abuse that I've suffered and I was quite nonverbal when I got to prison. I wasn't able to communicate with anybody as I was terrified of being hit again. All I could think was, ‘I could die’. Especially seeing all the concrete and steel. 

When I first went into prison, I got no help contacting my children. Nobody asked if I had kids, or where they were. Meanwhile, my children thought I was potentially dead, ‘Where's Mum? She's just disappeared off the face of the earth’. Eventually my ex-husband said ‘your Mum’s in prison’ and it was never discussed again or explained. All they could think was that I’d abandoned them. 

Prison is about processes, even your telephone contact list. It was months before I could make a call and, when I did, my ex-husband would decide whether I could speak to the kids. Seven minutes with my son, seven minutes with my daughter, often there’d be yelling in the background and I'd be asking everyone around me, ‘I'm trying to speak to my daughter, could you please be quiet?’ My daughter was so worried she’d miss my calls that she stopped doing things, just stayed at home waiting. When I couldn’t call, they were scared that something had happened, that I’d died. They were living with that traumatisation over and over again. 

Once my daughter rang the prison and asked to speak with me. The person on the phone asked her what her Mum’s CRN was – I was a number and my daughter didn’t know the answer. She was a child, sobbing, just wanting to speak to her Mum, and they wouldn’t let her. 

My kids got no support, they were bullied at school once people found out where I was. They ended up living out of home, in halfway houses and other places, in their early teens because of all the trauma they experienced. 

Once I was released, I was kicking in doors trying to get help for me and my children, but it didn’t happen. I didn't get help with connecting with my children.   

If my children had somebody to support them, to listen to them and talk with them, that would have made their lives so much better. They probably would not have suffered as much as they have. We’ve had to piece our lives back together – bumping our way through.  

My children are the most important thing to me in the world and if there's any kind of opportunity to advocate for children to see their parents in custody, I'll do it forever.  

If a woman goes into custody, she should be able to communicate with her children and make sure her children are notified where their mother is. Children should be able to talk with and see their Mum, be able to touch and hug and kiss and have some kind of meaningful activity, normalise the relationship. Just as importantly, set up supports while Mum is in prison that will continue once she's out of prison that are about keeping that family together. 

My children's lives were deeply, seriously and severely impacted - because this one person went to prison, their whole life changed. There was no support for them and that has caused damage to our relationship, it is still like climbing a mountain. As my daughter said, you can’t just take a Mama away from her children and then put them back and expect everything to be fine. It doesn’t work like that.  

It’s amazing that my kids and I have got to where we’ve got to, but we’ve done it on our own. This is going to be an ongoing conversation, trying to rebuild different bridges that had Molotov cocktails thrown at them. We're all still being affected in ways we're not even really aware of. 

Try to imagine how you would feel, how your children would feel, if one day you were there and the next day you’re not and they don’t know what’s happened, never knowing if you’re still alive. It would rip you apart and completely destroy your children.   

The people who make the decisions about these things have no idea the effect that it’s having. We could be doing so much better so that children are not the ones paying the price. Whatever way you’re looking at it, you need to change the game radically because it doesn't work. It doesn't just harm the person in custody. It harms their whole family in ways you can't even imagine. 

In many places around Australia, the increase in the prisoner population has been driven by an increase in numbers of people on remand. Remand populations (that is, people who have not been convicted of any offence and are waiting for their court date, and people who have not yet had their sentence determined) now constitute more than a third of all people in custody. The increase in the remand population is intimately connected to changes to bail legislation, particularly the tightening of eligibility for bail. Policies that tighten bail legislation, alongside policies that tighten eligibility for parole, and policies that increase sentence lengths, have all contributed to our increasing prisoner population.

Decisions around parole, bail and sentence length tend to be made in highly politicised environments, often very quickly, and often on the back of a very public and very serious crime that quite understandably has caused community outcry. However, what is now very clear, is that policies that are made this way (alongside policies that occur in the ‘tough on crime’ law and order auctions during election time), fail dramatically when it comes to building safer communities. Instead, what these policies do, is increase the numbers of people – particularly women – that are captured in the net of the criminal justice system. 

For instance, in 2017, 41 per cent of women in Victoria’s prisons were unsentenced and held on remand, typically for non-violent offences. Just a few years later, this figure climbed to 56 per cent, driven in large part by the introduction of tougher bail laws following the Bourke St rampage that killed six people.

When governments restrict access to bail, lawmakers are not intending to lock away more women, many of them vulnerable and with no prior prison history, for offences for which they had not yet been convicted. But the unintended consequences of these changes in Victoria are replicated around Australia. Policy shifts intended to keep the community safer in response to rare but horrific acts of violence, inevitably end up drawing much larger numbers of people into the justice system, not because they are ‘dangerous’ but because they can’t make bail. 

The failure of incarceration

The Productivity Commission noted in its report last year that the justice system is failing at enormous expense to taxpayers. This report joins more than three decades’ worth of government-led reports and inquiries in Australia that have identified the failure of imprisonment to achieve its intended crime control ambitions. 

Decades of evidence shows us that for the vast majority of people, imprisonment doesn’t work to deter or to rehabilitate. Prison is in fact ‘criminogenic’. The experience of going to prison makes it more likely that someone will go on to re-offend and return to prison. More than 50 per cent of people who leave prison return within two years. If we were to take a snapshot of the prisoner population today, we would see in some Australian jurisdictions, that more than 70 per cent of people currently in prison have been there before. 

Although prison works fairly well to ‘incapacitate’, (that is while people are in prison they are not able to commit crime in the community), any crime control function that this might have is generally short term, and then ultimately erased by the fact that the experience of imprisonment increases the likelihood of future offending and imprisonment. Although locking people up in prisons may prevent some crime happening while people are locked up, it does not address the drivers of incarceration, and it certainly doesn’t reduce the likelihood of future crime being committed when people come out of prison.

Alongside the decades of reports showing imprisonments failures to reduce crime, there are countless reports, inquiries and royal commissions that have detailed the damage and harm that prison causes to both those who are locked up, and to the families, loved ones and communities who are also exposed to this experience. 

Our over-reliance on incarceration as a default response to both disadvantage and offending has resulted in a situation where too many people in the justice system are unnecessarily trapped in a cycle of harmful and costly incarceration. Instead of reducing the likelihood of reoffending, prison entrenches existing disadvantage and increases the likelihood of ongoing criminal justice system involvement, often over generations. Many people leave prison homeless, jobless, and without the necessary supports to build healthy, productive, connected and meaningful lives in the community. 

Australia spends more than $5.2 billion each year on operating prisons and many more billions on building new prisons and new prison infrastructure. When we look at the failure of incarceration to make the community safer alongside the enormous economic and human costs of incarceration, it becomes clear that there is a need to do things differently. We need to take a clear-eyed and evidence-based approach to criminal justice, forming policy and practice around what works – not what is popular or based on kneejerk reaction.

Shifting the political landscape and increasing public education

Across the country, governments on both sides of politics have regularly adopted a ‘tough on crime’ approach to justice policy which has resulted in increasing numbers of people in prison. Although these kinds of approaches can be politically popular, they have been extraordinarily ineffective at reducing cycles of incarceration, ineffective at building safer communities and excessively expensive. The research is clear. Imprisonment is failing. And there are alternatives that work better to keep the community safe. It is not an absence of research or evidence that is holding us back from making long over-due changes; it is an absence of political will. The Justice Reform Initiative was formed precisely because of the need to increase both the political appetite to try something different, and the need to educate the community about imprisonments failures, at the same time as promoting evidence-based alternatives. 

While policies from governments of both political persuasions have historically led to poor outcomes in the criminal justice system, the failures of our justice system are not inevitable. There are compelling examples around Australia of evidence-based programs, policies and services that are working to disrupt criminal justice system involvement. There are opportunities to build pathways out of the justice system and improve our service delivery response at every justice system contact point. There is the need to significantly scale up programs in the community and expand the capacity of the community sector to enable people who are caught in the justice system a range of opportunities to genuinely re-build their lives. 

While there is no single ‘reform fix’ to reduce prison numbers, there are multiple proven, cost-effective reforms that can work together to make progress. Some of these reforms involve legislative change (for instance Raising the Age of Criminal Responsibility) and some require significant resource allocation to increase genuine alternatives to the justice system so that people have the opportunity to be supported and connected in the community, rather than being ‘managed’ in the justice system. Many of these reforms are already catalogued in an abundance of government and non-government reports and reviews. In addition, there are clear examples and case studies both Australian and internationally that point to approaches led by the community and health sectors that can make a profound difference in disrupting entrenched criminal justice system trajectories.

There is also a growing body of more formal research exploring the impact of various models of support There is clearly the need for early intervention, and community-based support and services that work to prevent people at risk from entering the justice system. There are also then opportunities for diversion at the point of policing, and courts, and multiple options in terms of diversionary and post-release services that are focused on supporting people who have already experienced justice system involvement and are at risk of ongoing justice system involvement. 

We need all sides of politics to put aside grandstanding and populist rhetoric, and instead embrace evidence-based justice policies that genuinely address the drivers of incarceration. Jailing is failing – and Australia is increasingly on its own in the developed world in persisting in this failed approach. 

The primary offence for both Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal women are Offences Against Justice Procedures, followed by Assault as the next most common offence in South Australia. Offences Against Justice Procedures include breaches of Parole and Home Detention, and correlates with the shorter sentences seen for women. Women who have breaches of Parole and Home Detention are often in unstable housing, experiencing domestic family violence or drug use, and these are contributing factors to this offence type.

The general tightening of bail laws that were intended to target violent men, may also be having unintended consequences on women and their remand rates (Australian Institute of health and Welfare, 2020).

High representation of Aboriginal women in custody is well above the general Aboriginal population in South Australia. A 2021 Custodial Admission Program was commenced by the Adelaide Women’s Prison and in partnership with the SA Aboriginal Legal Rights Movement. This Program provided immediate legal representation and collected improved data on new Aboriginal women to custody, in relation to housing, domestic violence, offence type, drug/alcohol use and caring responsibilities. This program is a step in the right direction, but a significant amount of work is required to reduce the number of Aboriginal women in incarceration. It is very good to see a reduction in incarceration rates for Aboriginal prisoners now a Closing the Gap target.

More work needs to be done around supporting pregnant prisoners, and those who give birth while in prison. Every state has different policy settings in relation to the removal of babies and the support provided for female prisoners. There are many positive examples here in Australia and overseas that show improved outcomes for these children and their mothers if they can remain with their mothers, with parenting support. 

Work Ready, Release Ready

This is an innovative, voluntary and first of its kind program nationally that commences with case management services in-prison and follows the prisoner as they progress through various correctional facilities during their incarceration period, and literally picks the participants up at the gate on exit and supports their transition post-release for up to two years. South Australia has seen a significant improvement in reoffending since this program has commenced.

The overarching goal of WRRR is to reduce reoffending (with participants followed two years from release) and the achievement of paid employment. A training plan is undertaken with each participant upon commencement in the program approximately two years from release, so that they use their time to participate in training or industry programs while in prison, based on their capacity and labour market opportunities. A release plan is undertaken six months from release. This is a detailed plan on what the participant will do once they are released, with regard to housing, health support, employment, transport and so on, followed by intensive vocational and personal support by a trusted mentor for up to two years after release. This is a voluntary program and candidates are selected on the basis of low education and qualifications, poor work history and most likely to require support with employment upon release.

Female Participants in WRRR

WRRR engages closely with the Adelaide Women’s Prison and has achieved positive results in reducing female re-offending in South Australia. Workskil Australia has supported 1400 prisoners in WRRR since 2018, until 30 March 2022, with 185 (13.3 per cent) of this group women and 62 (17 per cent) of these women identifying as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander.

A significant amount of focus for women in WRRR is re-connecting them to their children upon release, finding them a safe place to live, helping them to establish a support network on the outside that will be positive for them, and helping them manage their finances, life administration, and to set up their new living arrangements. Many women upon release have poor literacy and digital literacy skills, and support is provided to arrange Centrelink and other services.

WRRR data demonstrates that success in employment upon release is a statistically significant factor in an ex-offender woman not returning to custody. Figure 8 (below) shows women engaged in WRRR who are released and voluntarily remain in the program upon release and gain work are less likely to return to custody.

The WRRR program has reduced recidivism by women in South Australia since it has commenced. The program goes a long way to addressing many of the systematic issues described above and continues to be successful. A lack of affordable housing options is now emerging as a critical issue for women on release and will be the next challenge to work through. 

Our research partnership focused on community collaboration and human-centred design. We spent time quantitatively researching the challenges facing people in prison by speaking with 22 people who were currently incarcerated or had previously been in prison through individual interviews and group think tanks. As a result of these discussions, we ensured the range of human experience and stories we heard could be communicated through our design artefacts (personas and journey maps) that would inform Thriving Community Partnership’s ongoing research and collaboration with the financial sector. Our goal was to create artefacts that would enable anybody, regardless of their level of subject matter expertise, to empathise with the experience that someone who is currently or has been incarcerated might have had.

Applying co-design to rising incarceration rates

Including communities in the research and design process involves understanding the context of the problem, and hearing from the people involved. There is a wealth of research into the incarceration of women, providing insight into the ways violence against women perpetuates cycles of generational incarceration, or rethinking the response to female offending. This echoes the need to understand the root causes of offending behaviour and the need for more holistic, empathetic approaches. Over the past few years, we’ve spoken to court officers, judges, legal aid, police and women who are currently incarcerated or recently released.

Many people in prison come from severely disadvantaged backgrounds with serious physical and mental health challenges and higher rates of disability than is found in the general population. Incarcerated women are disproportionately represented in unemployment, health and homelessness statistics. For instance, it’s estimated that 33 per cent of women in prison have an acquired brain injury (ABI), compared with two per cent of the general population. People we spoke with who have experienced issues with debt, homelessness, health or ABIs pointed to the lack of integrated services that would have helped them resolve the issues they were experiencing before they committed the minor offences that led to cycles of reoffending.

Rates of reoffending as well as personal accounts of the prison experience indicate that incarceration isn’t effective rehabilitation. In 2020, more than seven in 10 (72 per cent of) prison entrants who were women had previously been in an adult prison. Women we spoke with during our research into barriers affecting financial stability who had experienced family violence felt that the loss of control and independence perpetuated by the prison environment made them feel isolated and unsafe. This led to them being unable to build new connections or receive the support they needed to overcome cycles of violence and trauma. The intergenerational cycle of trauma is a systemic issue that disproportionately affects women and First Nations communities. For many women, incarceration affects their ability to care for or spend time with their children, further contributing to an ongoing cycle of trauma, criminal activity and incarceration.

Understanding the root causes and the levers to bring about systemic change is vital to creating approaches that take into account the various factors, needs and motivations of everyone involved. In the context of increasing female incarceration rates, this means looking for opportunities to address cycles of violence, intergenerational trauma and disadvantage through connected, holistic services. 

Community-based approaches to justice address both the huge cost differential between incarceration and community programs as well as the need for empathetic responses to complex issues. Alongside the economic advantages, choosing community-based outcomes enables women to access support programs, financial resources or medical and psychological support without being exposed to further violence and trauma. Understanding the need for new approaches and service interventions is only the first step, as new approaches also need to be piloted, tested, evaluated and scaled to address this important challenge.