In a tiny, windowless meeting room on the third floor of the Melbourne Magistrates' Court one recent afternoon, lawyer Jill Prior sits opposite a police prosecutor, files stacked high between them.

They're working through dozens of driving charges against one of her clients, who's being held in the cells beneath the building ahead of her bail hearing.

One of the offences, Prior will tell the court later, happened while the young woman was sleeping in her car: when police startled her awake, it allegedly triggered memories of a family violence incident and she took off, leading officers on a dangerous high-speed pursuit.

"I'm not sure if I can take this," Prior says, suddenly pulling her vibrating phone from her jacket pocket. It's one of her social workers, she explains, ringing with news of a jury verdict: another client has been on trial this week in the County Court, defending charges of serious violent offending.

She inhales slowly and picks up. "Not guilty?" she gasps, a look of shock and relief spreading across her face. "That is the best news I've heard in a long time."

Jill Prior (right) and Elena Pappas (left) set up LACW in February 2016 in response to the dramatic increase in the number of women behind bars. ( ABC News: Tom Gelai )

But now is not the time to celebrate: it's back to the case in front of her, and several more hours spent dashing between courtrooms, making calls, swapping bulging folders with one of her lawyers. That was a "great day", she says later: Four clients got bail, one was acquitted, another five showed up for their matters.

For Prior, the co-founder and principal legal officer of the Law and Advocacy Centre for Women (LACW), these small wins — keeping troubled, marginalised women out of jail — make leaving work at 8pm completely worth it.

When we speak on the phone another evening, as she's driving back into the city from Dame Phyllis Frost, the maximum-security women's prison, she describes her motivation a different way: "I just like to bust the ladies out."

Keeping vulnerable women out of jail

For almost four years Prior has been doing just that. She and fellow lawyer Elena Pappas set up LACW in February 2016 in response to the dramatic increase in the number of women behind bars in Victoria.

Since then, they've represented hundreds of clients charged with everything from first-time shoplifting to murder, and weathered headwinds in the form of tough new bail laws, which have been criticised for making it harder to keep vulnerable women out of custody.

Those laws — and the urgency of LACW's efforts — have been pulled into sharp focus following the death in prison last month of Yorta Yorta woman Veronica Marie Nelson Walker, a client of their service.

Ms Nelson Walker, who had been on a Community Corrections Order and charged with shoplifting, was refused bail after representing herself at Melbourne Magistrates' Court on New Year's Eve, when courts and community services are run by skeletal staffs and those facing charges may find themselves slipping through cracks in the system.

Jill Prior and Elena Pappas (pictured) have represented more than 600 clients charged with everything from first-time shoplifting to murder. ( ABC News: Tom Gelai )

Ideally, Prior and Pappas say, women charged with minor offences should be given a leg-up, not locked up, which is precisely what they aim to do at LACW.

Yet their unique model seems so logical many Victorians would be surprised to find they're the only legal service in the state whose primary focus is tackling the underlying causes of women's offending — poverty, family violence, substance abuse — by linking them with whatever support they need to get them out of prison and back on their feet.

As former Supreme Court Justice Betty King put it at LACW's official launch: "They don't just deal with the charges, they deal with the whole person."

But while their aim is to stop stubborn cycles of reoffending, to not have repeat clients, they inevitably do — and perhaps that's a by-product of the criminal justice system itself: almost half of all women in prison in Australia in 2019 had been incarcerated previously, the latest data show.

It might sound counterintuitive, Prior says, but "one of the most amazing things we see is women who come back." One brush with the courts won't fix a woman fleeing family violence, she says, a few meetings with a case worker can't cure intergenerational trauma.

"The fact that women come back to us when they're in crisis means they trust us ... they feel like we're an anchor point in the world."

Being an anchor point, though, is not all Prior aspires to. Behind her and Pappas's drive to support the women Victoria would rather not think about is a preparedness to have uncomfortable conversations about what keeping people out of prison actually means: being willing to look closely at the violence and grief that often brings them into contact with the justice system in the first place, to stand with them in unthinkable pain.

"There are days where you think, this is an overwhelming problem," says Prior, who worked at the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service for more than a decade before making the "difficult decision" to leave and start LACW.

"You finish one matter, you get a bunch of women out and there is an exhilaration about that, or a sense that, good, that's done. But then the next week ... we get a lot of phone calls and faxes from women in prison saying, 'Can you act for me?' There is a constant 'tap, tap, tap'."

Bail reforms have had a 'massive impact'

That it feels overwhelming is not surprising: when LACW first opened its doors, there were about 400 women behind bars in Victoria, 10 per cent of them Aboriginal (less than one per cent of the Victorian population is Indigenous). The numbers have only shot up since then, with the female incarceration rate growing faster than that of men.

And while the number of female prisoners nationally has decreased slightly, the number of women incarcerated in Victoria has continued to climb. By June 2019, there were 578 women locked up, more than 13 per cent of them Aboriginal — though the government in September announced a funding package aimed at shrinking those figures.

The state's "incarceration crisis", as it's been called, has been fuelled largely by a sharp rise in the number of unsentenced prisoners — those held in custody on remand.

The Law and Advocacy Centre for Women aims to stop stubborn cycles of reoffending. ( ABC News: Tom Gelai )

This growth has been attributed partly to sweeping changes to the Bail Act in 2017 and 2018, following heated debate about two high profile cases where horrific crimes were committed by men on bail: James Gargasoulas, who drove a car through Melbourne's CBD in 2017, killing six people and injuring dozens more, and Sean Price, who in 2015 murdered 17 year-old school girl Masa Vukotic.

The reforms expanded the number of offences requiring applicants to show either "exceptional circumstances" or "compelling reasons" why bail should be granted: all of a sudden people charged with seemingly minor crimes had to meet the same threshold as those charged with manslaughter or child homicide.

Now, with the death in custody of Veronica Marie Nelson Walker, the "crisis" seems to have escalated — though there are no plans to change the laws (a government spokesman told the ABC that, because Ms Nelson Walker's death was being investigated by the Coroner, it would be inappropriate to comment further).

"The bail reforms have had a massive impact," Pappas says. "We already had a lot of women in custody who needed our assistance but the reforms have meant the amount of work we have to do just to keep people out is immense."

The consequences of not getting bail can be huge, she adds: even one day in prison can derail a woman's life — she may lose her house, her job, her children, her connections to support services.

"The reforms were brought in for community safety reasons ... but because the net is now so wide they're capturing people, women, who are not threats to the community and for whom periods on remand are going to be extremely detrimental."

In extreme cases, like Ms Nelson Walker's, the costs are incalculable.

And yet: LACW is managing to chart a course through the new regime. Between January and October 2019, 80 per cent of the firm's bail applications were successful, according to their own analysis. Often, clients get bail because LACW has found them, say, secure housing, or a referral to a family violence worker, and a magistrate is persuaded they're in good stead to get back on track.

The woman charged with a string of driving offences, for instance, was released on bail that evening after a LACW case manager got her a bed at a residential rehab facility and the magistrate agreed she should be given an "opportunity" to deal with her addiction issues.

"If you can coordinate those services at the time a woman is remanded, short periods in Dame Phyllis are less likely to happen," Pappas says, "and she's less likely to reoffend, less likely to be sentenced to a period of imprisonment."

Standing in places of great discomfort

That's partly why bail applications are one of Prior's favourite things: "Because somebody's liberty is at stake". That, and it's validating when a system that can often feel devoid of compassion, and stacked against your client, agrees with you.

That's what she means when she says she likes "busting ladies out" — it's the sense of achievement, the thrill, of beating great odds to do good work.

"When you've spent the week being told by prosecutors that you're not going to get bail, and then you get it ... there's almost a comfort in knowing there is a shared humanity in what is occurring. When the most unlikely of decision-makers comes to the same position as you, there is great hope in that."

There hasn't always been great hope, though, or even acknowledgment that the soaring number of women in prison was a problem. When they first began floating the idea of LACW four years ago, Prior and Pappas were met with blank stares and confusion from colleagues in their networks.

"A lot of people thought it was a non-issue," Pappas says. "Why would you need a separate service for women?"

When they floated the idea of LACW four years ago, Prior (pictured) and Pappas were met with confusion. ( ABC News: Tom Gelai )

Still, they pushed on, growing from just the two of them working out of a "broom cupboard" sized room at the Aboriginal Family Violence Prevention and Legal Service into a team of six lawyers and two social workers funded mostly by individual Legal Aid grants, government and peak body grants, and philanthropic donations.

Of the 635 women they've assisted since, a whopping 40 per cent are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, and almost three-quarters have experienced family violence.

"I had no clue about the level of harm and victimisation," Prior says. "The more clients we saw, the more women we spoke to, it just became this horror story of trauma and victimisation ... I've been really shocked by that. You have these moments where you think, how are you alive?"

Her father's influence

Prior has never experienced the trauma or disadvantage most of her clients have; growing up in Camberwell in Melbourne's east, the daughter of a Uniting Church minister, she and her siblings never wanted for anything, she says. "We were never rich ... but we children had no idea we had little money ... we never woke up in the morning and wondered if we were going to get food."

Perhaps one of the biggest influences on her career course, then, was her late father: a "man of the people" who "swore a lot and grew up in out-of-home care" but who spent his life looking after his community.

"When my parents were living in Hong Kong they opened a women's refuge ... when they came back to Melbourne he started a cafe at the back of the church building near the [public housing] flats in Carlton," she says. "We always had people staying in our house; he was always out doing that kind of care work."

But she recalls one incident where she was embarrassed by him. "I remember him standing on the cliffs on the Mornington Peninsula on Australia Day in 1988 — I was about 15 — just silently waving this enormous Aboriginal flag. Everyone was watching the First Fleet re-enactment go through the harbour ... and I was like, Oh my god, you are so embarrassing."

Now she sees that day, his determination, differently. "That's a bravery of conviction to stand amongst all those people just trying to have a nice time: there's this funny, skinny bloke there with his flag, but he's standing in a place of discomfort, silently speaking to something people don't want to hear.

"And I don't see what I do as any different from that ... I don't for a moment think I have that tenacity, but I do see it as standing in places of great discomfort, because these are uncomfortable conversations to have. And we have to have them, we have to give voice to these women, or what else do we do? We just keep sending people to Dame Phyllis."

'You mucked up, so what went wrong?'

Tucked away in the Magistrates' Court, as bitter wind and rain hammers William Street outside, Prior is savouring news her client has just been acquitted after a touch-and-go trial. Just before she hangs up the phone to her social worker, she asks to speak to the woman, who she can hear screaming excitedly in the background.

"It's amazing what you've done this week," Prior tells her. "You go on and live your best life in that house."

That house, of course, is the supported accommodation LACW organised for her after other agencies failed or refused to help, Prior says. "That client has no reason to trust anybody because she's had nothing but wrong done to her."

Between January and October 2019, 80 per cent of the firm's bail applications were successful, according to their own analysis. ( ABC News: Tom Gelai )

The charges she was defending were "deeply offensive" to her given the harms she's personally experienced, Prior says. "Her life has been brutal. She has been let down by agencies — housing, health, disability — that were supposed to support her but failed her at every turn. She has substance abuse problems ... she would never turn up to court for her matters."

In the two weeks leading up to her trial, several times she failed to return home by curfew — a breach of her bail conditions — and Prior and her case manager were on edge, terrified she'd be sent back to prison.

"So there is no measure for the magnitude of that win," Prior explains, a few weeks later. "If she had been found guilty of one of those charges she'd have been returned to custody for a long time and then all of the work that was done, the relationships she's built, the trust she put in us, in the system..." — she trails off.

That's the message Prior wants her clients, guilty or not, to receive: that even if they stuff up, there will be someone they can trust, who will sit with them in their pain, then help them get back on their feet.

"So often we say to people, 'You mucked up so we're going to send you back to prison'. And right, often they do muck up, but why aren't we saying, 'You mucked up, so what went wrong? Let's make sure you have what you need so this doesn't happen again'."

And that, she adds, is the conversation the wider community needs to be having, but avoids. In the wake of yet another "senseless" death in custody, just days into the new year, will Australians find the courage to start talking?

"It's not an inevitability that someone will stay on this path. You just have to keep turning the light on until it stays on."