Violence costing women their freedom: Debbie Kilroy on the hidden tolls of locking people up

Updated

On a brisk autumn night in May 1988, Debbie Kilroy tore through the quiet streets of Brisbane in her Chevrolet convertible, furious.

She had just heard a rumour at a bar about her football-star husband and another woman.

After pulling up in her driveway at home, she slammed the car door and stormed inside to find Joe Kilroy asleep, and let fly with her accusations, barely pausing to draw breath for 40 minutes.

The conflict between the couple had been escalating in recent months; arguments and shouting matches would frequently spiral into physical fights and, though she was strong and full of rage, Debbie would usually emerge from them worse off than Joe.

That night, before she knew what was happening, a frustrated Joe had bundled up his wife and carried her down the hallway to the back door; from there he planned to chuck her in the pool outside, he said — anything to stop her yelling at him.

As he pushed open the door, Debbie grabbed onto the doorframe in desperation. "My hand's stuck!" she screamed. But Joe, a tall and powerful rugby league player, ploughed on down the stairs, only stopping when he reached the water's edge.

There, Debbie held up her hand to the moonlight and, for a brief moment, time stood still as shock set in. "Where's my f***ing finger?" she shrieked, before doubling over to be sick.

Her ring finger, it turned out, was still upstairs: her wedding band had gotten caught in the doorjamb, and her finger was ripped off in one swift tug.

"I remember the ambos saying, 'Oh, don't worry, we've seen men get their dicks cut off and we've successfully sewn them back on," Ms Kilroy told ABC News this week, more than three decades on. "It was the weirdest thing to say to someone in my situation."

Not least because, despite several hours of surgery, the doctors couldn't save her finger — the gap it left would become a permanent reminder of just how extreme the violence between the couple would get.

Not long after she lost her finger — and her marriage, for a short period — Ms Kilroy was sentenced to six years' imprisonment for the trafficking and possession of drugs; she and Joe had been arrested after Debbie sold heroin to an undercover cop.

Her name would soon become famous around the country for two reasons: one, because Ms Kilroy witnessed the callous murder of one of her closest friends while she was in Boggo Road jail. And two, because her time behind bars led her to establish Sisters Inside, an organisation supporting and advocating for the rights of women and girls in prison, the majority of whom, like her, are survivors of violence and abuse.

Paying fines to 'Free the People'

For nearly 30 years Ms Kilroy and her team have worked with thousands of criminalised and imprisoned women in Queensland, connecting them with whatever they need — legal advice and representation, sexual assault and trauma counselling, secure housing — with one main aim: to stem the tide of women flowing steadily into Australian jails.

Since the launch of Sisters Inside, though, the number of women in prison has exploded: back then, in 1992, there were about 80 women in jail in Queensland. Today, there are 838 women behind bars in that state, more than a third of them First Nations women, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. More than half — 53 per cent — of women in prison in Queensland in 2018 had previously been incarcerated.

"The prison industry has actually gotten bigger and more powerful [since I was in jail]," Ms Kilroy said. "We're criminalising more women than ever before; we're also criminalising [a broader range of] women and behaviours: women with mental illness, women with disabilities, women who are homeless, disadvantaged and impoverished."

Australia is also criminalising a growing number of victims of family violence, as ABC News reported recently. While research suggests between 70 and 90 per cent women behind bars have experienced sexual or domestic violence in their lifetime, a survey of 110 women in prison in Queensland by Sisters Inside found 98 per cent of women had and that, for many, this experience can lead directly to their incarceration.

These issues are currently under a bright spotlight thanks to a widely publicised fundraising campaign launched by Ms Kilroy to free Aboriginal women who are in prison or at risk of being imprisoned for unpaid fines in Western Australia — the only state where people are regularly jailed for failing to pay fines under the Fines, Penalties and Infringement Notices Enforcement Act.

Ms Kilroy was spurred into action, she said, after Perth-based actor and dancer, Reuben Yorkshire, was arrested last month on a warrant of commitment for unpaid court fines and ordered to spend six days behind bars to 'cut out' his debt.

"It reminded me of Ms Dhu, who was a victim of horrific domestic violence" Ms Kilroy said, referring to the Yamatji woman who died in custody in 2014 after being jailed on a warrant of commitment for $3,622 of unpaid fines.

"So many Aboriginal mothers who are living in absolute poverty, who have suffered awful violence, are being imprisoned, with no capacity to pay off their fines. And yet the government still hasn't taken action to change the laws [that allow them to be]."

At the time of writing, the Free the People campaign had raised $352,485 from 7,559 donors, enabling Sisters Inside to pay the fines of 72 women in the community, and the warrants of four women already in jail, securing their release.

"People have been shocked and disgusted to learn we are treating human beings like this," Ms Kilroy said of the public support it has received. "People are always saying ... this is wrong and unjust, what can we do to help? And I think this has been a practical way for people to do that."

Of course, Ms Kilroy's intimate knowledge of the many factors leading to the incarceration of women in Australia means she is better placed than most to spearhead such an influential campaign. And it has been, by many measures, an overwhelming success, also sparking a month-long national conversation about how seemingly benign (though disturbingly common) experiences like family violence, homelessness and poverty can cost women their freedom.

But what is also remarkable is that it has taken a woman who has been through the system herself to expose its many failings, and to open the rest of the country's eyes to the hidden tolls of locking people up. In its founder's home state and others, there are signs the Sisters Inside movement is gathering steam.

Debt impossible to clear

In setting up the fundraiser, Ms Kilroy also asked donors to email Western Australia's Attorney General "and demand that these discriminatory laws be repealed as a matter of urgency", echoing the recommendations of several major reports and inquiries in recent years, including by the state coroner following the inquest into Ms Dhu's death.

The Western Australian Government has repeatedly promised to reform the Fines Act, which in the past three years has seen almost 2,500 people imprisoned for unpaid fines alone, a disproportionate number of them First Nations women. (As of February 2 this year, only two people, both Aboriginal men, were in jail for this reason, according to the Department of Justice.)

The laws have also deterred victims of domestic abuse from calling police for help out of fear they will be arrested for outstanding warrants instead of assisted with violent incidents.

Do you have a story? Hayley Gleeson and Julia Baird are currently investigating the increase in the number of women being incarcerated in Australia, and why a significant majority have experienced domestic violence. If you have a story to share, contact us at: ABCIPV@gmail.com.

A spokesperson for the state's Attorney General, John Quigley, told ABC News Mr Quigley intended to introduce a package of amendments to the Act in the first half of 2019, the effect of which "will be to ensure that imprisonment for fine default is truly a last resort and only possible if ordered by a Court".

"The McGowan Government takes this issue very seriously," the spokesperson said. "We know that keeping fine defaulters in custody to 'cut out' their unpaid fines is not the most effective way to enforce fines payments and is economically unsound."

But Ms Kilroy is concerned that, even if the Fines Act is reformed, vulnerable women will continue falling through the cracks — particularly those experiencing domestic violence.

Even now, women are being released from prison in Western Australia with huge amounts of debt that they are unable to cut out with time served.

One Indigenous woman told ABC News she was released from prison in Kalgoorlie last year with $8,000 of debt she was not able to pay off behind bars.

The woman, who has served several short sentences in prison over the past decade, mostly for minor offences like theft and disorderly conduct in public, was able to cut out her $30,000 court fines debt but not the $8,000 infringements debt she owed — one of which was incurred in 2012 when she was fined for riding a train without a ticket while she was trying to escape her violent ex-partner.

(Some of her other offences, she said, were related to her drug and alcohol addictions, which she developed after enduring years of physical and psychological abuse.)

She has since been able to negotiate a payment plan with Baycorp, the private debt collection agency, which is deducting $150 from her fortnightly Centrelink payments. But if she hadn't she set up the plan, she said, she wouldn't have been able to get back her driver's licence, which she needs in order to drive herself to parole appointments, find a new home, and begin rebuilding her life.

"It's really stressful, because I can't really afford to pay that much — I have barely anything left for food and clothes for my baby after the $150 comes out," the woman said. "But I am trying hard to get back on my feet."

Still, there is a good chance she will end up back in prison, like scores of other women in her position do, or worse.

From prison to poverty, and back again

"One of the biggest risk factors for recidivism is the fact that women are continually being released from prison into poverty, which just pipelines them back into prison," said Ms Kilroy, who for decades has watched women bounce from violent relationships into homelessness, which can be a fast track to offending.

"Many women will also go back to their violent partner ... they will continue to self-medicate [with drugs or alcohol] to deal with that abuse, and once you start to use illegal substances you're going to collide with the cops fairly quickly."

In extreme cases, these factors are resulting in preventable deaths by suicide, drug overdose and severe domestic violence, with numerous studies showing ex-prisoners are at greater risk of death after release from prison than while they are behind bars. (One Australian study found that more inmates died in the year after their release from prison than the annual number of deaths in custody.)

It makes sense then, that the first government grant Sisters Inside received in 1994 was used to fund a domestic violence support program for at-risk women.

The program was prioritised after an inmate in Boggo Road jail was released into homelessness, despite telling Corrective Services she had nowhere to go.

"She went back to her violent partner and was murdered that night," said Ms Kilroy, who is aware of at least six women in Queensland who have died soon after being released from prison in the past 18 months.

But while some prison support workers insist that, for many women, prison can be a "safer" place to be than in the community, providing them with space to think and perhaps sober up, Ms Kilroy scoffs at the idea.

"Being in prison is like being in a violent relationship," she said. "One minute [the prison guards] are belting you, the next minute they want to be your friend ... prison just replicates the same cycle of violence women have been through on the outside — it's just another perpetrator in their lives."

Breaking the cycle of self-blame and abuse

This is why Sisters Inside also invests heavily in helping women identify and heal from their trauma which, particularly for the organisation's many Aboriginal clients, can often be traced to their devastating experiences of colonisation, child removal and the constant drip-drip of racism.

"A lot of women I see in the prisons will talk about how they believe the violence in their life is their fault," Ms Kilroy, who has degrees in social work and law, said. "So for me it's important to help them unpack the messages they've swallowed that make them believe they deserve to be violated in that way."

Sometimes, that involves helping women acknowledge how their own behaviour might have invited or exacerbated their abuse, an approach that will doubtless draw criticism from domestic violence advocates, who are typically quick to rebuff even the slightest suggestion that a victim might be "blamed" for a violent partner's actions.

"I'm not saying [violent] men aren't to blame — of course men need to take responsibility for their behaviour," Ms Kilroy said. "But I stayed in [my abusive relationships]" — including with her first partner, who beat her so severely that on one occasion she leapt out of a third-storey apartment to escape him — "because of the script I had been following all my life."

That script was written in her teenage years, several of which she spent in a youth detention facility that claimed to be a "child guidance hospital for the treatment of delinquency in the world".

During one of her stints there in 1975, she was cruelly blamed by a nurse for the sudden death of her father from a heart attack, leaving Ms Kilroy with a deep and destructive sense of guilt she would carry for decades.

"[The matron] just kept telling me that I'd done it. You killed your father," she later told her biographer Kris Olsson. "And that's what I swallowed ... I killed my father so I must be bad, I must need punishment. And the way you get punishment is to be really bad, to become violent. So that's what I did."

This narrative also played out in her intimate relationships, she said, including her marriage to Joe, a kind and easy-going man whose love she felt she didn't deserve.

So subconsciously she continually, deliberately "pressed his buttons", she said, in a bid to provoke him into reacting violently, or leaving: another form of punishment. (Ms Kilroy and her husband are still married today, and are happy, which she attributes to years of hard work from them both.)

'I'll show you how bad I can be'

Troublingly, similarly misguided messages are still being directed at young people behind bars, Ms Kilroy said.

"I can go to the youth prison today and hear the prison officers telling girls they're no good, they're nothing, they're bad. And I have actually heard the girls say back, 'I'll show you how bad I can be'. If you tell them they're a bad and violent person ... that's how they'll behave — that's how they think they deserve to be treated."

It is this philosophy — that prisons cause more harm than good — that ultimately drives Ms Kilroy and her work, and why she describes herself as an abolitionist. This, she said, means "imagining" a world in which violence and its causes are addressed in communities, not by police, prisons and other "broken" systems.

But while she concedes she is unlikely to see prisons completely eradicated during her lifetime, there are signs governments are starting to take notice of the damage they're doing.

Earlier this month, for instance, the Queensland Productivity Commission released the draft report for its ongoing Inquiry into Imprisonment and Recidivism. The report regurgitates the same alarming statistics of inquiries past: though crime rates are down, imprisonment rates are increasing — especially those of women, and particularly Aboriginal women.

Crucially, the report notes, prison also disconnects people from their communities, jobs and housing, "and can even train them to be better criminals. This can turn low-harm offenders into more serious offenders" it says.

The clincher for Ms Kilroy, though, is the state's dramatic increase in recidivism: the proportion of prisoners returning to prison with a new sentence within two years of being released.

This has shot up from 29 per cent in 2007 to 40 per cent in 2017, while of 63.6 per cent of prisoners in 2018 had known prior imprisonment, the highest proportion of any state and higher than the national average of 56.7 per cent.

"If a private business had that kind of failure rate — any failure rate — it would be shut down," she said. "But we don't do that with prisons, we just keep throwing money at them." (It costs $107,000 per year to keep a single prisoner behind bars, according to the report.)

Still, she is hopeful that its final recommendations, due out in August, might lead to a meaningful change in policy direction. "This inquiry gives us an opportunity to address the social issues which lead to the criminalisation of women ... and I believe there is a commitment from the government to do that. But we have to make some pretty big changes if we're going to have any impact."

In the meantime, even if the bureaucracy is dragging its feet, Ms Kilroy is convinced her movement is gaining broader momentum.

Her most recent annual conference, hosted by Sisters Inside in Brisbane last November, was the most well-attended yet — so jam-packed, in fact, that her keynote speaker and friend, the American civil rights activist and scholar, Angela Davis, pulled her aside.

"Angela said to me, 'Most movements start around a particular event and then they usually die off pretty quickly. But Sisters Inside is creating a community that is getting bigger and bigger'," she said.

"And she's right: our conference is getting bigger and the next generation are talking really seriously about abolition. There are so many young leaders around the country — especially in the Aboriginal community — who are all stepping up, armed with strong arguments, and they're taking this fight on."

As for what keeps Ms Kilroy in the fight of her life?

"The women," she said, without missing a beat. "The women, the girls, their children. We are seeing generation after generation of women being incarcerated. But if we want a better world, all of us have to get out of bed and do the work."

Debbie Kilroy will be joining a panel of experts on The Drum tonight to explore why so many women in Australian prisons are victims of domestic violence. Watch at 6:00pm on ABC TV.

Topics: domestic-violence, homelessness, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, women, people, prisons-and-punishment, laws, australia

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