When mum goes to prison

Updated

More women are entering Australian prisons than ever before. When they're also mothers, the consequences for families can be devastating.

Marree is 54. She lives in Melbourne's outer west. Her home is tidy, sparse and warm.

She has a dog and four cats, whose personalities she describes in great detail with a throaty chortle.

She's quick to put the kettle on. Meeting her feels like a catch-up with an aunt who you haven't seen for a long time.

You wouldn't guess she's been to prison.

"It was the year 2004 on Melbourne Cup Day. We walked to the hotel, and that's the last thing I remember. The next thing, I wake up in the hospital.

"No one told me until two days later that my friend, the guy who was living with me, died in the car."

Marree had been behind the wheel. She was charged with culpable driving and manslaughter, and sentenced to four and a half years in prison. She was 37.

In the last 10 years, rates of female incarceration have increased by more than 40 per cent. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, it's almost double the growth rate for the incarceration of men.

"Women's imprisonment rates are growing; they're growing at a really concerning rate," says Adrianne Walters, the director of legal advocacy at the Human Rights Law Centre.

The situation is even more alarming for Indigenous women.

While Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women only make up 2 per cent of Australia's adult female population, they constitute around 34 per cent per cent of women in prison.

"Studies suggest that around 80 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in prison are mothers," Ms Walters says.

"Many of those will be primary caregivers."

Impact on families

Overall, more than half of the women in prison are mothers or primary carers and their time in jail can have major consequences for their children and families.

When Marree was sentenced, she was the mother of five children.

In prison, Marree decided it would be best to cut contact with her kids.

"I refused to see my children because I didn't want my children seeing me in a green monkey suit."

On the inside, Marree threw herself into the prison rehabilitation programs. But after 18 months of separation from her family, her mental health began to suffer.

"That's how I ended up in a lovely gown locked in this room where I couldn't even have my shoes or shoelaces or anything," she says.

"I went crazy."

Imprisonment presents a unique set of challenges for women and their families.

"Male prisoners will often have a home, a partner and their children to come back to. [For] female prisoners, often that won't happen," says Charlotte Jones, the general manger of Melbourne's Mental Health Legal Centre.

"So with them leaving, the family unit disintegrates.

"They will often have other people's children and other people who rely upon them, and then there'll be the elderly members of the family who also rely on them.

"So when you take a mother out of a family, that can suddenly leave six people without care and support."

Meeting mum on the inside

For Marree, the decision to eventually see her kids was necessary to preserve her mental health.

Marree reached out to the prison's social workers, who work to keep women in contact with their families while they're in jail.

They contacted her ex-husband, and arranged for her two young girls to come and see her.

"He asked the girls and they said, 'Yes, we want to see mummy.'

"They were happy as soon as they saw me, especially in a monkey suit. My daughter calls it that — the green monkey suit.

"They came in first for visits, and then they came every Sunday.

"I got to spend time with them and made things for them. I knitted teddy bears. I always made sure that they had something every time they came to visit."

Marree also has three older children by another man, the first of whom she gave birth to when she was 16.

She lost custody when she split up with their father and by the time she was in prison it had been years since she'd seen them.

Then, halfway through her sentence, she had a sudden, bittersweet reunion with her 22-year-old daughter.

"I was working in the garden section. I got called to the programs room and I sat there, and all hear is, 'Mum.'

"I turn my head and here's my daughter."

Marree's eldest daughter was in for drug-related offences.

"I couldn't say much to her because she had to learn it herself, but I did try and get her to see that what's on the inside, you don't need to see, you don't need to learn.

"I learnt a lot in there. I learnt how to rob houses, how to break into cars and how to do things that you would never want anyone to know."

Children who end up in out-of-home-care when their parents go to prison are more likely to go to jail.

"Most of the women that are in prison have had some contact previously with child protection, have been somehow removed from their families and their connections," says Sonia Chudiak, the senior manager of justice services at Melbourne City Mission.

"It's just this cycle that keeps going around."

When Marree's sentence was up, she invited her daughter to come and live at her house to get clean.

But the pair argued over her daughter's drug use, and eventually Marree kicked her out.

"Six months later, I got a phone call saying she was in the hospital, that she was going to die."

A photo on the living room cabinet shows Marree's daughter as a teenager: beautiful, with long straight black hair and a huge smile, her head thrown back in laughter.

"You never could imagine having to bury your own children, or your own child."

Pregnant and strip-searched

Michelle is 38 and a single mother. Her five kids are aged from six to 16, four boys and one girl. They're polite to the point of shyness.

Michelle is unashamedly strict with them, and the family home is beyond neat.

Three of Michelle's children were born while she was doing time. She served two separate one-year sentences for fraud.

After growing up in an abusive home, Michelle has also been in abusive relationships.

"I left home at 16 because of the abuse that was happening at home, how my dad was hitting my mum," she says.

"He was an alcoholic and he was very controlling. She had her own things to deal with as well, so she really couldn't protect us. He was hitting us as well."

Cycle of abuse

Many female inmates like Michelle are part of a cycle of abuse.

"Women are often victims of crime and are often also accepting criminal punishments on behalf of partners," says Charlotte Jones, the general manger of Melbourne's Mental Health Legal Centre.

Around 85 per cent of women prisoners are victims of abuse in Australia. Most have lived through multiple incidents and forms of violence.

Key statistics: About 60 per cent of women in prison are mothers

About 80 per cent of Indigenous women in prison are mothers

The rate of increase for women in prison generally over the last 10 years is 42 per cent. The rate of increase for male prisoners during the same time is 24 per cent

Indigenous women make up 11,000 of the 30,000 women currently in prison (despite making up only 2 per cent of the general population)

The intersection of family violence with homelessness, substance abuse and sentencing trends could explain why the number of women in prison is rising dramatically around Australia.

"I think there are multiple reasons that are compounding each other," explains the Human Rights Law Centre's Ms Walters.

"What isn't appreciated is that more and more people are swept up into the criminal justice system, and women are more likely to experience homelessness, to have to care for children, to experience family violence and sexual violence, and all of these things contribute to the risk of offending.

"It also contributes to the risk that someone might turn to alcohol to self-medicate because of all the trauma and all of the stress in their life.

"Substance abuse and mental illness are known to be linked to the risk of offending, and so there are all these different factors."

A 2003 federal government report found the typical female offender is young, from a disadvantaged background, with mental health issues.

According to the report: "Life before jail for many women and their children is characterised by unsettled housing, low incomes, social isolation, substance abuse and domestic violence."

Fourteen years on, the current prison population is still reflective of these trends.

Ms Walters is one of the authors of a new report by the Human Rights Law Centre and Change the Record on the incarceration of Indigenous women.

"One of the key findings of the report was that there are laws that are unfairly criminalising Aboriginal women," she says.

"So one example is the fine default imprisonment laws in Western Australia. Ms Dhu, who was a young Yamatji woman, was locked up under those laws in a police cell where she was treated inhumanely and then passed away tragically.

"Her death was preventable, and when the coroner looked at her death, the coroner said that the laws that saw her locked up because she just didn't have the means to pay her fines need to be abolished.

"Laws like those see Aboriginal women over-imprisoned."

Once women are out of prison, the chance they'll return — in some capacity — is high in Australia. The recidivism rate is around 36 per cent for non-Indigenous women; for Indigenous women, this figure is much higher, at around 65 per cent.

"As we have been since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in custody, we're at crisis point," says Yorta Yorta woman Nerita Waight, a lawyer and policy adviser at the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Services.

"We see this never-ending cycle where grandma is coming in to us because her daughter is in prison and she wants care of her grandchild who is also a female.

"So we have three generations of females right there who are replicating cycles of trauma constantly."

The road to recovery

When Michelle was released, she tried hard to get her life back on track. She got a job selling advertisements for a suburban newspaper and settled back into normal life.

She says her brother got her into trouble with drugs and drug dealers. At the same, her new relationship was disintegrating and her partner was abusive.

When she offended again, she said it was to get money for her family.

As it was Michelle's second fraud offence, she was sent to a maximum security prison. When she went to jail, she was pregnant — this time with twins.

Because of the twins, Michelle had extra antenatal visits at the nearest maternity hospital. It was a traumatic and humiliating experience every time she left the prison.

"When I had to go see the nurse for a check-up, it was hell because I was handcuffed. Everyone's looking at you and here you are trying to keep calm, pretend like nothing's happening, nothing's wrong."

Heavily pregnant, she was subjected to full strip searches on the way out to hospital and on the way back in to prison.

Then, when the twins were born, they were underweight and had jaundice.

Michelle was sent back inside while they stayed in hospital. She was allowed to visit for two hours a day to feed and change them.

Once they were well, she brought them back to the prison with her.

She was afraid her crying babies would anger the other women in her unit, and that if something went wrong the prison staff wouldn't respond quickly enough.

"You've got all these junkie women walking past and trying to touch them — girls giving you attitude or trying to start a fight with you.

"It was hard. It was very hard."

Michelle says she felt incredibly guilty about her babies spending the first six months of their lives in prison, but she used the feeling as motivation to turn her life around.

"I hated myself because of what I'd done. Looking at my kids suffering as well, it's the worst feeling ever.

"I remember when I first came out I said, 'I'm going to get my life back on track.'"

A single mother of five kids, Michelle has managed to finish a diploma of beauty therapy.

"I did that course at TAFE whilst the twins were still very young, so I was juggling everything around."

Now six years old, the twins are thriving in their second year of primary school, while Michelle is busy running her own beauty business from home.

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Topics: law-crime-and-justice, prisons-and-punishment, drugs-and-substance-abuse, drug-use, crime, drug-offences, family-and-children, deer-park-3023

First posted