Tracy Brannigan

Tracy Brannigan died in prison on Monday 25 February 2013. She should never have been isolated from her friends’ support by being placed in a ‘high needs’ cell when she was clearly under the influence of drugs. Had proper services been provided, such as drug rehabilitation, intervention, dry cell and sufficient monitoring, Tracy would still be alive today. She should have been able to use her time in prison effectively, but instead she was left frustrated without access to education and a computer. The inquest into Tracy’s death failed as it lacked the legal support prepared to investigate and expose these issues and link them to similar past cases.

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In Australia, Indigenous women are overrepresented in prisons. The number of indigenous female prisoners in NSW has increased by 230% from 1998-2009. In comparison, the number of non-indigenous female prisoners has risen by 43%.

High incarceration rates are partly attributed to practices adopted by police authorities. This involves stationing a large number of police at largely indigenous populated areas. This generates a higher level of surveillance on Indigenous groups.

In addition, on average indigenous women serve shorter sentences than their non-indigenous counterparts. This suggests that they are being imprisoned for minor offences, such as alcohol related offences, and that imprisonment is not being used as a last resort.

The high level of incarceration occurs in the context of family violence, over-policing for selected offences, poor health, unemployment and poverty. Overall indigenous women have a double disadvantage, namely race and gender. To overcome these issues the law must recognise that indigenous women in particular are socially and economically oppressed. Many of the services that are currently provided for the Indigenous prison community are tailored towards indigenous men. Until the law recognises these rights, indigenous women will be continue to be treated unjustly.

Remand

Over the last fifteen years, there has been a sharp increase in unsentenced women being imprisoned on remand in Australia. While on remand, women prisoners have limited access to programs, services and support and are further limited due to the prisons classification system – remandees usually highly classified. Women prisoners on remand are more likely to be released with little support for their rehabilitation into real life.

Aggregate Sentence Length

Women are likely to get shorter aggregate sentences and less time to serve in prison than men; in 2013, the average aggregate sentence for woman was 9 months although it was 17 months for men. However, the sentencing of women is more likely to be inappropriate and ineffective; indeed, far from the ‘rational’ of a socially and financially independent male, a battered woman, a mother with dependent children, a woman who goes into debt to help another, a person with a drug addiction, a person who faces structural racism or suffers trauma, the legal system awards blame and does not even consider support as part of the equation. Ejected from society because of their illegal activity substantially too often perceived as ‘anti-feminine’ behaviour, prisons do not necessarily offer the appropriate means for women to live correctly in prison. For instance, some jurisdictions attempted to switch the traditional tracksuit with floral dresses. Interestingly enough, basic health, nutrition and humane treatment do not seem to equal ‘feminine needs’.

For both men and women, people who have previously been incarcerated are more likely to receive a term of imprisonment than those who have not. The rate of women returning to prison thorough Australia has increased. In 2013 the rate of recidivism for Indigenous women was 66.8% while non-Indigenous women’s was 41.5%.

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Officially, the ‘Bangkok Rules’ is the United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders, and the UN General Assembly adopted the rules in December 2010. They are relevant in transcending international issues relating to prison and incarceration communities that do not cater to women. The Bangkok Rules should always be read in conjunction with the Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners (STMRTP). The Bangkok rules merely supplements them by providing foundational rules that facilitate to female prisoners to avoid bureaucratic discrimination.

According to the book “Using Participatory Action Research to put the Bangkok Rule into Practice, The Thai Prison Case Study”:

• Culturally women are abused both within the social world and within incarceration. Therefore, there treatment of women should be specialised.
• The Bangkok Rules are not linked to discrimination, but rather acknowledge particular needs that are linked to female gender physically, socially and culturally.

Consideration is given to issues such as:

• violence
• victimisation
• powerlessness to bargain or plea
• separation from children
• care for elderly family (parents) outside of prison
• health problems (reproductive health and sexually transmitted diseases)
• the problem of pregnant women and giving birth in prison
• psychological conditions of prison which enforce stress, pressure, self-harm and suicide.

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Given that the development of personal skills and knowledge is crucial to the rehabilitation of women prisoners, problems surrounding education and training in women’s prisons must also be examined.

Education and Employment
Women are less likely than men to have access to education, rehabilitation and employment training programs while imprisoned. As unemployment has been found to be a strong predictor of recidivism, this inaccessibility can have negative implications for women post-release.¹ In addition, prior to incarceration, women are less likely than men to be employed with unemployment rates of 69% compared with 46%.² Women are also less likely to have employment organised prior to their release than men (10% and 31% respectively).³

Corrective Service departments throughout Australia have introduced education and training programs in their prisons, and use course completions and reduced recidivism as measures of success.⁴ Importantly, programs that reduce recidivism rates, such as in-prison study and workplace integrated learning, provide the greatest return to the community in terms of reducing the costs of imprisonment as well as other policing and legal costs. Education and training in prison imparts specific and generic life skills; while workplace integrated learning recognises the importance of and promotes the social aspects of successful reintegration. As such, computers are an important tool to target recidivism through education and self-improvement. Computer literacy is an increasingly vital requirement for everyday life; it significantly affects education, vocational training and career prospects.

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Many women prisoners have experienced life difficulties that impact on their health and wellbeing prior to entering prison, including episodes of sexual, physical and/or psychological abuse.¹ This is said to contribute to women prisoners having higher rates of mental health issues compared with women in the community. Eighty-four percent (84.5%) of women in prison had a mental disorder compared with 19.1% of women in the community.² Women prisoners have been found to be 1.7 times more likely to have a mental illness than male prisoners, and non-Aboriginal women are significantly more likely than non-Aboriginal men to have attempted suicide.³ One Victorian study found that 84% of women prisoners interviewed met the criteria for having a mental health problem.⁴ Forty-four percent (44%) of these women had major depression and 36% had post-traumatic stress disorder. Higher than both these groups was the percentage of women who had a drug-related mental health disorder. This was 57%.⁵ The study states that this range of mental health problems is similar to those found in literature on the impact of childhood abuse including the subsequent development of mental health issues into adulthood.⁶ 

As such, women are more likely than male prisoners to suffer from psychiatric disorders.This leads to cyclical ‘serial instituionalisation’ where a high proportion of women prisoners have dual and multiple diagnoses and are more likely to serve multiple sentences throughout life.

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Female convicts from Ireland and England in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries who were sent to Australia had to work in a ‘Female Factory’ either making ropes, flax or wool. Others were sent to the home of settlers to serve as domestic. Some also had the opportunity to work as nurses or record-keepers under the Governor Phillip’s system of labour.

After colonization, the first prison for women opened in 1909 in Long Bay (NSW), nowadays known as the State Reformatory for Women.

In 1969, another training and detention centre was opened in Silverwater (Sydney) and accommodated female prisoners who had previously been in goal in the Long Bay Institution.

Women imprisonment rates in Australia have been steadily increasing, in both the rate at which they are imprisoned (almost four times than twenty years ago) and their percentage of the prison population. There are more women in remand than men although it remains difficult to compare statistic of the time in custody as women have shorter but more frequent periods of imprisonment.

Women tend to be involved in crime typically regarded as less serious, such as shoplifting, fraud and drug-related crimes. Nevertheless, increases in the proportion of incarcerated women might be partially explained by the changes in type of crimes women are committing. Indeed, between 1999 and 2012, the Australian Bureau of Statistics overview of national trends observed an increase of women committing robbery, theft, assault and homicide. The most serious offence with the highest proportion of offenders for women in Australia in this period was possession/use of illicit drugs, followed by acts intended to cause injury. For men, it was the opposite.

Being deprived of one's liberty is a severe form of punishment. It has long been recognised that, aside from community safety or punishment, one of the major roles of prisons is to provide prisoners with opportunities for rehabilitation. The concept of rehabilitation is that the time spent in prison is an opportunity to provide prisoners with programs and activities to develop skills and resources that will assist them to live in society successfully upon release, without committing further breaches of the criminal law. However, successful rehabilitation also requires post-release support which women prisoners largely do not have access to upon their release.

Making Rehabilitation of Women Prisoners Effective

Genuine rehabilitation simply cannot be undertaken solely within the prison environment and must be undertaken at the post-release phase. Factors such as employment, accommodation, drug abuse, mental health, sexual assualt and trauma are deeply implicated in offending for women, and need to be addressed in rehabilitation programs. Currently in Australia, the extent to which these factors can be meaningfully addressed prior to release continue to be very limited and ineffective. The reduced availability of in-custody rehabilitation programs compared with men is discriminatory and has a negative effect on women’s rehabilitative prospects. Case management and programs must become available to women at the time of their incarceration, not just after their sentence. Almost 30% of women in custody throughout Australia are on remand with no access to the rehabilitative programs that could improve their prospects for reintegration on release. Clients of the organisation WIPAN and also other post-release services for women prisoners have been made aware of women in prison who have had no opportunity to participate in programs from the date of receiving their sentence to their earliest date of release. A woman’s sentence includes the time spent on remand and consequently they can leave prison with no further custodial time to serve or for a short time after sentencing, making her ineligible for in-custody rehabilitation programs at all. This does nothing to assist women prisoners with the process of rehabilitating, one of the stated aims of all corrective services. The whole of the custodial period is a time that should be used by Corrective Services to increase the likelihood and ability for women prisoners upon release to successfully reintegrate.

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Women in Prison FORUM:
Mothers, Sisters, Daughters

WEDNESDAY 13 AUGUST 2014
PARLIAMENT HOUSE, Sydney,

CHAIR: THE HON. ELIZABETH EVATT AC
Former Chief Justice, Family Court of Australia

SPEAKERS:
PAT O’SHANE, Former Magistrate, first Australian Aboriginal barrister
PROFESSOR EILEEN BALDRY, President of NSW Council of Social Services, 
KAT ARMSTRONG, Director of WIPAN

RSVP: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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