Crimwife (10 page)

The first time I went to prison … I was 14 years old. Skinny little boy … very afraid. By the time I came out, I had a beard. I was a grown man. I went back to my hometown. I found my mother. I kissed her. And she screamed. She didn’t recognise me. I have been in three different prisons, Montgomery. Three different countries. And you know what I learned? I learned prison is a bad place to be. Seven years is a long time. Some men would do anything to avoid seven years in prison.

—
25th Hour

Even if I’d read all the articles, forums and literature on relationships with inmates that I have now, I know I wouldn’t have made different choices. In fact, I was reading up on it as I went along, and while it made me stop and think, it didn’t sway me. Rather, I knew what all the researchers say, and what all the officers long in the job know: that these relationships rarely succeed. With rare exceptions, they end very, very badly.

My colleague Maxine’s long list of reasons not to get involved had, I thought, covered everything. But of course, I am different. I am not average or vulnerable to statistics. Despite a history of some seriously bad decisions, I’m always convinced that it won’t turn out the way it’s clearly going to. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how loudly the alarm bells are ringing, I’m sure that it will all be fine when I do it. Just you wait and see.

One night before it all began, I went out with a bunch of prison officers for a barbecue. They told the story of their female colleague who, some years back, had fallen in love with an inmate in her wing. When he got out, they met in a motel room, and somewhere over the course of that weekend he slashed up her face. The hard part for these officers was supervising the visits where she would come in to see him, her face scarred and bandaged. He was in custody for what he had done to her, but these officers had no choice but to allow her through the gates and watch their ex-colleague sit with the man who had butchered her.

“What kind of idiot would put up with that?” I thought that night. “I mean, really. He gets locked up for that and she still went in to visits?”

Since then, I have learned much about idiots and myself. Humble pie is a staple of my diet.

Of course, such things are never supposed to happen. In jail it’s much less shameful among the staff to bring in contraband, drugs, food or phones than to care for an inmate. Hatred between blue and green uniforms is old-school. Long gone are the days where inmates faced the wall when officers entered the room, and looked at the floor when they spoke, but the poison is the same. To show a crim compassion is a crime in itself. To fall in love with one is disgusting. It is the lowest of low acts. It makes the inmate lovable, forgivable and human, and that is not what jail is about. The culture of those in blue is to remind those in jail every day why they’re there and how much hell it can be.

There are also some very hardworking, principled officers. How they balance integrity in a corrupt system is beyond me. There is some care for those inmates who officers believe have been done an injustice, or who are very old or otherwise vulnerable. But when it comes to the run-of-the-mill “oxygen thieves,” compassion runs dry quickly.

Case management, which assigns officers to oversee inmates, has changed a lot since the 1990s, when it was introduced. At first it was resisted heavily by both blues and greens, because it means discussion of personal issues, where previously inmates strictly kept such matters for welfare workers. When the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) investigated Officer Shane Hughes in 2004, Hughes blamed the department’s case management policy for his bringing in drugs, steroids and phones to inmates in return for money. He claimed that enforcing punishment and loss of freedom on someone was compromised by the expectation that he also be a shoulder to cry on about that same person’s dead brother. The boundaries become blurred for both sides with case management. While the older generations still detest either side interacting on a friendly or equal level, the younger generations are growing more cooperative as time goes on and as policies insist that they work together.

The health department is given some respect by blues, as doctors and nurses are fellow professionals. They are given the highest possible respect by greens, as they are the gateway to drugs. But while welfare, psychology, education, and drug and alcohol workers are professionals, one of their primary roles is to advocate on behalf of the inmate, to further their success overall. It took a long time for “crimlovers,” as such professionals are called, to integrate into the jail system and be seen as a useful cog in its machinery, both for the officers and inmates. Even so, the in-between role remains.

I’d desperately like to believe that I wasn’t naïve about the possibility of being conned. I’ve done the headmiles, as they’re called, gone over and over and over it all, more times than you will, and I’ve not yet come to a conclusion. If it was love, and I have a whole bunch of evidence that it was, then it damn well should have worked after everything we went through. If it was a con, and I have just as many reasons why it was that, then I fell for it like a Nigerian scam in your junk emails. And if it was a combination of both, and that’s what it feels like overall, then it doesn’t feel so different from anything else I’ve known. Or a lot of other people’s relationships. Perhaps the only difference is that I was forewarned about the man I fell for. But forewarned doesn’t always mean forearmed.

*

Over the five years that Jimmy and I were together, I was always suspicious that I was being used, and perhaps it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Still, the last thing I was interested in when I first walked through those gates at Parramatta jail was having sympathy for male inmates, much less lowering myself to see one as human enough to love. And a Victorian crim at that. Not even one of our own.

According to my own brand of feminism, men have plenty of power already. If they want to seek help, they can. They can call their brothers, cousins or their mates, the guys from the club house or the pub. I’m not saying there shouldn’t be welfare services for men in jail, far from it. The need is desperate. I just wanted someone else to do it. It wasn’t my calling; it wasn’t my intention to assist men in need. When there’s social disadvantage, you can bet your last dole dollar that women are doing it harder than their male counterparts. Often there are children in their immediate care whose welfare is directly at stake. I came into the job to work with women, whose crimes were often cruel, selfish and destructive, but usually nowhere near the magnitude of the horror of men’s crimes. As a senior child protection worker told me years ago, “I don’t work with perpetrators because I’ve taken too many children to hospital in the night.” I feel comfortable with that position too. But now it was my job, and I was out of other options.

Men’s prison has a constantly heavy, tense atmosphere. The gravity of its inhabitants’ circumstances is more severe due to their crimes, the violence and being surrounded by hundreds of others in the same boat.

The Coach House was so-called because it had been used for stabling the horses back in the day. It is a majestic two-storey building with a medium-sized courtyard, surrounded by a twelve-foot fence topped with standard barbed-wire curls. For an inmate to enter the grounds of the Coach House, he had to get permission from the guard at the gate of his yard, before walking through an open area under the watch of those in the towers. He then waited until he was let through by staff at the gate. This happened if he was called over the microphone by a worker, or had express permission for an appointment, to attend a class or access the library. Numbers were always accounted for. No one was to be in the Coach House grounds without cause. 

The main reason that inmates would hope to loiter in or outside the Coach House was to make contact with the in-betweens, the Carebears: alcohol and other drugs workers, welfare or education workers, or psychologists who worked out of the offices upstairs. Downstairs was an open area where tables could be arranged for workshops or classes. Beneath the old stairs was a library with computers for education. The Coach House was a castle that the officers took pride in protecting. As long as its inhabitants understood that the officers’ way was the final way, the arrangement worked well. The workers needed the officers’ protection, and the officers appreciated the dirty work of human emotions that the Carebears provided. Eventually it was noticed that the crims were more often far more manageable after Welfare had allowed the phone call they’d been banging on about.

The sandstone blocks of the Coach House were uniquely carved and hand-placed by the convicts who built their own jail. These sturdy heavy stones turned the building into a fortress, which was unbearable to work in if the temperature was not mild. The summer I worked there was hot and there was no air conditioning. Sweat would drip from us as we laboured to achieve small victories in these men’s lives: a phone call to a grieving relative or their kids; a place in rehab that would get them out of this sauna; a spot in a course that would gain them a certificate to show the judge they were trying. In winter it was brutally cold and the main areas of the jail acted as wind tunnels. We had heaters in our offices, but jail was an icy windy place away from the heating.

The inmates lived full-time in identical conditions, and the sweat and aggression ran freely. In summer, the sun belted down on the yards that they walked in, their only escape the sandstone cells they shared with an equally agitated and overheated man. And in the winter they froze. There were never enough blankets or tracksuits or thermals to go around.

Men’s jail was very different to women’s. I had a lot to learn in a hurry even from behind the shield of the Coach House, with the rifle-ready guards in the towers watching down on our gate. Men’s jail was taken much more seriously by both sides. Despite the devastation in the lives of women at Mulawa, it felt as though I’d now been flung into the major leagues. Which was strange, given that I’d failed somehow in the minors. I couldn’t afford to make one more mistake. I would prove Godzilla wrong in the end. I was a perfectly fine employee.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw all the inmates leave their cells after let-go, a sea of them behind the twelve-foot fence, an army of hundreds of men dressed in bottle-green, swelling in the yard. They seemed to all move towards me. Who knew what could happen next, what this mass of restless men let out for fresh air could do if they banded together? 

The last thing I wanted to see, having just worked with women who were victims on so many levels of the crimes these men had committed, was a gathering of powerful men, united in their defiance of society. 

*

Any hopes of gaining the respect of these inmates would disintegrate should my terror show at all, so I faked calmness as best I could. As the officers showed me through the areas and the different wings, I pretended that it didn’t matter when inmates playing cards or sitting around in the yard called out obscene remarks to me. The walk to the canteen was slow for the first few days as they tried me out, but they dropped it once they realised I was staying and might be of some use. After all, I had access to the almighty phone and a few other maybe-get-out-of-jail cards, like rehab and court reports, up my sleeve. So by the end of the first week, the crims were OK and I tried to slot in like a piece of furniture among the Carebears team.

Parramatta jail at that time was designated a minimum security jail; however, for reasons unknown, it operated as a maximum security jail. First muster was at 6 am and let-go was at 8.30. The crims were out for a few hours in the morning and afternoon, with a lunchtime lock-in from 11.30 until 12.30. Finally they were locked in again at 3 pm, even though by rights they should have been out until 6 or 7, since the inmates there were at the lowest security classification. Many of their rights were discarded due to preferable Standard Operating Procedures.

The jail was also extremely overcrowded. Parramatta jail had been supposed to close at least three times before I got there. There were over five hundred men living in primitive conditions. Most of them were on remand, not yet convicted of any crime, but placed in maximum security conditions anyway. Remand went on for months for most, and often a couple of years. I met twenty-year-old men who had gone out one night with no intention of getting involved in whatever their mates had planned. They had been on remand for two years and those two years would make them very different adults from the ones who had first come to Parramatta jail. 

Other inmates were transitional. They were moved to Parramatta from a country jail in order to attend court. Some, however, had been sentenced and were able to get themselves a metropolitan hold, the ultimate golden ticket. Unless an inmate is from a rural area, staying in a city jail keeps them closer to services, their families, friends and girlfriends, and generally makes their lives easier. It was considered a privilege to stay permanently in Parramatta, which seemed incredible until the option of Broken Hill was presented.