By Angela Matheson
"I began slashing my wrists after two male prisons officers ordered me to urinate in a bottle while they watched. They said they were testing me for drugs, but no matter how hard I tried, my body just wouldn't do it. As punishment, I was strip-searched and thrown into an isolation cell."
As a former inmate at Sydney's largest women's prison, Mulawa Correctional Centre, Jackie McKinnon's injuries are one of 73 documented cases of self-mutilation at Mulawa for the first half of last year. Stories from inmates of gross abuses of power from prison staff, including cruelty, arbitrary punishment and sexual assault by officers, have led to an investigation into prison management by the office of the NSW Ombudsman.
The investigation is one of a string of reports and inquiries into women's prisons over the past 20 years which, according to Dr Patricia Easteal, senior criminologist at the Australian Institute of Criminology, have done "almost nothing" to improve conditions for women.
She says the severity of punishment inflicted on women prisoners goes to the heart of the way society treats women who deviate from the norm.
"Women's prisons are totally Kafkaesque", she says. "Women are treated much worse than men — if men do a break and enter, it's sort of macho, but if women break the law they're seen as very, very bad because they're violating society's expectation that they should be meek, good and passive. How can you explain a place which is so paranoid and punitive that it searches babies' mouths and nappies for drugs before they're allowed to visit their mothers? And then they're not allowed to sit on their mother's knee anyway? It doesn't happen when children visit fathers who are in prison."
Stories like these of the treatment of women prisoners invariably take on a sexualised flavour. Allegations of women trading sex for favours from prison officers were first raised in the NSW upper house in April 1994 by Labor MP Ann Symonds. Her allegations of sexual abuse from male officers and 56 self-mutilations in Mulawa in March alone in an inmate population of 200 precipitated the ombudsman's inquiry.
"It seems to me", says Symonds, "that little has changed in the treatment of women prisoners in this country since the First Fleet. It's absolutely horrendous; they're still treated like damned whores, and like the old days most of the women shouldn't be in prison at all."
Drug offences
Symonds points to the fact that most female offenders are jailed for petty offences against property like shoplifting, bad cheques and social security fraud and drug-related offences. "Their profile is the same as in the days of transportation. They're in for minor offences against property, and they steal because they're poor. Many of them steal to buy drugs and because they're under enormous economic stress."
Symonds is also a strong advocate of the reform of drug laws, which, she says, particularly discriminate against women. "The state needs to drastically review drugs laws. Drug addiction is a health issue and only became a crime this century."
She also cites figures from the 1985 report of the Women and Prisons Task Force, of which she was a member, which show that 75% of women prisoners are victims of incest, sexual assault or domestic violence. "Why are we surprised if women turn to drugs to ease the pain? And if the drug they picked was legally sanctioned, like sedatives, instead of heroin or marijuana, they wouldn't have to steal and they wouldn't be in prison self-mutilating in despair. The whole thing's totally irrational."
But Blanche Hampton, former Mulawa prison inmate, author of the book Prisons and Women and prison reform activist, says responsibility for high levels of self-mutilation rests not in the women's backgrounds, but with the Department of Corrective Services.
"I don't buy into that idea that prisoners have to be victims to be worthy of assistance", she says. "Women slash up because of the crazy way they're treated in prison. The rules are absolutely unbelievable. Look at the consequence of the rule that says you're not allowed to have a phone card. If a woman gets word that her kid is sick and she's used up her phone calls for the week, she panics. The social workers may have gone home and she's desperate. So an officer may offer her an extra phone call — for a price. Sex for a 40 cent phone call."
Hampton also blames the psychological damage caused by arbitrary punishments and constantly shifting rules. "The latest things I've heard of is that the milk ration at Mulawa has been cut", says Hampton. "What it means is the women can't give their kids a small tetra pack of milk during a day visit. And as the women aren't allowed to give the kids their ration, they have to go without for the day. There's no explanation given for this change of rules; it just came out of the blue like it always does, but it's little things like this, tiny little things which make no sense at all, which make life a misery for women."
Dr Easteal does not believe random rule changes like these are made for no reason.
"I equate prisons with dysfunctional families", she says. "One of the marks of a family where there is sexual abuse, for example, is the indiscriminate exertion of power and authority. Just to let the children know that you're the boss and that you can do with them as you please, you keep them hopping by being inconsistent and changing the rules."
Dr Easteal says women who resort to self-mutilation are invariably severely punished. "Oh yeah, I saw women in NSW and Victorian prisons who had just slashed up being led into isolation cells with nothing but a canvas cot. This is their one means of protest, but boy is it punished. It's bizarre, it's appalling, but the rule in women's prisons is that they're not allowed to talk, trust or feel."
Department silent
Stories about the abuse of power at Mulawa are impossible to verify officially. The Department of Corrective Services refused to let me speak to inmates or prison staff and would not answer questions about allegations of sexual abuse and self-mutilation.
Prison wardens, social workers, doctors and official visitors are also barred by the department from speaking to the media. The department also refused to comment on allegations from inmates who say this year's Women's Action Plan — designed to improve treatment and conditions — is not being implemented. "One would think", says Symonds dryly, "that a healthy government department would believe it would be a good thing to make information available to the public".
Stories about prison life at Mulawa filter out through ex-inmates like Hampton and community-based groups like Justice Action, which claims that although the ombudsman's inquiry has been under way for three months, overdoses, suicide attempts, self-mutilation and sexual abuse are still rife. They claim that although prisoners at Mulawa make up only 3% of the NSW prison population, they account for over 35% of all self-harm cases this year.
Easteal and Hampton claim Mulawa prison uses traditional methods to keep women in their place, systematically destroying the self-esteem of inmates through sexual denigration, stereotyping and punishment of any sign of independence.
"When I was working in the kitchen", recalls Hampton, "the potato peeling machine used to break down all the time. But although I was studying industrial electronics at the time, I was not allowed to fix the machine. But of course, women don't fix machines and they just laughed at me when I suggested it. We had to wait for days for someone to be brought from the outside. But in Long Bay there are groups of prisoners who fix all of the broken machinery."
And while male prisoners have access to gym equipment and weight rooms and leave prison fitter than when they arrived, women at Mulawa are not allowed to exercise unsupervised. "If they're short of staff, which they usually are", says Hampton, "you're not allowed to exercise — not even to walk around the yard by yourself".
In male prisons there are usually a range of work options available, including farm work and courses like computing and woodwork. Options at Mulawa, however, are traditionally female and include work in the laundry, needle room or kitchen. "I picked the kitchen", says Hampton, "as it seemed a better option than sewing shrouds and surgical gowns".
Culture change
Symonds believes women's prisons need a complete culture change. "Prisons should be a place where the punishment is loss of freedom and where there is genuine rehabilitation which means that when the women leave they'll have job skills and the chance to have given up drugs. As it is, the prisons are places where women are intimidated and made into objects of derision and scorn by people who regard themselves as superior."
Symonds is also concerned by the lack of follow-up care after women leave prison. "Where do they go? They've lost their housing; they've usually got the responsibility of children. If they're not to fall back on property theft to scrape together some money, the government's got to resource after care." This year, she says, the NSW government has allocated a mere $551,000 for after care for all prisoners in the state. "It's as if the prisons are saying, 'Here's the door, and see you when you get back'."
Hampton rejects the notion that the women need to be rehabilitated. "Rehabilitate the prisons and the drug laws, not the women", she says. "If women are put in prison because of irrational drug laws, why is it that they need rehabilitation?"
Hampton prefers the Dutch model of women's prisons, where loss of freedom is the acknowledged punishment, and emphasis is placed on developing work skills and drug programs for life after release, "if the women want them."
Dr Easteal says she's "more or less come to the conclusion" that Australian prisons, despite their stated policies of rehabilitation, are not actually designed to rehabilitate. "If we want to stop crime, then we would see prisons doing something different", she says. "But it seems prisons are there to punish people and if that's so, then I say they're doing a hell of a good job."
Dr Easteal toys with the Foucaultian view that prisons are there to create the illusion of social cohesion. "It's one way society keeps itself together and appears to be cohesive", she says. "You develop an us and them mentality and have a scapegoated outsider group who we see as bad and very different from the rest of us."
This, she says, accounts for the apparent irrationality of a system which pours enormous amounts of money into incarceration which could be used productively elsewhere. "I saw women in prison who defrauded Social Security of maybe $10,000. They were in for a year at the cost of $50,000, and the defrauded money is never recovered." Bizarre it may be, she says, but it has its own kind of logic. "It allows us to look at women prisoners as being completely socially distant from us and a group we can close our eyes to.
"But from my point of view", she says, "it's a case of there but for the grace of God go I".
[This article first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald.]