Archer Magazine #18 - The INCARCERATION issue (March 2023)

A MAGAZINE ABOUT SEX, GENDER AND IDENTITY

THE INCARCERATION ISSUE

To support, partner with or advertise in Archer Magazine, please email info@archermagazine.com.au Visit us online www.archermagazine.com.au FOUNDER + PUBLISHER Amy Middleton GUEST EDITOR Tabitha Lean ART + DESIGN CURATOR Alexis Desaulniers-Lea LAYOUT DESIGNER Angela Iaria SUB-EDITOR Greta Parry IMAGE CURATOR + DIGITAL SPECIALIST Hailey Moroney ONLINE EDITOR Dani Leever ONLINE EDITOR Alex Creece EVENTS CO-ORDINATOR Dani Weber

To all our readers: please be aware that from next issue, Archer Magazine’s print mag will increase in price by $2 per magazine, due to increased costs. We will continue to deliver free-access content on our website at www.archermagazine.com.au

HUGE THANKS TO: Karen Field, Ali Hogg, Nigel Quirk, Sam Elkin, Gretel van Lane, Larissa Daniel, Claire Noone, Andre Dao, Alison Battisson, Roxy Moore, Isobel Blomfield, Moz, James Little, Sejal Bhikha, Razia Zakarya, Georgia Verkuylen, Margherita Coppolino, Phoebe Wallish, Ron Van Houwelingen, Cash Savage, Alison Whittaker.

We acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the land that we live and work on, and pay respect to Elders past and present.

Printed in Australia by Printgraphics Pty Ltd. ©2023. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be produced without permission from the publisher. Views expressed in Archer Magazine are those of the respective contributors/advertisers and not necessarily shared by Archer Magazine.

Archer Magazine is presented in partnership with Drummond Street Services and Queerspace.

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TABLE

OF

04

60

Tabitha Lean

THE INSIDE

COMMUNITY ON

EDITOR’S NOTE

Stacey Stokes

08

66

THE REVOLVING DOOR

AN UNJUST

Aunty Vickie Roach

16

INTERVIEW WITH DEBBIE KILROY

Tabitha Lean

SYSTEM Nic

24

I AM NOT THE PROBLEM

Jax Sansbury

32

KIDS ON THE OUTSIDE

Mabel Elizabeth

38

IMAGES: ‘PARIAH’

Zarita Zevallos

54

THREE CAGED BIRDS SINGING

Jace

02

CONTENTS 100

A LIFELINE IN DETENTION

Shivani

104

IMAGE 1:

70

BEHIND THE MASK

L

78

TRANS LIBERATION AND COMMUNITY CARE

Witt Gorrie + Katie

86

‘DISAPPEARANCE JAIL’ Maria Gaspar

106

IMAGE 2:

‘DISAPPEARANCE JAIL’ Maria Gaspar

108

HOW TO HELP

IMAGES: ‘LOCKDOWN’

Dread Scott

94

MODERN WITCH-HUNTS IN THE COLONY

Tina

03

Editor’s note TABITHA LEAN

“Basically, don’t fuck anyone”. That was the first instruction I received when I arrived at prison.

Too often in these spaces, we don’t speak the whole truth (and nothing but the truth) or we speak half-truths, for fear of upsetting people, or in an attempt to keep people feeling After they told me I was to receive no love, affection, companion- comfortable. Therefore, conversations around issues like ship or pleasure while inside their cages, they stripped me naked, incarceration feel less than authentic, but to be radical stole my name and robbed me of my dignity. means that we must go to the root. If we are going to change something, we must sit with tension and pain and discomfort.

Since my release, all I’ve managed to get back is my clothes.

Maybe some people will walk away from this edition and Prisons steals from us. They take from every single one of us. think more critically, and maybe some will continue with the You may not know that. dissonance. Either way, I believe in speaking from a place of truth and power (everyone Every time they disappear who knows me, knows that I someone from a home, a run straight), and that is what family, a neighbourhood, our brilliant contributors have they take from us. They done. Truth can hurt, truth change our communities, and can be pain and truth can be they alter entire life courses. extremely uncomfortable, but the beautiful thing about This Incarceration edition of truth is that it can also be Archer is special. It is special transformative; and I believe because it holds within that this edition is both its bound cover, stories of beautiful in its authenticity pain, trial, torture, terror, and in its honesty. separation, torment, and sadness. It is heavy and it We have made a bold and will be hard to read at times. very deliberate decision to It should be. It is about have no image on the cover incarceration, after all. of this edition. Who is the face of incarceration in this It is impossible to speak country? Is it me? Is it you? about prisons, surveillance, Or should we have put a and policing, without mirror on the front cover speaking about violence. because it is in fact, all of us.

Therefore, this edition will Not only is every single one explore how the prison of us touched by the carceral industrial complex in this system - whether we are country and beyond, complicit in the enacting disappears, cages and of carceral violence, or we confines bodies. How the benefit from the continued State deploys the carceral enslaving of bodies or we system to uphold and are imprisoned, but we are maintain white supremacy all one misstep away from with both force (oftentimes, prison ourselves. lethal) and with impunity to ensure the continuance of I should know, because I the colonial State. speak with the authority of someone who has been to the depths of hell, danced with the devil and has the blisters on Incarceration is in this nation’s blood. It is the very fabric that my heels to prove it. No one I met inside was extraordinary. binds this country together.

Just ordinary people who were faced with a particular set of circumstances that led them to that place the system calls a While reading this edition, we invite you to sit with discomfort, “correctional facility”. So, the cover of this edition of Archer because that is the site of learning and unlearning. However, I is plain, and it is devoid of image. It is bleak and lifeless, as is also encourage you to look after yourself and your wellbeing. incarceration.

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EDITOR’S NOTE

Image by KATE HILL

The stories you will read in this edition are heavy, because they are raw and real – and real is rare these days. I am proud that a majority of the stories are written by people with lived prison experience, and all of them by people with lived experience of the prison industrial complex and all of its machinations. Hearing from people with actual lived experience is critical. Only by living the experience can you speak with authenticity. Added to that, more than half of the contributors are Aboriginal. It is Black voices that must dominate all discourse in this country.

Our edition quite aptly opens with a speech by the indomitable Aunty Vickie. Aunty Vickie is someone that many of us look up to and admire greatly. She has endured and survived the system and she continues to fight the prison industrial complex with both grace and intellect. Simply, Aunty Vickie meets the carceral beast head on. She is both inspiration and aspiration for me and I thank her for the work she has done and continues to do, and for her generosity towards me personally. There is a solidarity among those who have seen the inside of a cage that the non-criminalised will never understand; and the love and support I have felt from Aunty Vickie, my sista, Tina, and the woman I call mother sista, Debbie Kilroy is unparalleled.

The edition unfolds with story after story of power, presence and survival. It is painful and it is harrowing. But every contributor has blown my mind with their contribution. Jax, Jace and L explode onto the literary stage with their beauty and generosity of storytelling. Do not underestimate the toll it has taken for these writers to bleed these tales onto the pages for you. Stacey speaks from inside the razor wire risking life and liberty to bring you an inside perspective.

Witt and Katie remind us of the power of community in transforming support both inside and outside of prison.

Nic’s piece will challenge the abolitionist in you, and Mabel’s piece will make you weep. The Q&A with the feisty and staunch Debbie Kilroy will push you toward abolition. Tina’s piece will have you reflecting on the parallels between the current punishment system’s gendered violence and the not so historic hunting of witches, and Shivani’s story will leave you breathless with grief. The photo essays are stunning, and while challenging, provide some visual relief to the textual gravity.

Every inch of this edition will make your body surge with emotion – and I hope, rage. I hope the pages of this magazine will compel you to act. And if it does, the very last page provides some links to how you can get involved to dismantle the master’s house.

single aspect of incarceration. The absence of a topic or person does not mean we didn’t value that topic or think it relevant. I worked really hard to make sure we covered what we could. So please, go gently on us.

If you must critique, and critique is healthy and welcomed, as an abolitionist, I encourage you to do this through a focus on nurture and care, to work towards the reduction of personal and systemic harm collectively without resorting to shame, guilt and punishment central to the functioning of the prison. This edition was never intended to tell the whole incarceration tale. While the prison industrial complex persists, that story is not finished being written. All the stories left untold, must be spoken of and platformed. I will continue to do what I can to platform those untold tales, and elevate them.

As I come to the end of my editorial role, I can honestly say I am tired, and I am fucking angry. The lives being taken by the prison system continue to rise. People are being killed behind bars, in police watchhouses and in the backs of cop cars. Our kids are lynched on the streets – and frankly, you are not as angry as us. At least, you are not angry enough to act.

When I walked out of the gates of prison, I made it my mission to dedicate my life to abolition. I wanted to use my hands to tear the system apart brick by brick, bar by bar, word by word, policy by policy. I have used my body, my liberty, my words and my intellect. I have trundled out my stories, my scars, my war wounds for everyone to see. But nothing moves you to act. And now I am tired. I have come to a place in my life where I wonder whether any of you actually care about what happens to us behind bars or whether you have actually been poisoned by the carceral Kool-Aid to the point that you have internalised this pull to punishment and vengeance so deeply that you cannot extricate yourself from it. I hope I am wrong; I hope this edition will awaken something in you. Do I dare light another wee candle of hope?

This edition is dedicated to the memory of Uncle Jack Charles. It is dedicated to every person who has been killed in custody and it is dedicated to every single person sitting in a cage right now.

May we know love. May we know peace. May we know true justice.

However, not for want of trying, there are gaps in this edition, and you will find them. Time did not permit us to cover every

EDITOR’S NOTE

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The revolving door

by Aunty Vickie Roach

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This speech was delivered by Aunty Vickie Roach during a Fund Communities not Prisons & Police rally in Naarm in October 2022.

IMAGES BY: CHARANDEV SINGH

I am Vickie Roach, a Yuin woman with a Master’s degree in writing and, you could almost say, a PhD in the long history of the Australian prison system.

Some people say the criminal laws that are putting more and more Aboriginal women, men and children in prison in Australia are broken, but I say they are working exactly as they were designed and intended to work.

I was removed from my mother when I was two years old, charged (as a small child) with “neglect by way of destitution” and made a ward of the state.

As a child, I ran away from my foster parents several times, and was taken into custody for running away.

My removal from my mother was a product of the colonial system and its laws. My mother’s removal was also a product of the colonial system and its laws. My grandmother’s loss of her child was a product of the colonial system and its laws.

My child’s removal from me was a product of the colonial systems and its laws. …

I don’t think I am different from other Aboriginal women in the criminal legal system. We are all unique in our own ways, but the way we are treated is the same.

The criminalising and targeting of me as an Aboriginal woman who uses drugs and needs to be punished, corrected and cured, is the reason I have spent years in the coloniser’s prisons.

People who use drugs and end up in prison, particularly women, are very likely to look like me and, like me, have multiple trauma stories as yet untold.

THE REVOLVING DOOR

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“‘Revolving door’ women often serve relatively short sentences but, even so, they lose everything they have on the outside, including all their personal possessions (clothes, photos and other sentimental mementos), accommodation, and even their children”

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I started using when I was 13. I lived on the streets for a while there.

I was probably the original street kid in the Cross. I was the one who used to sneak around at four o’clock in the morning and nick your bread and milk and your newspaper.

For a really long time it felt like we were just having fun. I knew everybody, everybody knew me, and I belonged. I was part of the fabric of the Cross. They were my people.

The thing with using is, there are a lot of problems but it also gives you purpose and a community. When you look at it, you’ve gotta go and make the money you need, like everyone else. It’s a job. You have to work at it like it’s an actual job – a dangerous and often dirty and disgusting job. Nothing like the teacher, doctor or animal trainer you thought you wanted to be when you were a kid. But it’s the job you’ve found yourself in, and you need to do it to keep the demons at bay.

My so-called “crimes” were acts of survival. Survival was having enough money to keep a roof over my head and not starve and support the drug habit that numbed me enough to be able to do the things I needed to do to survive.

It starts with out-of-home care – being removed from our own families. It’s like a pipeline, a funnel. The juvenile justice system governs the lives of wards of the state. I was in adult prison by 17 years of age. …

There’s this underlying ideology throughout corrections that we should suffer or be ‘corrected’. Aboriginal women in custody are treated with varying degrees of outright hostility, physical abuse and neglect. In my experience, racism is never more clearly defined than when you’re sitting in police custody.

If you’re a wealthy white woman, you will probably be looked at by a doctor straight away and get proper medical assistance. A user off the street would be treated far differently: they’d be lucky to see a doctor, and they’d have to wait for hours for a nurse just to give them a couple of Panadol.

For an Aboriginal woman, she might be in the same boat, but probably wouldn’t even get the Panadol, and would only see the doctor because the doctor’s there for the white woman anyway.

THE REVOLVING DOOR

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As an Aboriginal woman going into custody and prison, you have been through that stuff as a child as well, so it’s just an extension of the same. When you’re in a kids’ home, you figure out pretty quickly that your own body doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to them. They can do what they like to you.

With strip-searching, so many women just disassociate from their bodies, but it’s not easy for all women to do.

For a lot of women, just being strip-searched in itself will trigger so much trauma. Even after they get dressed, they’re still shaking and it’s a traumatising experience, particularly in custody cells, because they’re rough and they’re rude and they’re arrogant and they’re personal. The guards make personal remarks about your body and shit like that.

It always made me think of us being slaves on the market getting ready to be sold, and it could be done as meanly and as roughly or as perfunctorily as they felt like, you know. It just depends.

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I lost custody of my son in 1986. The custody hearing was at the children’s court on Albion Street. It was in the same court where that same judge had sentenced me to a children’s home.

I was in the same building with the same judge who sent me to prison as a child and who was now deciding I was to lose my own child. It took me eight years of fighting in court to get my son back. …

I have been in nearly every rehab on the east coast of this country.

The best drug rehabilitation I ever had was actually for alcohol, when I lost my job. I went on compo and they sent me into this private rehab. I couldn’t believe it.

They treated us like patients, not like inmates, and we actually saw the doctor once a day. We had all sorts of activities, art, music… some were optional, some were not. Very few were mandatory.

An actual professor would come and talk to us about addiction and explain aspects of addiction to us, and even taught me things I didn’t know. We could leave any time we wanted. The only thing was you didn’t want to come back drunk. If you came back drunk, they wouldn’t let you back in. I think it cost $30,000 for a 10-day stay.

And it wasn’t drug free. They gave me drugs and controlled the withdrawal so well that I hardly even noticed it. That was the best treatment I ever had. Rich people treatment.

All the other programs I’ve been in tell you that you’re a bad person, that you’re weak, that you’re useless and hopeless, and that you need to suffer more to learn your lesson, or some shit. They’re all about total abstinence and compliance.

They’re also usually shitholes. The food is usually shit. And because everybody is withdrawing without medical support, they’re not very pleasant places to be. A lot of people are like “Fuck this!” and just walk out. And then they call the police, because you have broken your bail or whatever.

The thing is, you can’t force someone to stop using. It has to be their decision and on their timeline. Our job is keeping them alive, treating their situation as a medical condition until they reach that point, and then making sure quality care is available for them when they get there.

THE REVOLVING DOOR

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There are a lot of barriers to getting into treatment programs, in my experience – waiting lists of six months or more in the few rehabs that remain; calling every day to see if there’s been a cancellation.

I’ve been through that process so many times. There are not enough beds, and waiting times are too long. When someone decides they want to stop, they need the help then, not to be told, “Oh, just keep using until a bed opens up.” …

Getting housing made a big difference for me. I got a job after I got housing, but you can’t get started on anything – your health, safety, wellbeing – nothing, without a house, a home, a home base.

Without permanent, secure, affordable housing, Aboriginal women become so enmeshed in the criminal justice system that they are in and out, in and out, on a regular basis for the rest of their lives.

‘Revolving door’ women often serve relatively short sentences but, even so, they lose everything they have on the outside, including all their personal possessions (clothes, photos and other sentimental mementos), accommodation, and even their children. They have to start from scratch, every time, over and over again, with mindnumbing consistency, and have to maintain the fight to either keep their children or have their children returned to them.

My story is the continuing story of all Aboriginal women during occupation, colonisation and genocide. We are in jail for breaking a white man’s law – men who have no right to be making laws on this land at all.

Our lore is ‘first at law’, and it should have always been the dominant law in this country. Terra nullius effectively erased us so they could make their own laws and outlaw us. It’s like we are refugees in our own country, on our own land. Hunted by coppers and racists alike, we remember how our ancestors must have felt as we live through it.

They say history is written by the victor. So be it, but let us make our story so big, so loud and so proud, we can never be written out of history.

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“Aboriginal women in custody are treated with varying degrees of outright hostility, physical abuse and neglect. In my experience, racism is never more clearly defined than when you’re sitting in police custody”

THE REVOLVING DOOR

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The criminal justice system is beyond repair, say abolitionists, and needs to be built again from the ground up.

Q&A with

The road to

n:

a

l i t o i o b

Debbie Kilroy

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Interview by TABITHA LEAN Artwork by TIBBLES Photographed by Dizne

We live within a socio-political system that is designed to keep some people down and protect others. For those of us that it betrays, targets and confines – rather than upholds, protects and celebrates – we are in a constant state of flux and survival.

No-one can flourish in that state. No-one can maintain the forward march. So, we limp.

We limp because we have to keep moving. If we didn’t keep moving, they could too easily railroad us, and we would have no choice but to lay down and die.

That’s what the system wants from us – for us to give up and give in. But every time they knock us down and we get up, our resistance and our survival becomes an act of subversion.

Debbie Kilroy knows this act of resistance all too well. As someone who has spent much of her childhood and a good portion of her adulthood in prison, she has now dedicated her life to tearing down the prison industrial complex, to free people from cages and work towards a world where the punishment complex no longer plagues us.

In this interview, Debbie Kilroy, CEO of Sisters Inside and founding member of the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, talks about her experiences in the criminal punishment system, as well as the road she is paving towards abolition of the prison industrial complex in this country.

THE ROAD TO ABOLITION

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T. Deb, Tell us a bit about yourself, and your experiences as a young person and a grown woman in the criminal punishment system. How did it change you? What do you add, from your lived experiences, to the endless debate by academics, policymakers and others?

D. I was first locked in a cage when I was just 13 years old. I was just a child. Like most kids imprisoned in this country, I wasn’t convicted of any crime. Rather, I was “detained” for a psych assessment, and ended up being imprisoned because I was a “truant”. This first incarceration at a young age started a revolving door of imprisonment and progressive criminalisation. I spent a lot of my childhood in and out of “juvenile detention”.

My break from the system came to an abrupt halt when I was charged with drug offences as an adult and sentenced to six years in prison. I served three, and while I was inside, I witnessed the murder of my best friend.

As a kid, I suffered abuse at the hands of the carceral state and watched other kids being abused. This fuelled my engagement with crime, and also fuelled a deep anger within me. I could see clearly from a very young age the gross injustice of this so-called justice system.

It was during my last period of imprisonment as an adult that I became determined to improve the situation of women and children with lived prison experience. I began training as a social worker while I was in prison and, following my release in 1992, I created Sisters Inside.

Sisters Inside is an organisation that responds to the needs of criminalised women and girls, and works to advocate for their human rights. Since it was established in the early 1990s, Sisters Inside has grown from a largely voluntary group to a community-based organisation which provides services to many women and children both inside and outside prison each year. It is the only organisation of its kind in so-called Australia.

I have also completed my legal training, and I was admitted as a legal practitioner in Queensland in 2007. I was the first former prisoner to achieve this. Along with a group of formerly incarcerated women, girls and femmeidentifying people, we have now formed the National Network of Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated Women and Girls, the first of its kind in this country.

T. Too often in this country the voices and needs of those of us who have been in prison are silenced, invisibilised or disregarded. The National Network argues that there should be “nothing about us, without us”, and that there is a need for, or rather there is power in the inclusion of, the voice of those with lived prison experience.

D. Right across this country, the voices of women, girls and femme-identifying people who have been to prison are ignored or actively silenced. There are panels held regularly to discuss prisons and policing and they are comprised of people who are held up as ‘experts’, who have never seen the inside of a cage.

The National Network seeks to redress that.

Our aim is to organise in such a way that our voices are heard, and our needs are met. We will be a presence in this country that cannot be ignored when these conversations are taking place, and we will drive policy discussions on matters that affect us.

Add to that, the criminalised community are regularly exploited. So often people working in this space (academics, researchers, etc.) fail to really be honest about the power dynamics they operate within, feigning partnerships with criminalised people but mostly making their careers off the back of our oppression. We are not interested in being exploited anymore.

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As a network, we want to work with people and organisations that will honour our stories and respect our experiences as expertise. We want our network members’ expertise to be recognised formally, and for their careers to be built up, rather than used to uphold others’.

After all, we are experts in our own oppression. If you have not seen the inside of a cage, you cannot be the expert in prisons – no matter your degree or proximity to us.

T. Much of your work these days centres around abolition. Broadly, what do you mean by abolition?

D. I don’t believe we can have true justice in this unjust colony. We cannot have true justice alongside or within the carceral state. The system’s extreme racial disparities and daily dehumanisation do not result from a glitch in the system, but rather from the smooth functioning of a system designed to control and contain poor, Black and unwell people.

Dreamtime Sissy by Tibbles The spirit of an Aboriginal woman who died in custody.

If we persist in trying to reform a system that continues to serve only the interests of private property and capital while enacting extreme violence, we will not realise safety for all. Abolition enables us to challenge the ubiquitous belief that there are disposable humans. It enables us to connect with our communities, learn how to take accountability, and foster communal responsibility for preventing and responding to harm.

Abolition enables us to dispense with suffering, punishment and exile as solutions to harm. Abolition gives us the opportunity to work to change the conditions which produce both actual harm and people who act out that harm, so that we won’t actually need systems of punishment. Abolition has the capacity to change the face of justice in this country and deliver love, safety and real liberty for all, not just a select few that this colony deems worthy.

Abolition gives us life. It gives us a future, and it has the potential to pave a liberatory pathway for everyone, not just the incarcerated.

Essentially, abolition is a two-part process. On the one hand, it is a demolishing project. That part is where we defund, demolish and disestablish institutions and systems like prisons, policing and family policing. Then there is the second part of abolition, the building project, where we build up communities of care, establish transformative processes of radical reciprocity and accountability, and really consider what it means to be in relationship with each other, with property, with the country and with the State. Abolition allows us to reimagine our communities.

T. Talk me through the changes to the criminal punishment system you would like to see.

D. I am an abolitionist, so I want to dismantle the entire punishment system! I want to see the complete abolition of the prison industrial complex – there will be no punishment system.

It is time that we, as a community, reckon with the fact that prisons cannot be reformed, since the very nature of prisons requires brutality and contempt for the people imprisoned. Prisons themselves are a form of reform and in this country, we have been trapped in a prison reform cycle for more than 200 years.

Prisons are not getting safer; they are getting more dangerous. Aboriginal deaths in custody are increasing every single year. We must accept that prisons are used to punish people for being Black, for being poor, for being unwell. Systems of punishment have crept into our community, and systems of surveillance into our homes. The carceral net is ever-expanding, and we must work to abolish it.

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“It is time that we, as a community, reckon with the fact that prisons cannot be reformed, since the very nature of prisons requires brutality and contempt for the people imprisoned”

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The Australian punishment system has never been a system designed to keep everyone safe. It has never been a system designed to end harm. It has never been a fair system, a just system or a system of radical social change.

To the contrary, it has been an instrument of ruling class oppression. The legal system, from its founding, was about preserving distributions of wealth and property and white supremacy. The criminal punishment system has consistently been deployed by settler-colonial states to uphold the colony, and to further the colonial project that is Australia.

The system is not broken. The system is not failing when you consider its real intent. We are told that our ‘justice’ system is about public safety and human flourishing, but if you think that our legal system is really about creating a society of equality, justice, liberty and public safety, all you have to do is look around to understand that it’s failing miserably at that.

That’s why you hear so many people from all over saying the criminal justice system is broken. It’s only broken if you think that those are its purposes. If you actually consider that its purpose is controlling certain populations, oppressing certain people and conserving the hierarchies of wealth and power, then it’s actually functioning very well. And the people who’ve been running our criminal legal system for decades aren’t stupid. They weren’t trying to do one thing but woefully failed, they were trying to do what the system has been doing, which is to keep certain people contained and controlled.

We need to ask ourselves some really hard questions about why we’ve been inflicting so much pain and harm. Please don’t fall into the trap of thinking we can tweak a ‘failing’ system to make it work. We can’t. It is working perfectly for the racial capitalists and colonialists.

T. Given that abolition and queerness are intrinsically linked in their exploration and dismissal of the impossible, many of us argue that we can’t have queer liberation without prison abolition. After all, the movement for queer and trans liberation has always had abolition at its core. Where do you see queer rights sitting within the abolition movement in this country?

D. By definition, queerness exists outside the confines of what capitalism in this country deems acceptable, so it comes as no surprise that the prisons are filled with people who are queer. Like all of the other people the system disposes of – First Nations mob, the unwell, the disabled, the poor – the prison industrial complex works to control queer and trans people using prisons.

These systems of criminalisation and incarceration pose constant and pervasive threats to queer and trans liberation. For queer and trans people of colour in particular, policing and imprisonment can come with deadly consequences.

The policing of gender and sexuality has been a form of oppression deployed by the white supremacist hetero-patriarchal colonial State, and the violence against queer and gender non-conforming mob stretches back years. It is therefore essential to recognise that queering the conversation around abolition extends beyond highlighting the ways LGBTQ+ people are targeted by and resist the criminal punishment system. We also need to examine the ways in which gender, sex and sexuality have been deployed within larger political, economic and social processes driving policing and incarceration in this country.

The reality is that the queer community lives abolition in their everyday, to a certain extent. Every time they insist on accessible and affirming healthcare, safe and quality education, meaningful and secure employment, loving and healing relationships, and being their full and whole selves, they are doing abolition.

Queerness, like abolition, is a project of imagination: of moving beyond the constraints of our society to seek out alternative forms of kinship, life and futurity. Abolishing the colonial gender binary and breaking patriarchal gender

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norms – these are all things that abolition calls us to do, to liberate each other from systems that oppress, and to transform ourselves and the systems around us into more nourishing and fulfilling entities that focus on abundance and healing, not scarcity and harm.

The abolition movement is asking us to value the sanctity of human life, regardless of gender and sexuality, to remove the violent systems that seek to oppress, and make an active commitment to build support systems that actually make communities safer. As my sista Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, “Where life is precious, life is precious.”

T. Deb, you have just launched the End Toxic Prisons – Block the Pipeline campaign. Can you tell us about that?

Sisters Yarning by Tibbles A group of girls in prison sharing yarns.

D: The campaign was launched in response to the Labor Government’s proposal to build a new youth prison in Cairns. The campaign argues for an immediate end to youth incarceration. It calls on the government to invest in community-controlled solutions to end the criminalisation of marginalised people, by demanding that the government prioritise the development of care solutions managed by the local community to address the social issues faced by youth in Far North Queensland.

We believe that the youth who will be targeted and disproportionately affected by the development of this new State-sponsored carceral project will predominantly be First Nations girls and boys. These new developments will enable the carceral machine to more effectively coax young First Nations people into the criminal legal system.

Our campaign seeks to end the gendered, racialised violence against First Nations people, and abolish the age of criminal responsibility in order to prevent First Nations people being killed in custody.

The campaign is, at its heart, an abolitionist campaign, driven towards stopping the expansion of prisons in our communities and ending the carceral violence against First Nations people and communities.

T. For many people, the idea of abolition seems huge. After all, many people can’t imagine a world without prisons and policing. How can people get started on their abolition journey?

D. Abolition starts in our homes and in our hearts. It is not just about abolishing the police force, but also the little cop inside your head. Start to think about how you can include abolition in your everyday life – in your workplace, and your home. Support Aboriginal families who have had family members killed in custody – donate to their fundraising pages, share their posts on social media, attend rallies, donate to Aboriginal community-controlled organisations.

Demand that no new prison beds be created in your state. Donate to our FreeHer campaign, so we can liberate women from cages. And read. Read about abolition from Black scholars, feminist scholars, First Nations scholars.

Learn all you can.

If you are asked to speak or write about imprisonment, carceral violence, justice solutions, deaths in custody, or penal abolition, and you look around and see no-one with lived prison experience having their voice elevated, weaponise your privilege and share your platform. Because our voices are valid in this space. We are experts in our own oppression, and there should be nothing at all about us, without us.

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“Prisons are not getting safer; they are getting more dangerous. Aboriginal deaths in custody are increasing every single year. We must accept that prisons are used to punish people for being Black, for being poor, for being unwell”

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Growing up Black in the colony of Australia means that far too many Aboriginal kids are subjected to police brutality, violence, institutional racism and bigotry.

I AM NOT

THE PROBLEM WORDS BY: JAX SANSBURY IMAGES BY: CLAUDIA FISCHER

I’m Jax. I’m 18 years old and I have had more interactions with the police than anyone my age should have.

I am here to tell you that I am not the problem.

I am like a flower. I have so many petals that make me who I am, but at the centre of all those petals is my pistil – my Aboriginality. This shapes so much of who I am as a person. My flower wouldn’t be my flower if it didn’t have this at its centre.

My most cherished petal is my sexuality and gender identity. I am the first (very proud) gender-fluid bisexual in my family. The journey of coming out and discovering myself as a queer person while growing up in a society and family steeped in homophobia was, frankly, fucking tough.

The freedom and joy I feel at being able to express myself is hard to capture in words. The first time someone validated my identity as a non-binary person felt like an out-of-body experience, except that I was more comfortable in my body than ever before.

Another petal that makes me who I am is the fact that I am the oldest of six kids. From the earliest age I have been a caregiver, a protector, an educator and someone striving to be a good influence – but I am by no means perfect and I know that at times I’ve been both the hero and the villain in my siblings’ lives.

I am also the oldest of too many cousins to count. As someone who has had to look after and nurture almost every one of them, I’ve always felt it was my duty to make our family a safe place for them to be able to live life on their terms and express themselves openly, safely and with pride.

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“I have countless childhood memories of police beating down my door to arrest my family members, while in the loungeroom watching Nickelodeon with my younger brothers asleep in my arms”

Looking at some of my younger cousins, I don’t think I’ll be the only openly queer family member for long. It’s a big weight to carry the responsibility of opening my family’s minds. They had been bolted shut to the idea that being gay, or trans, or a ‘feminine’ guy, or a ‘masculine’ girl isn’t just wrong or a phase, but is someone’s truth – someone stepping out of a hollow shell. That it’s someone choosing not to live and die miserably.

Another petal that makes me who I am is the unique way that I view this world. This is something that would never have been possible without the influence of my mum. I didn’t get to live with my mum much while growing up, but she’s in my life now and that’s what matters.

My mum is loving, generous, openminded and so damn charismatic.

Mum is understanding and fights for her beliefs and the beliefs of those she loves, even if she doesn’t always understand them. It was my mum who first taught me that expressing myself emotionally, mentally, physically and spiritually was a radical act, and something to be proud of.

It was my mum who taught me that being gay wasn’t a sin, or something shameful; that it was something to celebrate. It was me living my truth.

My mum taught me that while the world is full of both good and bad, expressing myself and living life on my terms is definitely part of the good.

Another petal that has shaped how my life has played out is the fact that I am the child of a criminalised man. I grew up bouncing between him and my nan.

It pains me to remember him during my childhood as a sad, scary, shallow and money-hungry man. I also remember him being outrageously funny and an amazing woodworker.

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When my dad sings, he always finds a way to work himself into the lyrics like he’s Ice Cube or something. He is fiercely loving in many ways, and fiercely violent and harmful in others.

Dad has always struggled with his mental health and addiction, and has often relied on things like drug dealing to support us as a family. When he was a kid, society forced him to learn how to provide for himself in a world that didn’t want to see him survive – a world that told him time and time again that he was the problem.

It breaks my heart that my siblings and I also had to grow up in a world that told us time and time again that we were the problem. Despite my dad’s best efforts, he couldn’t protect us from this messaging. I hate that my dad grew up in a world that saw him as a criminal from a young age, and I hate that the world sees me and my siblings as criminals because we’re Black and we were born to someone society has painted as a villain. …

My great-grandmother and my greatgreat-grandmother were both part of the original Stolen Generations, and I know this is where my family’s pain started. I loved my great-grandmother deeply and remember her wisdom. I also remember the hurt she carried.

I don’t think any kid my age should understand the term ‘generational trauma’ the way I do.

My dad has spent a lot of time in and out of prison and our relationship is complex. This relationship is not simply good, nor simply bad – it’s both and everything in between. To my dad, I think I am many complicated things.

I am his child, but I’m also the one who has had to step up many times.

I’m the one who looks after him and

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who cares for him and his children, and sometimes I think he feels like I threaten his authority and his validity as a ‘man’ (whatever that means).

As I write this, my dad has been in prison for two years. For about a year and a half of this, he was awaiting sentencing. He’s due to come home any day now and to be honest, I feel so many complicated emotions about it. I feel excited. I feel scared. I feel heavy.

In so many ways my life is simpler without him around, and in other ways I feel his absence like a wound.

Most of my childhood memories are traumatic. Some of the most vivid of these aren’t of trauma inflicted by my family, as the world so often wants to focus on, but rather trauma inflicted by the State. I have countless childhood memories of police beating down my door to arrest my family members: while in the loungeroom watching Nickelodeon with my younger brothers asleep in my arms; while dozing off to sleep on a Sunday night; while at a wake for one of our family’s Elders.

The threat that my caregivers could be violently stolen from my life at any given moment always loomed large.

I remember this one time police forced their way in when I was about nine or 10 years old. I knew the drill by then and bundled up all my younger siblings and cousins into one room and hid under the quilt cover. On this particular occasion, I heard the bedroom door open and felt the quilt being ripped from us. I opened my eyes to see a bright light shining in my face. It wasn’t until another officer entered the room and turned on the light that I realised that it wasn’t simply a torch, but the barrel of a gun pointing in my face. I was a child – no more than 10 years old.

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“If you are an Aboriginal child whose parents have been criminalised, police officers see you as a criminal, too”

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This is the same night my dad got charged for resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer as he struggled free of their grip to come to me, his child who was surrounded by police. This is the same night that I felt my heart rip in two as I saw my five-year-old brother, pinned to the window, screaming “Dad, Dad, Dad!” as he watched my father’s face being dragged along the concrete by four officers.

My heart broke with the realisation that my baby brother was going to grow up in the same world that I was growing up in. I need you to trust me when I say that violence by police officers towards Aboriginal people is real and I need you to trust me when I say that if you are an Aboriginal child whose parents have been criminalised, police officers see you as a criminal, too. This message was drilled into my 11-year-old brain on another occasion when cops burst into my dad’s house, chaos ensued and my aunty ended up being held down by five police officers. I remember feeling rage boiling in my belly and eventually spitting from my mouth when, for the first time in my life, I told the police what I thought of them.

need to know, though, that this still doesn’t mean that I’m the problem.

Despite all of this – despite everything I have lived through, everything I have had to do to survive – I am still here. I am smart. I am funny. I am intensely loving and protective of my younger siblings, but man – I can be heartbreakingly cruel towards myself. I have a best friend who I love with the fire of a thousand suns. This best friend is teaching me how to accept love and care from others.

At 17 years of age, I started living alone in a high-density public housing block and there’s not a week that goes by that I don’t open my door to someone in need.

I am trying hard to finish school, but it’s not easy to write an essay on ‘Where I see myself in 10 years time and how school is going to help me get there’ when I don’t know where the money for rent or dinner is coming from.

It’s even harder when you get suspended for two weeks for smoking a cigarette. I can’t help but think that if Mr Vice Principal was also living in unsafe public housing and had their 56-year-old alcoholic neighbour banging on their door and hurling abuse all night, he too might want a cigarette on his lunch break.

“Oi, you fucking pig. My aunty doesn’t fucking deserve this.

My family doesn’t deserve this.

What you are doing is fucking wrong,” 11-year-old me yelled.

Cool as a cucumber, through pursed lips, I remember this slimy cop’s reply: “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “That’s gonna be you one day.”

Can you imagine hearing that as an 11-year-old? …

Another petal that makes me who I am is my ability to survive. Just like my dad, my nan, my great-grandmother and my great-great-grandmother, I’ve had to learn how to provide for myself in a world that doesn’t want to see me thrive.

This means that I’m wickedly creative and it also means I can live off just oats, Weet-Bix and hot water for weeks on end. I’ve stolen more times than I can remember – sometimes to feed myself and my younger siblings, sometimes to keep up with the latest trend and sometimes because, if you were in my position, wouldn’t you, too? You

Despite all of this, I am still here, sharing my story with you. Despite all of this, at 18 years of age, I can now call myself a writer. I had always dreamed of telling complex stories, like the one that I have lived and am living, but from a vantage point miles away from that of the average white, middle-class reporter or researcher – and here I am, doing just that. Here I am, sharing the stories that other people won’t let us tell, sharing the stories that help people understand that we are not the problem, sharing the stories that help other kids like me know that they aren’t the problem either.

Because I am not the problem.

We are not the problem.

I AM NOT THE PROBLEM

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Kids on the outside When a child’s parent is locked up, their life changes forever.

WORDS BY: MABEL ELIZABETH

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I remember everything really clearly.

It was 22 February 2016. It was a Monday. I was six years old. It was the day my dad went to jail, and my life changed forever.

We weren’t exactly expecting the world to fall apart but just in case it did, I stayed home from school with one of my grandparents. The day seemed like any other day. The sun still rose in the morning and my breakfast still tasted the same.

Nana and I played a few rounds of Uno and Go Fish, and it seemed like the second hands of the clock still ticked at the same pace. But as the hours crept on, time seemed to slow, until Nana got a phone call.

Nana looked at her phone, glanced at me and left the room to answer it. I kept rummaging around in the toys looking for another board game to play. I’m not sure if I was self-consciously trying to distract myself, or desperately trying to grab a hold of the childhood that was about to be stolen from me.

Either way, I didn’t hear the phone call that tore my family in two. …

My oldest brother was the first to know that my dad was going to jail. Then the middle one, then me – I was the last to know. But actually, all Nana told me was that my mum was coming home. Nana didn’t tell me Dad wasn’t. It was like she was trying to save me from the painful truth, but there was no point – it was going to be really obvious that Dad was taken when Mum came home alone.

I remember that she hugged me after she told me.

I remember being really confused because Mum coming home was good, right? But the hug felt like a consolation hug. It felt like she was showing me pity and I could not understand why.

This was a lot of confusion for a six-year-old brain.

At this stage, I still didn’t know that my dad had been sentenced to six years in prison. So, I’m sitting there in this awkward embrace, thinking: What are we even sad about? This is all over, yeah? We can move on.

My family is coming home. I’ve got my parents back.

Haven’t I? I pulled away from Nana and walked into the lounge room to find my brothers. We have always been close, despite the age difference. I wanted to be with them and to hold them in this moment that saw the end of the nightmare my family had been living for several years. But as I entered the room, I saw the

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youngest of my older brothers screaming in anguish on the couch. His whole body was wracked with grief and his face was distorted with sadness. It was one of the most painful things I have ever seen.

I was confused; the whole scene felt like some kind of surreal movie. I looked around for my older brother, but I couldn’t find him. I searched for answers from the adults around me, but came up blank.

After what felt like days, but was probably only an hour, my mum walked through the front door, followed by my grandfather, and then no-one. That’s when it clicked. The walls closed in on me, ringing buzzed through my ears and all I could say over and over in my little head was, “Dad’s not coming home.”

And he didn’t. He’d been taken to prison straight from the courthouse. He was in a cage somewhere – we didn’t even know which one.

I couldn’t wrap my head around it. It felt like he had disappeared – from our home, our lives, our family.

Gone.

And yeah, my mum was home, small mercies. But wrapped around her ankle was a big fat monitoring device. She was on home detention. Home, but surveilled. Home but imprisoned. My home became a jail.

Yet, it still was not over. …

I had turned seven by the time they took my mum away.

It wasn’t meant to happen. And yep, I remember that day clearly too. Why do the days your life falls apart start off like any other day? Why are they just normal days that end up cataclysmic?

Why aren’t there signs? (Were there signs?)

It was a Tuesday – a school day. Mum was sure she would be home because that’s what her lawyer had said. Still, I begged to stay home from school.

I wanted to spend every second with her. I wanted to be by her side.

Mum said I should go to school, take my mind off the day and we would snuggle together that evening. So I did. I went to school, in my school uniform, with my bag on my back and my mum on my mind.

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In the schoolyard I was called up and taken into a room with a teacher, a School Services Officer, my grandad and my two aunties, who were all sitting on some blue chairs. I was told to sit down (why do people think that sitting down eases the pain of bad news?).

Being so young, my mind didn’t immediately jump to, Oh God, something happened to Mum, but as we all awkwardly sat there a rock started to grow in the pit of my stomach.

Something was up. Something very bad was happening. I was about to lose everything. I just sat there. Waiting. Anticipating. Then my grandad spoke.

Awkwardly, he told me that my mum had been taken to jail.

It took me a full minute to realise what he had said. My mum wasn’t coming home.

I remember breaking down in this tiny, dull room. The thing that I had been dreading had happened.

Even now, words escape me. They can’t adequately explain how I felt. Not only did I lose my mum that day, I lost a piece of me – the very piece that held me together. It’s like the system pulled out my plug and all of me started unravelling.

My life was running water and I was trying to grasp it with both hands.

Again, no-one was telling me what was going on. I will never forgive them for that. I might have been young, but no matter what, this was my life, and everything was changing, and it was affecting me. No matter how old I was, it was still happening. My mother was still being taken away from me. …

My dad had already been in jail for a year by the time they took Mum. I was only seven, but I felt like nothing would ever get any better. When I got separated from my mum, I also got separated from my two older brothers, who were my absolute lifelines through all of this.

I had to go and live with my grandad in rural South Australia. As my eldest brother had just started university in Adelaide, he went to a boarding college in the city. My other brother had a scholarship to a private high school in Adelaide, and he moved into the boarding house at the school so he could continue his studies there.

We were all separated, and I was on my own.

All alone.

But, you know, time is a funny thing. It ticks by and I guess I became a frog being boiled slowly.

My brothers and I visited my mum in prison every fortnight. I was a seven-year-old going to prison, walking through security, getting a wand waved over my body, and watching people being frisked.

It was scary having this tall-ass man standing over little seven-year-old me. The way they would make jokes and laugh with me still makes me feel sick to my stomach. I don’t even know if that’s normal, or what is normal anymore.

The visits with Mum were good. Sometimes she’d cry. Well, mostly she’d cry. Sometimes she brought snacks. We’d colour in and chat about life. But mostly I remember them as hard and scary. The guards loomed large and the system seemed fierce and unforgiving.

The time she was in there seemed endless. Days turned into weeks, and months into years.

Christmases came and went and Mum didn’t come home. Each time she had a parole review my heart would light this little candle of hope that she’d come home and we’d be a family again, and those people in the system would blow it out like the big bad wolves that they were.

I learnt to not let the candle shine as brightly anymore. …

The day inevitably came. It kinda came without any fanfare, which was weird. One minute she was disappeared, and the next day they were letting her come home.

I was excited, but my heart ached for having to leave my grandad. It was a weird, emotional time for me. I felt guilty for feeling sad to leave Grandad’s when I should have been so happy my mum was coming home.

I was lucky, after all. Heaps of kids’ parents were still locked up.

That first night that my brothers and Mum and I were all home together was my favourite. We didn’t have much, but we had each other. We had blow-up mattresses on the lounge room floor, an old TV and a few SpongeBob DVDs.

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We all lay there together just watching re-runs of SpongeBob. I remember looking across the room at us all there and feeling peace. We were finally all back together. It was tinged with sadness and grief because emotions are complicated, but it is one of my happiest memories.

There are days when I still yearn for that simple night of no distractions and just us four on the lounge room floor hanging out together, not taking each other’s company for granted, loving being together. …

Our ancestors never had prisons. In this country, that means prisons and policing are only 233 years old.

You could learn from our old people and the ancient ways. There are ways to hold people accountable and ways to care for each other and the environment so we don’t do the kinds of harm that we see on the news each night.

Let’s find better ways to live with each other, better ways to respect the planet. Because something’s gotta give. Something’s got to change. And I’m going to grow to help make that change.

As years have passed, I’ve had time to think about the impact of what has happened to my family. I am angry.

I am angry that no-one in the system cared about what happened to my brothers and me.

When the State sought to punish my mum, they also punished us kids. They took from us the very person who provided our care, love and support. The person who made our house a home. They took our mother.

They took my mother. And they did this in the name of justice.

Was Mum so evil that they needed to lock her in a cage? I guess they’d say yes. I guess they’d say she brought this on herself, that she let us down. But I don’t see it like that. I see the State as letting us down.

At the time when we needed our mum the most, they took her. They should have made her stay in our lives.

They should have made her be accountable to us – the people who love and care for her, the people who depended on her.

I have grown up being told by schools and institutions that the cops keep us safe, but they didn’t keep my family safe. They tore it apart. The whole prison system exists to protect people on the outside. But what about the children who get involved? Where is their protection?

What about me? What about my siblings? What about every other child who had their parents ripped from them by the hands of the government? Not only did they take my parents, they took my childhood from me.

There is nothing in place to keep the children safe. …

I want to see things change. I want to see the end of prisons. I don’t want people punished the way they are now. There has to be a better way.

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“At the time when we needed our mum the most, they took her. They should have made her stay in our lives. They should have made her be accountable to us – the people who love and care for her, the people who depended on her”

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PARIAH

ZARITA

INTERVIEW BY HINI HANARA

ZEVALLOS

Interview by HINI HANARA Photography ZARITA ZEVALLOS

Zarita Zevallos is a Haitian photographer and architect based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is known for hand editing and superimposing photographs of darker skinned bodies with materials such as thread, bullets, glass, barbed wire, etc. The purpose of her work is to reflect upon identity, gender roles, crimes committed by nations, non-conformism, and political or ideological authoritarianism. She enhances her concepts while allowing the observer free rein of their subconscious artistic impulse.

H. I have so many questions about your experiences growing up in Haiti.

Is your narrative in Pariah a direct link to your birthplace or is there wider context?

Z. The photoseries Pariah is specific to formerly incarcerated people in the United States, expressing both the exploitative nature of the system, and the difficulties of surviving it after being jailed. The lack of order and justice in Haiti is much more gruesome and heartbreaking.

H. The barbed wire is such a fierce icon of imprisonment or incarceration.

Can you tell me about what it symbolises for you?

Z. When I think of the idea of incarceration, the image of barbed wire comes to mind. Its use also helps to intensify the feeling of physical/ emotional pain, harm and damage inflicted on a specific group of people.

H. Even with barbed wire being so prominent, I almost feel a poetic grace displayed by the models. Was that intentional?

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Z. Absolutely. During the photoshoot, it was important to have the models pose in a manner that constantly evoked tenderness and care. Black men, within and outside prison, mutually support each other. I chose to represent them in a softer light, underneath the contrasting and harsh layers of barbed wire.

H. Some of our readers may not be aware of Haiti’s colonial history, or how it’s still affecting Haitian people today. This understanding helps people like myself share their own similar experiences. Who inspires you to open up, and which other artists have helped light your path?

Z. I get this question often and, unfortunately, I don’t have an artist or known person that inspires me aside from my father, Arturo Zevallos. He is the reason I picked up a camera, as he is a photographer as well, and his conversations about philosophy with us, his children, are the foundation of my work. He has read hundreds of books and always taught us about the effects of colonialism and propaganda in the media; that the information

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that is easily given to us via television and radio is not always correct. He is from Peru and has lived through the cancerous growth of imperialism in South America. One of his favourite writers is Eduardo Galeano, who has dedicated his life to denouncing the crimes of the Western world. His knowledge and lived experiences light my creative path.

H. Aotearoa (New Zealand) is my birthplace. It was one of the many Polynesian islands that were colonised and converted to Christianity by Britain. As an Indigenous Māori person who grew up in a very staunch Christian household, I often refer to myself as “twice-colonised”, as both my land and my spiritual beliefs have been manipulated. When I viewed the image of the two men in the water, one floating on their back and one standing, my first thought still went to baptism. I understand Haiti also has a strong religious influence. Has that played into your experience of colonialism?

Z. Thank you for making space to share this. Yes, religion is very present in the Haitian society, mindset and culture. Even the government is Catholic. Religion also played a role in developing classism; for instance, when schools were created in Haiti, all of them were Catholic and private. If you could afford an education, you were part of the bourgeoisie. This meant that most people who could afford it were foreigners, or native rich people who very often were light-skinned. This isolated 99 per cent of the mass population and the lower class, who found themselves rejected and ignored from opportunities. Religion in Haiti, in my opinion, remains at the top of the pyramid of violence.

In my journey of questioning my religious upbringing, I found my personality. As I unlearned antiblackness and anti-classism, and found my way back to humanity, I

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rejected the notions of the classist Haitian (anti-native) church. I am very angry at how religious leaders get away with, quite literally, the rape of the world and hold a systematic monopoly over the human consciousness.

This will always play an important role in my journey of unlearning, because religion, as imperfect as it is, was injected into my existence at birth. It took a lifetime for me to learn this self-hate. It will take a lifetime to vomit its filth.

I also want to add that there is a difference between spirituality and religion as a system. This need/ obsession to control a collective narrative that is life is not acceptable to me.

H. Did you feel safe to express yourself creatively in Haiti? How has your move to the USA changed the way you approach your art and express your beliefs?

Z. Yes, when you are part of the upper middle class and you are light-skinned, you have access to a lot of freedom of expression, which was what I belonged to when I lived in Haiti. I only realised how restricted others were when I moved to the US and began understanding my privilege.

It has been a journey of analysing my behaviours and instinctive thoughts.

Having access to writing by Black authors and documentaries about neo-colonialism in the Caribbean have been helpful to see myself as I was, and to understand what I can do to denounce the separatism that we inflict on our own race and people when we assimilate the coloniser’s mentality.

H. I’m curious about your creative team and perhaps their shared lived experience. What does that conversation look like in the imageplanning process?

Continued on page 48

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“When I think of the idea of incarceration, the image of barbed wire comes to mind.

Its use also helps to intensify the feeling of physical/ emotional pain, harm and damage inflicted on a specific group of people”

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PARIAH

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Z. I usually reach out to two people: my sister, Alexa Zevallos, who I have been inviting on set since last year (2022) to help with directing the models; and my friend, Keylah Mellon, who is a film photographer, to look over the final product and share comments.

The conversation is mostly around aesthetic, wording of concept and the editing process/colour correction.

Planning and research I tend to do on my own.

H. I understand landscape photography was a big love of yours and I feel that reflected in the models’ bodyscapes. Do you have a sense of connection to land, being from Haiti?

Z. I have an ambiguous relationship and connection with Haiti. The land itself is infinitely loved and cherished.

The native people are warm and hardworking, but my heart is angry at the country itself, run by thugs who choose to share political and financial privileges with international rulers.

Recently my aunt, Gina Rolles, was framed and unjustly incarcerated without proof, while the people who are responsible roam free.

The system is so poor in Haiti that they refuse to see her to set her free.

She is now depressed and has lost so much weight that she can no longer speak. The people in the government who have jailed her are now revealed to be responsible for fraud and other heinous crimes. I do not see myself ever going back.

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H. You’ve explored the theme of masculinity in past work. Has this played a role in Pariah?

Z. It played an underlying role here; it was not the focus of this series.

The goal was tenderness. It wasn’t until after Pariah was published that I received comments from a few men expressing that this series seemed “homosexual”, simply because two men were close and touching.

It definitely caught my attention because I did not imagine that some men could be offended by the masculine touch. It’s surprising that platonic intimacy between two people causes so much uproar.

H. Do you see a resolution for the tension we see in Pariah?

Z. Yes, the mental battle people face in prison and after is torture. The racism, the physical violence, the forced labour, the reintegration with negative labels into society, the loss of rights, the high possibility of going back to jail because of how easy they make it for you to break a slight rule.

All of these things cause so much distress and limitations. If you have no support system, family or friends helping you, it’s a winning battle for the system.

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INTERVIEW BY THE ARTIST As part of the research phase for this series, the artist conducted an interview with a man, Henry, with lived experience of incarceration.

“Through talking to him, I realised that he was accepting of his fate,” says Zarita. “He felt the rage of the unjust treatment he received from the system, but he was still and collected.

Very often, I find that as Black people, we are not allowed to outwardly express our anger and pain. It is an implosive reaction. We keep it to ourselves.”

Zarita reflects that this experience is felt through this series.

“The photos represent the implosion and restriction felt as the result of a traumatic experience. You sometimes find the model in uncomfortable positions, with barbed wire over his mouth to express silent pain, or reaching out to nothing, reduced to the limits of his condition.”

Part of Zarita’s interview is included below.

Z. After this experience, do you feel free? Do you feel fragile? What are the rights you lost?

You lose a lot of rights for a while. You can’t vote. If you try to look for housing, they say you can’t have a criminal case of less than five years, among other things. Getting back into society is really hard, especially when you try to get a job. They label you a lot.

In the beginning, I had to be under house arrest for six months. If I wanted to go out, I had to call [the probation officer] in advance to say at what time I’d be leaving the house and at what time I’d be coming back. If by any bad luck you’re not back by the time you’re supposed to be, the cops will come to your house in less than two minutes and they will arrest you.

I felt scared because I had eyes on me constantly. I was very paranoid.

Z: How long do you think it took before you got used to it?

It took me about three and a half years.

It was extremely hard, I can’t stress that enough. You have to depend on your family and friends, if they’re still there for you.

PARIAH

Z: Did you find work? Do you get paid properly?

I kept asking. I’m disabled. And finally, after three years, I got a job. Ten dollars here, 20 dollars there. Per day in prison you get paid 15 cents for hard labour.

Some get paid 15 dollars a month!

Z: Did this experience affect you emotionally? Mentally?

I couldn’t sleep. It’s torture.

Z: Now that you are free, are there everyday tasks that trigger some emotions or flashbacks?

Yes. Big fights, people getting cut or stabbed... The bad things that happened [in jail], like when someone got stabbed right next to me, they all come back.

Z: Have you kept in touch with your friends and family?

My family supported me. They took care of me so I didn’t get depressed, and so that I try to lift myself up again. It all depends on your family and friends.

A lot of guys don’t have that [support] and when they come out, they would prefer to be in prison.

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The prison industrial complex condemns families to a generational cycle of incarceration.

THREE CAGED BIRDS SINGING WORDS BY: JACE IMAGES BY: MAHALIA MABO

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My mum, my sister and I found a love of music together.

There was rarely a car ride with the three of us that didn’t feature a ballad, with all of us singing at the top of our lungs.

We did this for as long as I could remember. Though not always in key, it was always filled with joy, shared smiles and laughter. …

My mum had me when she was 19, and six years later, had my darling sister. Over the years we have sometimes been closer and sometimes further apart, emotionally and physically. It’s hard to follow all the different reasons why, but we always find our way back to each other, kind of like a flock of birds.

We each have our own stories, but sometimes you can see the common threads that we share.

One of those common threads is that each of us has been trapped in a different metaphorical (or literal) cage fashioned by the prison industrial complex.

I think the easiest way to explain it is chronologically. …

made her suffer. Being alone, separated from what she once knew, and violated by a system that she was also meant to feel safe enough to report to – no child can be expected to arrive at a place of healing under these circumstances. Yet they continue to remove children, acting shocked when the healing never comes. …

“My sister was 14 the day she phoned me while actively on the run from the police. She had run away from home, in a different state from me, and had been told she had to return home. What she thought would be a simple act of defiance became her first arrest”

My cage looked a little different from my mum’s. My trauma and subsequent reactions to it have been pathologised for as long as I can remember.

From the time I started school, I was a regular in the counsellor’s office. Things that I had come to know about my mother’s cage, and things I had seen for myself, had made me a perfect candidate for institutionalisation. So much so, that my parents’ ability to raise me was brought into question on multiple occasions.

Considering my mum’s personal fears around the organisation, she coped pretty well defending herself to child protection services in their poorly ventilated office as they told her that it must have been her fault her child was so sick.

My mum had what anyone would consider a tumultuous childhood.

Her family home was not safe, as deemed by child ‘protection’ services. When it came to the ‘problem’ of my mum’s safety, she was robbed of all autonomy.

My mum had fallen down to the first level of the prison industrial complex, and shortly I would slip through to the second. My first hospitalisation came at 14 years old. I had already been on psychiatric medication for six months, which came with no information leaflet for the 13-year-old patient.

The times my mum would run away, police would put her in the back of the car, kicking and screaming, and return her to the house. Other times, she would beg to stay, and child protection officers would whisk her away to a situation just as dangerous, with no support.

They said I had a “mental breakdown” and would benefit from some “time out”. Rather than give me or my family the support I needed to stay at home, I was taken two hours away to a city I barely knew, and trapped in a box with 10 other ‘problem’ teens.

Each time the officers removed her, they assured her that she would be safe. Instead, repeated unstable living and traumatisation left my mum with little hope for a future.

Although the State calls it ‘child protection’, this system did not provide care for my mother. In fact, the system

For years, every six months, I would be shipped out from my small country town when I was considered “too unwell”, and put in a place I could not leave. When I hit 18, I was moved from the colourful walls of the youth wards to a sterile hospital with people sometimes 30 years older than me.

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I didn’t have a choice. I was in their system – they made the decisions for me because I was considered too much of a risk to be allowed to make my own.

The labels of ‘mentally ill’, ‘incapacitated’ or ‘broken’ are all too commonly given to mob. The Australian Bureau of Statistics stated in 2019 that 24 per cent of Aboriginal people selfreported a “diagnosed mental health or behavioural condition”.

We know that society tells us to keep these things close to the chest, so the numbers are undoubtedly higher. Institutions use these labels as another tool to control and villainise communities, with such power and accuracy that you can’t help but feel as though it is a conspiracy. …

My sister’s cage became more literal than my mum’s and mine before her. I guess you could say it started at 6 months old, when she was given the label ‘failure to thrive’.

She wasn’t feeding properly, and child protection services put my mum on a watchlist that day. Yet again, rather than provide the support needed for my mother to be healthy enough to produce milk, they demonised her and decided that she was actively harming her children.

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My sister had been in the world for barely any time at all, and the prison industrial complex already had their claws in her.

She was a sweet kid growing up, and always said she wanted to be just like me. When my parents separated, she hadn’t even reached double digits. Things started to go downhill from there. Her school quickly recommended that she seek help through the child and adolescent mental health services, but they found that when pressed, my sister would say everything was fine.

She was considered so resistant to opening up that they said they could be of no help to her. She couldn’t be labelled mentally ill and locked in a hospital room, like I had been. Instead, my sister reached the deepest hole in the prison industrial complex, which my mum and I had narrowly escaped.

My sister was 14 the day she phoned me while actively on the run from the police. She had run away from home, in a different state from me, and had been told she had to return home. What she thought would be a simple act of defiance became her first arrest.

She would be arrested three more times, and on each release, they would place her in a troubled girls home. My sister would tell me about the homes, and how the ones in charge would be so disinterested in her care that she felt like leaving was better than feeling so unloved. Leaving was a breach of her bail conditions and, as though in a revolving door, she’d be back in again.

No-one ever stopped to think that maybe this young girl could do something else, if given another option or some support. None of us were given another option. We were given a system that would rather spend millions fashioning us the perfect cage to sing from, rather than an opportunity to spread our wings. …

Looking back, I see our lives filled with ‘ifs’: if child protective services had actually protected my mother… if I had been given adequate healthcare… if my sister had been shown kindness and care. But the prison industrial complex only allows for punishment and exile. If you don’t fit our mould, we will build you a cage and contain you. The systems that should have helped us are what led my family to where we ended up.

These days, after all that has happened, the three of us struggle to be in the same room. We are all hurt people, still trying to heal.

While we may not be there yet, I dream of the day when we can again share those giggles as we drive through the streets, windows down, singing together, top note, liberated from our cages.

Free.

Jace is a proud First Nations non-binary person living on Kaurna Yerta. They have a background in community work and advocacy, with a passion for shared lived experience. Follow Jace on Twitter: @JaceCReh

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A POEM BY JACE Calling through the Bars – Conversations with my Sister I can hear it through the phone The automated voice repeats, “You are receiving a call from…”

It’s the call I’ve been waiting for I’m rushing home from work but I stop Everything slows down as she starts to speak “I’m gonna get out before my birthday!” she exclaims For my 15th birthday, I got a phone For hers… she’ll get out Her voice is so different now It has a hesitancy I never expected I haven’t heard her since before she went in But I know it’s not the same She tells me what she’s been up to Friends she’s made, goals she’s achieved As if it’s an ordinary day She keeps things light Secrets she’ll save until we’re face to face She’s loving catching up Until the automated voice screams, “FIVE MINUTES REMAINING” Sadness swells, she’s got more to say She’s restricted, calling through the bars I tell her I love her and I’ll see her real soon.

THREE CAGED BIRDS SINGING

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COMMUNITY ON THE INSIDE S

For incarcerated LGBTQ+ people, community support can make a world of difference.

WORDS BY: STACEY STOKES

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“IF I CUT MY HAIR, GREW A

BEARD AND DIDN’T USE

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Hello, my name is Stacey Stokes. I’m a 39-year-old transgender woman. I enjoy creative writing, reading, and writing letters. I love nature and the great outdoors.

Also, I’m in jail.

My prison journey has been harsh, and it has led me to fight for changes. I think many incarcerated transgender people do the same. We either fight for basic human decency, or we are trampled by the system. …

My journey started with court, where my lawyer told the judge I was transgender. The judge had me assessed to make sure I wasn’t just pretending to be a guy who was pretending to be a girl. They ruled I wasn’t just pretending, to pretend.

They then suggested I stop pretending, since I was going to be sent to a manly man’s jail. If I cut my hair, grew a beard and didn’t use a girl’s name, I would be safer and not get harassed.

I was sent to a men’s protection jail. All transgender girls were sent to them back then, and all the rapists, too. I was refused hormone replacement medication for years and placed in a three-man cell with two convicted rapists. I was teased, bullied and assaulted. An ex-soldier stood up for me – I will always remember that. Sadly, when he was released, he was shot in the head, robbing a drug dealer I’m told. The sad reality of prison. I will miss him.

I applied for a name and gender change during this time but it was rejected – they said it could offend society or my victim. The distinction of me being a crossdresser or transgender is upsetting, it seems.

When they rejected it, no-one was upset… except me. Having these changes rejected forced me to be misgendered and deadnamed forever.

Corrections had their ‘reasons’ and excuses – it made sense to them somehow. But I was not going to be forced to live my life as a boy forever as yet another punishment for my crimes.

I was hysterical. I cried. I wanted to die. I prayed to die. I only got through it because of support from the LGBTQ+ community. …

Some things have changed since then, and continue to change, for the better. But changes have only come about because the LGBTQ+ community has forced these changes to happen by fighting and pushing back. I have been to the ombudsman, the human rights commission and court (under a pseudonym), and I know others have as well.

We often face resistance to these changes. Community legal centres and LGBTQ+ groups advocating on our behalf has been a massive help, as has the support fund for incarcerated people in jail and upon release.

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A GIRL’S NAME, I WOULD BE

Then Ben was moved to another jail. We really missed him when he left, but we still had each other. A short time later, an older gay man came back from that jail and told us Ben had died.

I ran to the officers and pleaded with them to tell me what happened. They told me that he had hung himself. I was shocked, I didn’t understand. A lot of rumours went around after that – apparently Ben felt isolated and alone.

It made me think back to my name and gender change rejection, when I was hysterically crying and wanted to die. I only got through that experience because I had community support. I only got through Ben’s death because I had community support as well.

He had no-one. I started to understand then.

The other people in prison would ask me if “that gay boy really necked himself”. The newspaper ran an article saying something like, “Local criminal commits suicide in prison”.

No-one really cared except for our community and his poor family. We cried and mourned.

This experience opened my eyes to the truth: society doesn’t care, but our community does.

It made me want to be a more active member of our community. I looked for issues and shortfalls I could fix or help with.

One of the issues I found was that no-one tells you your rights, or who can help you when you’re thrown in prison and those rights are violated. You’re in the dark, all alone and fed lies by bullies and people who are trying to cover their arses.

I was determined to fix this. I didn’t want others to go through the same traumatic journey I did, or end up feeling isolated and alone like Ben did. I got a job as a peer listener and started to hand out details for legal centres and community groups who could advocate on our behalf.

I talked to other LGBTQ+ people inside about their rights and whether they were being treated unfairly. Around this time, the corrections system started making changes. One of those changes was a transgender and gender-diverse forum to discuss the many ongoing issues we were having. I eventually became secretary of the forum, speaking for those too shy to speak up, and arguing with the bigwigs from Corrections and Justice Health.

I wanted to make sure any issues that people cared about were raised. I didn’t want anyone’s voice to be silenced because people thought what they had to say was stupid. It was a forum, and I was determined that everyone would be heard. …

COMMUNITY ON THE INSIDE

SAFER AND NOT GET HARASSED”

We are a community inside jail, too, isolated from society: a minority inside a minority. We rely on each other for support and belonging. I first realised this when I lost my friend Ben. We hung out together every day: me, Ben and my other LGBTQ+ friends. We talked, laughed and gossiped like it was high school. It really helped pass the time we were all doing and insulated us against all the bullying.

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I believe the forum was a big help, as it prompted changes and allowed us to voice our concerns. The changes were too slow for others though.

Another initiative was by the prison’s education provider. Wanting to be more inclusive, they asked me to be a guest speaker for Federation University, speaking about transgender issues in prison. They seemed interested and listened, and I appreciated that.

More recently, the prison I’m at asked me to participate in a future leaders program the local government was running. The topic was social justice, and I wrote a piece that was read out to the group. Afterwards, I sat with smaller groups and discussed the issues of being transgender in prison and what supports are needed in jail and upon release. It was nice to be seen and heard by people from the ‘outside’.

Eventually I had to give up my forum role and peer listener job as I was moved to another jail. After years at the same prison, being moved was scary. I arrived at this new jail feeling alone and isolated. It was really hard for me. But, again, the LGBTQ+ community rallied around me. Fellow prisoners who are bisexual and pansexual visited me and walked laps with me every day until I settled in. …

My parole is just months away, and after seven years of institutionalisation, I am terrified to go home.

Being transgender, I was laughed and pointed at before I went to jail. I guess I’m not pretty enough. Now I have a record, finding work will be harder than it was before – never mind the institutionalisation, being scared of people in uniforms, never thinking for myself, always being told what to do. Then there is the PTSD I picked up along the way: panic attacks, paranoia.

Society will send me on my merry way, but members of our community are helping me to reintegrate and prepare for this big move. Our community has organised to support me, to stand by me and hold my hand, and to help me be an active part of our wider community again.

We are diverse people with different interests and personalities, but when it matters, we support each other and help in whatever way we can. Even if it’s just in little ways, it all helps to show we are not alone.

I’ve realised that society has turned its back on us, but our community hasn’t. I’m proud to be a part of a community that makes me feel loved and supported. I appreciate everything everyone has done to support us. It has really made a difference.

Thank you.

Stacey Stokes

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“MY PRISON JOURNEY HAS BEEN HARSH, AND IT LED ME TO FIGHT FOR CHANGES. I THINK MANY INCARCERATED TRANSGENDER PEOPLE DO THE SAME. WE EITHER FIGHT FOR BASIC HUMAN DECENCY, OR WE ARE TRAMPLED BY THE SYSTEM”

COMMUNITY ON THE INSIDE

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An unjust system WORDS BY: NIC IMAGES BY: MIRI BADGER

*Names and details changed for privacy reasons

survivors was not a place I ever thought we’d be.

They say that the enemy of your enemy is your friend. So if my enemy is my ex-husband, and right now my ex-husband’s enemy is the criminal punishment system, does this mean that the system is my friend?

But there we were.

Is it even possible for me, as a Blak, non-binary survivor of sexual violence, coercive control and physical violence, to be friends with this colony’s legal system?

I want to talk to you about my experience. Some of what I say will make you feel uncomfortable. But these are yarns we have to have.

I want to talk to you about the struggle I have faced as an abolitionist. About the questions I have asked myself as my family has trundled through the criminal punishment system when the system tried to bring my ex to justice for the abuse he perpetrated against my child.

I want to talk to you about the time I found myself questioning how I, as a Blak abolitionist who wants to see prisons and police eliminated, could bear witness to my own baby’s abuse and not call for justice.

To find ourselves entangled with the criminal punishment system as victim

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How the hell did we end up there?

The answer is very simple.

Without the resources to prevent my ex from causing more harm (the same harm he caused us), and without his community holding him to account, he reoffended and harmed another family.

This was our worst nightmare. This compounded with grief, and shattering self-talk: This is your fault. If you’d just put your feelings about the system aside and called the cops, held him accountable through the courts, he wouldn’t have harmed more children and their families.

But I didn’t.

I still think about this. I still wonder whether calling the cops on him would have stopped the violence, or whether we would have just traded that violence for State violence – after all, the cops have a long history of violating Blak bodies, even when they call on them for help. …

Many years ago, when the other parent first contacted me, I gave her the strongest warnings I could. I told

For survivors of childhood sexual assault, the criminal punishment system can bring more trauma than justice.

her to not leave her children alone with him. I told her not to move in with him.

I told her that although he may seem like the best thing since sliced bread, that tidy white bread would go stale very fast.

Predictably, she became the long arm of his abuse towards me and the kids.

But some years later, she contacted me again to say, “You were right.”

I was taken aback, but mostly devastated that my warnings weren’t enough, and another child had been harmed.

So began our forced engagement with the child abuse squad, and eventually the criminal courts.

I say forced because they leave us with no other choice when someone is causing significant harm. When we exhaust all the ways we can think of within our power to stop someone causing further harm, the system wins. And when the system wins, everyone else loses.

We had no choice. They set the rules of engagement, and we became bound to them. …

There are very few programs in the community for those who sexually harm children but are not (yet) criminalised. This is an issue. Frankly, what person is going to admit to

these inclinations in a world that is driven by revenge, and hell-bent on punishment?

This kind of offending is awful. But we don’t make it safe for people with these issues to seek help. We have made them so scared to approach anyone for assistance, that they hide away until they offend. We’ve created a world where we wait for harm to happen, and rarely talk prevention.

I can’t speak for my daughter, who found the courage to lay charges against him. I can, however, speak from my place as her supporter, and how I have borne witness to the way she has been treated by the very people claiming to be seeking justice for her.

I can also speak as the parent of two young adults who are grappling with the knowledge of what their other parent has done.

From the beginning, my daughter has been treated like a second-class victim. She endured the worst of the abuse over the longest period, at the youngest age. It was her who was asked to reduce the charges she had laid against him.

The system can’t even keep up with itself. My daughter’s liaison officer became uncontactable. We had to chase up court-hearing results. We

AN UNJUST SYSTEM

found out more from the other family involved; because the other victims were still children, and their family is white, they were contacted much more often than my adult daughter.

When sentencing was approaching, we weren’t told what the ballpark sentence would be. And although in the end there was a mutual guilty plea, it came at the cost of my daughter’s truth, to make it more palatable for my ex, and less work for the prosecution.

Crucially, no-one – not one agent of the criminal punishment system – could guarantee me that he will come out of this a better person, or that he won’t ever harm another child.

And they sure as shit can’t tell my kid that she will get closure from this, because when you’re cornered, guilty doesn’t feel like a win. When your hands are tied, there are no winners between victim and perpetrator. The only winners are the bank accounts of the lawyers and judges. …

My children have battled with suicide attempts, self-harm, survivor guilt, depression, anxiety and nightmares.

They are left processing what it means for them to have a parent who is now convicted of such a harrowing thing.

They have to learn to live with the fear of people identifying them as his children, and he as their father.

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The way society creates turmoil for children in these circumstances is devastating. The way this experience permeates through my three children and myself is traumatic. The system heaps trauma upon trauma upon trauma. I want to wrap up all my babies and shield them from it all.

We know prison won’t heal my ex. We know it will cause more pain, and that this pain will reverberate through the whole family. This ordeal has already affected his parents, his siblings and the children we brought into this world together.

As an abolitionist, I have come to realise that justice is for the paid players, not the victims. There is a world of difference between knowing that truth, and experiencing it.

I wouldn’t wish this system on anyone.

Despite not finding justice in this unjust system, my hope remains that we can move towards a future that has programs, not prisons; strong communities, not police; and accountability, not punishment.

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“Not one agent of the criminal punishment system could guarantee me that he will come out of this a better person, or that he won’t ever harm another child. And they sure as shit can’t tell my kid that she will get closure from this”

AN UNJUST SYSTEM

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BEHIND THE

MASK WORDS BY: L IMAGES BY: MAXIMILIANO MAGNANO

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The ‘justice system’ traps people in a vicious cycle of incarceration, stigma, trauma and discrimination.

“When I dare to be powerful – to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” - Audre Lorde I thought this would be simple to write. Using my experiences to advocate and fight for change is my dream, after all. But it hasn’t been as simple as I thought. This is the first time I have recounted this experience in detail.

It was early in the morning, perhaps 2am, and I could hear the cops chatting and laughing with someone from another room.

I could only just see them. I was in a large, cold, empty room surrounded by perspex. I sat there trembling. I’m not sure if it was because I was cold or because of the emotions running through me.

Two people dressed in casual clothes entered the room and began speaking to me. I sat there, blank. I knew they were speaking to me, but I was unable to function. I couldn’t understand what they were saying.

They eventually left. Then two more people came in. This time it was crystal clear what they said: “You must be strip-searched.”

I shook my head. I still couldn’t function. I sat in the cold, bare room for over 10 hours. I wasn’t going to let strangers see my body. I was cold.

I was hungry. And I needed to go to the toilet so badly.

I wouldn’t give in. I wouldn’t give them the little dignity and self-worth that I had left. Different people kept coming and trying to speak to me, but they would all get the same reaction: nothing. One person left the room saying to the other, “Is there something wrong with her?”

This was the first time I was ‘locked up’. This was when my life changed and a whole new world opened up. It was also when I began to lose me.

BEHIND THE MASK

I distinctly remember looking at myself in the mirror, and it was as if I was looking at a stranger’s reflection. But when I moved my leg, the person in the reflection would move as well.

Turns out, it was me. But I didn’t feel like me. It didn’t feel real. …

I went to court around a week later and was released on bail. I thought getting out and going home was the end of my troubles. Little did I know, I would be back a few days later, and it would be the beginning of a seven-year cycle through the youth and adult criminal justice system. A seven-year cycle that started because I had ‘trespassed’ in a 24/7 fast food chain. A seven-year cycle of punishment that I didn’t want to be in, but didn’t know how to get out of.

Of course, I didn’t know this yet – each time I got out, I genuinely thought it would be the last.

I hated being in prison and being away from home. But each time I was released, I would find myself back. Did I enjoy being there more than the outside? Surely not. I loved my family.

I mourned them. I needed to be home. I wanted to be home. But once again, I would get out, and I would be arrested. I was trapped on this treadmill of arrest-prison-release-arrest-prisonrelease. It felt never-ending.

I grew angrier and angrier. Just a few months before my first arrest, I was a high-school student, a good daughter, a caring sibling and a loyal friend. I had potential and a future. Then, suddenly, I didn’t know who or what I was. I had lost my identity.

Yes, I was still a daughter, sibling and friend. But I no longer felt as though I was good, caring or loyal, or as though I had any potential or even a decent future ahead of me.

I was now a ‘criminal’. I despised the person that I had become, and I believed it was all that I was.

It consumed me.

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Reflecting on this time in my life, it’s difficult to pinpoint exactly what it was that broke the sense of identity I’d always had – but I guess that’s because it wasn’t just one thing. It’s was like death by a thousand cuts. I was so young and confused. I felt completely out of control – because I was.

Every aspect of my life was managed. Every option had been removed. I couldn’t speak with my family without someone sitting next to me, listening to my call. (How could I be honest about anything that I was feeling?) Every room was equipped with camera surveillance. (I still scan rooms today expecting to find cameras.)

After my incarceration, I would walk through the city, and cops would approach me to let me know they were watching me on camera, and they would then follow me for some time.

Sometimes I would look at the cameras and see them following my movements. I’ve tried to write about some of my experiences with cops, but I suppose they’re still too raw to tell, and I’m just not ready to share them yet.

The experience of being incarcerated – the loss, the grief, the regrets, the trauma, the feelings of isolation and exclusion, the stigma and the discrimination – all stay with you. I have ongoing anxiety, which is exacerbated by a wide variety of scenarios including the city, confrontations, and, most randomly, the sound of radios.

It is hard to trust people and it is hard to let people in.

“Every aspect of my life was managed.

Every option had been removed. I couldn’t even speak with my family without someone sitting next to me, listening to my call”

Over the seven years, I grew angrier and recognised myself less. I felt like I was sinking into a deep abyss. My reality had shifted. It’s hard to describe, but I felt I no longer knew all that I had once held true.

Once-familiar emotions felt so different.

I subconsciously built strong, high walls around myself, which shielded me from harm. The walls I built and the mask I would wear became both my saviour and my enemy. They guarded me and concealed my weakness and vulnerability from the rest of the world, so these things could no longer be used against me.

But the walls blocked the light that was left. The darkness grew and my anger took control. I couldn’t manage it. It was far too potent. So the walls got higher, and the mask got thicker, and they became more difficult to remove. I sunk further into the abyss.

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The final time I was released from custody was during the most challenging period of my life thus far. Funnily enough, this was the first time that I had been released without saying that I would not be back. I could feel that something was different, but I still didn’t feel free. I felt lost and alone. I thought maybe when I finished parole, I would feel free, but this didn’t happen.

I am afraid. I am afraid of feeling anger, and of the anger consuming me. I am afraid that I will be locked up or punished for feeling it. I am afraid that I will be recognised by the police, and they will harass me. I’m afraid of my reactions to them, and of what others will think.

This fear was validated just recently when I went out for drinks after work and was stopped by a cop that recognised me and asked what I was doing in the city. Years have passed, and I have worked hard to be out of the cycle and contributing to the community. I have multiple degrees and I now work at a not-for-profit organisation, using my lived experience to contribute to change – yet I still can’t go for a drink after work without being stopped and profiled by the police.

There are many things I am unable to do, or that I’m overlooked for, because of my ‘criminal history’. …

I have slowly crept out of the darkness and knocked down many of the walls. It took me a long time to build the awareness and skills to remove my many masks and tear

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“Just a few months before my first arrest, I was a highschool student, a good daughter, a caring sibling and a loyal friend. I had potential and a future. Then, suddenly, I didn’t know who or what I was. I had lost my identity.

“I was still a daughter, sibling and friend. But I no longer felt as though I was good, caring or loyal, or as though I had any potential or even a decent future ahead of me”

down the walls I had built, and it was not an easy task. I had been wearing this armour for a very long time, and I believed it was a part of me, and that it had kept me safe. Removing it made me feel as if I had lost a piece of myself.

I had to rebuild myself. I have begun to reclaim my identity and value.

I wouldn’t say that I’m all the way there yet. I have had many labels and experiences; I am all of them and I am none of them. I am a person with experiences of being incarcerated, among many other experiences, values, beliefs and skills. Some I am proud of. Some I am not. I have achievements and I have regrets.

I am me.

I’ve developed a strong passion to use my experiences to help reduce the stigma experienced by people who have been incarcerated. It’s also deeply important to me that I speak about the injustices of the ‘justice’ system and the unfair challenges people face when they return to the community.

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For me, the most important aspect of this is the use of language. Personcentred language is critical for reducing the stigma that surrounds people who have a criminal record or have been incarcerated.

We must refrain from using language that perpetuates stigma and dehumanises people. Language cannot and should not define a person, or their worth.

I have used my experiences to advocate for people with lived experience to be involved in the design, delivery and evaluation of services and policies, as they are the experts. I have also highlighted the need for alternative approaches in the youth ‘criminal justice’ system, and challenged people’s negative beliefs and assumptions.

As people with lived experience, we are in a unique position to drive meaningful change.

“You cannot use someone else’s fire.

You can only use your own. And in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe that you have it.”

- Audre Lorde

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TRANS

LIBERATION AND

COMMUNITY CARE Interview with KATIE

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Interview by WITT GORRIE Images by JOEY GEORGE

*Names have been changed to protect identity From activists Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson in New York, to Phillis McGuiness and Vicki Harris in Sydney, we as a community have a long history of fighting back against the carceral State while also caring for each other.

After all, we have had to.

This is the legacy that Beyond Bricks & Bars: Trans and Gender Diverse Decarceration Project and the Incarcerated Trans and Gender Diverse (ITGD) Community Fund are built on.

Beyond Bricks & Bars (BBB) is a specialist transled support project that provides social work and advocacy assistance to trans and gender-diverse people inside prisons, and those returning home to their community based in Victoria. The project aims to prevent trans and gender-diverse people from going into or returning to prison, while keeping our community still inside alive.

The ITGD Community Fund is an Australia-wide mutual-aid fund that provides direct financial and material assistance to trans and genderdiverse people currently incarcerated and recently released from prison.

The following is a conversation between Katie*, a trans woman who survived seven years inside a men’s prison in so-called Australia, and who is supported by BBB, and Witt Gorrie, a trans, non-binary abolitionist social worker who works in BBB and as a committee member of the ITGD Community Fund.

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W. So where to begin... I think we met about four years ago?

K. Five years actually! I had to count [laughs].

W. Omg wow, that’s right! Okay that brings us to the first question: how did you get connected to BBB? K. Well! I was in men’s prison at the time and I had been for a few years. I was having a really, really hard time, I was in a very dark place. There was no support whatsoever. I kept asking and asking for support, but nothing ever changed. Then finally someone got a message through to an organisation that you happened to be working at then.

One day I got called up and told I had an appointment with someone whose name was Witt. So we sat down together and starting talking. That was the start of me getting better. It opened up a plethora of support that just would not have been available if you didn’t put up your hand, because it honestly seemed like no-one else wanted to.

W. And that was five years ago! I am so grateful that we met. For me that was literally the day this project started, with you and that first conversation. I met so many other trans people inside, particularly trans women, through you and those connections.

K. And I might add that you volunteered your time and did it on a voluntary basis for many years.

W. Yep and it was absolutely worth it! So you mentioned that before getting linked into BBB there was no support. Can you tell me what it looked like in practice to get that support?

K. It was like being thrown a lifeline because there are no lifelines in prison.

Because if you ask to see someone you might see a prison health worker who does their tick and flicks to make sure you’re not going to hurt yourself or someone else. That’s all the support there is.

But after connecting with BBB I was able to achieve gender-affirming treatment, counselling, support – someone else to talk to who understood what my situation was. Even personally, which still continues to this day, and I’m out now.

It was my lifeline to keep going and I don’t say that lightly, it really was.

W. Do you think it was important for that support to come from another trans person?

K. Incredibly important because you have someone who understands the struggles of being trans, understands the challenges – but also someone who had experience dealing with the prison system beforehand, understood the complexities of how hard it is to get anything done when you’re incarcerated.

Having support from other trans people makes you feel comfortable. You don’t feel judged, you don’t feel oppressed like you do by this entity that is supposed to be looking after you but is actually just trying to keep you locked up.

It’s a safe space to just talk about what’s going on for you. Whether that’s your gender dysphoria or what you had for lunch, it’s someone to share that with who is like-minded, who is going to understand your experience.

W. Over the time I have known you, I have witnessed you do an amazing amount of self-advocacy. Alongside other trans people, in particular women, inside, you have created so much change in the prison system. What are

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some of the biggest issues you have seen, and you and other trans people have experienced?

K. There’s a lot and there still is, but I think for me, the biggest challenge was accessing gender-affirming healthcare. That is, and was, for me the hardest challenge. But also the violence, the sexual assaults, the harassment, the stigma, the deadnaming, the misgendering, and just general transphobic bullshit from staff and other people inside. Different prisons also come with their own risks and challenges.

I guess some of the advocacy that was done, not just by me, was fighting to change the Commissioner’s Requirements for the treatment of trans people, which is the main policy that oversees our placement inside. It hadn’t been updated in 16 years. It was called the “Management of Prisoners with Intersex Conditions or Transsexualism” at the time, so you can tell how outdated that was. Under this policy, you couldn’t access doctors, hormones, female underwear or makeup, and there were no safety regulations about sharing cells or placement decisions... So yeah, got that changed.

W. Yeah you did!

K. So in 2017, after a lot of advocacy, the Commissioner’s Requirements and the Justice Health policy changed to allow access to gender-affirming health care, makeup and underwear, and they also finally allowed trans people to have a single cell so we didn’t have to share with someone else, which is still a ‘grey rule’ because in my experience it still isn’t followed half the time. They generally just place you where they want to. Policy and practice are often two different things in prisons, so there is still a lot of fighting to do.

W. You fought so hard for those changes and there was often a lot of risk to you personally.

K. Yeah heaps, the system can always make it harder for you especially if you rock the boat.

W. I can remember the day you finally got access to hormone replacement therapy very clearly. For you that was a huge fight with the prison system for many years. What was that moment like?

K. There were so many false starts along the way, when I thought it was happening and then there would be another roadblock or hurdle. So, when it finally happened, I didn’t believe it until I had the pills in my hand. When I did, I was basically cartwheeling back to my unit. It was the best day. It was the first day of spring, the sun was shining, I will never forget it. It was incredibly special. I went back and I showed my partner. Then I went to the phone and called my mum, and I took my first dose of hormone blocker and oestrogen on the phone with her. I immediately got Mum to text you to tell you what had just happened. I was actually seeing you a few days later and I wanted to wait to take them with you, but I couldn’t wait any longer, I had to take them immediately.

W. Of course! I am so glad you didn’t wait any longer after all those years, omg!

K. The weight that lifted off my shoulders in that moment – I hadn’t realised how heavy it was until it lifted. Everything from that day forward improved like a hundred-fold: my mental health, my happiness, just everything. It was incredible. It changed my life.

W. We have had a lot of chats over the years about the ways trans and genderdiverse people get pipelined into the prison system, and the conditions that create that. What part can access to gender-affirming care and support play in preventing our community from becoming criminalised?

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“I am so glad I made the decision to live my authentic, true self. Being in such a binary environment – probably the most binary environment in the world, literally – really helped to reaffirm who I was”

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K. The trans community are already a marginalised community. When you’re a trans person who is criminalised, you are minority in a minority. It’s already hard enough to get employment as a trans person without people judging you or having to deal with transphobic views.

So if you’re already disadvantaged in life, you can’t get a job and you’re isolated and being treated like shit, it’s easy to start using drugs to selfmedicate or steal to survive or end up doing work that is heavily persecuted by police, like sex work. Unfortunately, we end up in prison a lot of the time because of the way we are treated by society.

Having access to support and care that was gender-affirming would have a huge effect. I can draw from my own experience because I know it so well.

If I had support and access to it early on, it would have changed my whole outlook. You’re your own worst enemy, especially when you’re trying to repress who you are or trying to hide it, and just feeling absolutely miserable in your own skin because you know you are not the person you’re looking at in the mirror. Having access to gender-affirming care is literally life-changing. It’s not just gender-affirming, it’s life-affirming.

If people are happy with themselves, they are less likely to do destructive things to themselves or to others.

I think giving people opportunities will only see them benefit from it. You wouldn’t withhold life-saving medication for any other condition, why would you withhold gender-affirming care from someone who has gender dysphoria and is suffering?

W. Yes absolutely!

You also spent your whole time in prison inside the men’s system. You came out in that system. What was coming out in that environment like for you?

K. Incredibly scary! It was incredibly un-affirming at the start because you’re not believed by the prison, or people don’t understand – you’re judged. I had to make a decision: it was either come out or kill myself. They were my two options; they were the two options on the table and each one looked as good as the other. So, I had to make a choice.

I am so glad I made the decision to live my authentic, true self. Being in such a binary environment – probably the most binary environment in the world, literally – really helped to reaffirm who I was. Being a woman in a men’s prison, I knew clearly I wasn’t one of them. I am not a man; I never was and I never will be. And I thought, I’ll be damned if I spend the next seven years of my life sitting in a men’s prison pretending to be someone I’m not.

I knew the risks. Well, I thought I knew the risks. I suppose I thought in the back of my mind I can just kill myself. So I just took the leap, and I did it, and I never looked back. Best decision I ever made – as fucked up as that sounds.

W. God I am so glad you made that decision, as hard as it has been. I am so glad you are here. The amount of fucking courage it took to do that, because you’re absolutely right, there isn’t a more binary institution.

K. There isn’t! And you know what gets me is Corrections segregates “men” and “women”, but then they twist those rules when it comes to trans people, and they place trans women in protective custody because they claim it is safer, but it is actually much more unsafe.

Protective custody usually consists of people who have particularly violent charges, especially in the men’s system where there are a lot of guys who have been known to be violent towards women. The detrimental effects of

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placing trans women in men’s prisons increases the daily risk of rape, sexual assault and violence. It just doesn’t make sense in terms of safety at all, but it somehow makes sense to Corrections.

W. It seems there is a complete double standard when it comes to risk and safety for trans women when it comes to placement. It’s an acceptable risk to place women in the men’s system where there is a very real risk of harm, but trans women are rarely allowed to go to the women’s prison. If trans women are allowed, it is usually straight into solitary confinement where suddenly risk is considered only in the context of trans women being a presumed threat to cis women. So, it makes total sense in the context of transmisogyny right?

K. Yes exactly!

W. As you are someone who has accessed support from the Incarcerated Trans and Gender Diverse (ITGD) Community Fund, I wanted to know your thoughts on the fund and why you think it is necessary for our community inside and coming out.

K. I see the ITGD fund as an absolute lifeline of community generosity for trans people inside. It has overwhelmed me beyond belief, it still overwhelms me, to know how many people care enough to donate their money to trans and gender-diverse people affected by incarceration.

It has helped me like you couldn’t believe. It gave me a kickstart, it gave me a leg up when I got out and had nothing. I will be forever thankful for the support being able to access the fund has meant for me and for other people I know who have accessed that fund. Sometimes for those who are inside, it’s the difference between being able to access your underwear, because while the prison rules say you have access to them, you have to be able to fund it. Or the fund helps you just buy things to get you by, whether that’s your favourite chocolate, or makeup to help manage gender dysphoria or make you feel better about yourself. It helps people access rental accommodation or a fridge, or gender-affirming treatment when they get out. Just basic resources, things that you can’t access unless we have this fund. The community support with this fund has been unbelievable, it still blows my mind how generous everyone has been and continues to be.

W. Our community is beautiful.

K. I looked on the page the other day and someone had donated $1000 anonymously. It’s incredible!

W. Yes, there are so many people that really fucking care and you and all our community inside and coming out deserve that support. As much as I have had to convince you of this.

K. Hmm. I am learning [laughs].

W. Yes we have had many talks! In thinking about community, can you tell me what it means to you?

K. Community is acceptance. Community is allies. Belonging. Being able to connect with your community, access support – it is everything. To be able to draw on each other as community to support each other, for resources, for help – it is life-changing. It is the reason why we are sitting here talking today.

Community is us. Everyone who is going to read this, is community. You and me are community. We are the ones as community who have made change in the past and we are the ones who can make change in the future. Hopefully anyone reading this is inspired to make change by continuing to build our community by supporting each other. Because everyone is capable of doing good in the world, but we all need help sometimes. We have to back each other.

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W. That was so beautifully said Katie.

Okay, I’ve got a big question to end on. If you could imagine a world where prison and police didn’t exist, what would that world look like?

K. A lot fucking happier [laughs].

I dream of the day when communities sort out their own problems together.

When we don’t need people sitting in offices somewhere making decisions about how other people should be treated when they have no idea what it is like to be those other people, nor if they were in that position would they want that to happen to them.

I think a world without prisons would be a safer world and a happier world.

The amount of the money that is spent on corrections, prisons and policing is just wild.

If you have people in poverty who can’t access good healthcare, who are doing it tough, who are addicted to substances or are impacted by trauma, you have to address the actual issues, not just punish them when they do something wrong. You can’t expect those issues to be addressed when you remove someone from society for extended periods of time, traumatise them and then expect someone to be in a better space than before… it doesn’t make sense.

You have to fix problems from the root cause.

The Beyond Bricks & Bars: Trans and Gender Diverse Decarceration Project is sustained by community donations and can only continue to provide trans-led support to trans and gender-diverse people in prison, at risk of incarceration, and returning to their communities from prison with your assistance. To support this crucial life-affirming and lifesaving work, you can donate via this QR code.

Witt Gorrie (he/they) is a white trans social worker and Dad based in Naarm.

They have worked for over a decade supporting communities impacted by criminalisation. Witt began developing Beyond Bricks & Bars: Trans and Gender Diverse Decarceration Project five years ago alongside trans and gender diverse people incarcerated in Victorian prisons. They are also a committed member of the Incarcerated Trans and Gender Diverse Community Fund, a mutual aid project that provides financial and material aid to community inside and out.

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LOCKDOWN

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Photography DREAD SCOTT

Lockdown is a photography and interview project developed between 2000 and 2004 by visual artist Dread Scott.

The project tells the story of a society that at the time the work was made imprisoned over 2 million people, from the viewpoint of those locked down. Dread Scott worked with inmates in the USA, photographing them and recording their stories.

The project was originally presented as a series of 20″ x 24″ black and white photographs, accompanied by audio edited from the interviews.

Dread Scott is a visual artist with works exhibited across the US and internationally. In 1989, his art became the centre of national controversy in the United States over its transgressive use of the American flag, while he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

President G.H.W. Bush called his art “disgraceful” and the entire US Senate denounced and outlawed this work.

Dread became part of a landmark Supreme Court case when he and others defied the federal law outlawing his art by burning flags on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. He has presented a TED talk on this.

His work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, the Walker Art Center, Cristin Tierney Gallery, and Gallery MOMO in Cape Town, South Africa, and is in the collections of the Whitney Museum and the Brooklyn Museum. He is a 2021 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow and has also received fellowships from Open Society Foundations and United States Artists as well as a Creative Capital grant.

In 2019 he presented Slave Rebellion Reenactment, a community-engaged project that reenacted the largest rebellion of enslaved people in US history. The project was featured in Vanity Fair, The New York Times, and was highlighted by artnet.com as one of the most important artworks of the decade.

Dread Scott and Michael Welch wish to extend our thanks to the prisoners, ex-cons,and youth who were photographed and interviewed as part of this project. Without their participation this project would not be possible. Additionally we would like to thank Connie Jullian, Red, Michelle Cheikin, Anna Deavere Smith and the Institute on the Arts & Civic Dialogue, Andre J. Norman, Mark Scott, the Blue Mountain Group, David Thorne and Mikhaela Blake Reid for their contribution to this work.

‘Lockdown’ is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts and is a project of Creative Capital with additional funding provided in part by the Institute on the Arts & Civic Dialogue through a major grant by the Ford Foundation; The Puffin Foundation and other generous contributors.

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“I spent five and a half years putting all my feelings to the side. I couldn’t cry in prison. There’s not too much laughing in prison. You spend five and a half years being tough and maintaining what we call your ‘square’; so that nobody sees any sign of weakness in you. That does damage to people. So when I got home, the littlest things would make me cry because finally I could release those emotions”

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“How come when we die in here, nobody gives a fuck? I think it’s because we’re the invisible people. We’re throwaways. We’re used. The politics of prison is so beautiful in how much money they can generate for politicians; how many votes they can generate for politicians”

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“[That’s] the name of this institution: ‘Correctional Facility’, and they’re not correcting nothing… it’s a system that wants to perpetuate failure. I’ll keep you in a certain position; I’ll keep me a job. It’s a vicious cycle of ‘keep him illiterate, and I’ll stay in luxury’. This is what it boils down to: a have and have-not system, and basically, right now, we’re like cattle; they’ve got us on the stock market. The cell that I sit in right now is auctioned on Wall Street. And I’m well aware of this”

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The treatment of women by modern-day prison systems echoes the witch hunts of the past.

MODERN WITCH-HUNTS IN THE COLONY

WORDS BY: TINA IMAGES BY: CLAUDIA FISCHER

“The witch was a woman of ill repute” - Silvia Federici, 2018 I was first introduced to Silvia Federici’s Marxist feminist writings in 2020 by a university professor.

I wore an ankle shackle at the time, part of an arsenal of carceral violence the State inflicts on modern-day witches who break colonial law. As it turns out, the shackle was the least of my problems, but I’ll get to that later.

Back to Federici: as I read her book, I couldn’t help but see connections between the witch-hunts of a feudal past and the mass criminalisation and supervision of women in this land-now-called Australia.

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“I wore an ankle shackle at the time, part of an arsenal of carceral violence the State inflicts on modern-day witches who break colonial law”

The Hunt It took a while for the detective to arrest me. He toyed with me like a cat would a mouse before he pounced, timing the arrest with the departure of my lawyer on a jet plane.

During the hunt, he tried to turn the townsfolk against me – tormenting my friends at their places of business, raiding my parents’ retirement village, and threatening my cousin with “harbouring a criminal”, which was a ridiculous notion given I’d offered myself up for the taking many times, but he’d rejected each one.

When he finally got me, in the middle of a gym class, he made sure it was as dramatic as possible. Pitchforks were replaced by holstered guns, and six detectives stormed the aerobics room. I was video recorded and paraded through the gym like a prize, past members who had stopped their workout to watch this witch being dragged out of the facility in a ‘We got her!’ moment.

The Trial My court appearances had by now become media fodder, and public commentary on me ranged from sexist observations about my body to wild assump-tions about my personal world. Handcuffed and guided by armed guards, we witches were unloaded last from the prison van. As the men went to the right to be locked

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in their cages, we turned left into damp, dimly lit underground tunnels.

Witch by witch, we were escorted past the heckling men and up to face the old white guy who would seal our fate.

As I entered the court, I glanced at the public gallery where the townsfolk had gathered to witness my burning.

I, the accused, flanked by the sheriff, felt like a character in a voyeuristic carceral pantomime.

As the prosecutor made his final submissions as to what should happen to me, he delighted in weaving the facts together with mockery and humiliation. He said that by the time I was released from prison, I would be too old to make a success of myself.

Witches are misogynistically characterised as “poor old [women], living alone, dependent on donations from her neighbors, bitterly resenting her marginalization, and often threatening and cursing those who refused to help her”, according to Federici.

Women, Federici believes, were the primary targets of witch-hunts because they were the ones who were most economically disadvantaged by capitalism, and who rebelled against their impoverishment and social exclusion.

There is also the “diabolical” witch archetype commonly portrayed in Halloween imagery: overwhelmingly gendered as female; a criminalised,

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morally irredeemable, dark ‘other’; a seductress; and a danger to children.

Depending on which newspaper article you read, or prosecutor you listened to, I was cast somewhere between the two.

The old, wigged man in the robe glared at me from his lofty height, and with vitriol sent me to prison for 10 years. This witch would be handed a punishment much harsher than that of men who had stolen similar amounts of money.

As the media reported on the recordbreaking sentence, the accompanying photograph on every front page was a picture of me lying naked among strategically placed leaves.

This slutty witch will rot in prison.

In addition to the sexualised content, the leading narrative from male journalists was that I was a master trickster, capable of fooling even the most discerning person. According to Federici, capitalism frames women’s sexuality as a “social danger, a threat to the discipline of work, a power over others, and an obstacle to the maintenance of social hierarchies and class relations”.

My choices to be single and childless and sexual were framed as indicators of criminality and as a threat to puritan values. Patriarchal notions of gender and behaviour positioned me as a servant of Satan, in stark contrast to the handmaidens of the Lord.

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“When he finally got me, in the middle of a gym class, he made sure it was as dramatic as possible. Pitchforks were replaced by holstered guns, and six detectives stormed the aerobics room and placed me under arrest. I was video recorded and paraded through the gym like a prize”

The Prison It wasn’t until I entered the prison that I understood the politics of incarceration and the State’s control over women’s bodies and minds.

Since invasion, the colonial State’s project of ‘correcting’ criminalised women has relied on puritan and patriarchal values to determine how women should behave.

The prison I was in did everything in its power to constrain women’s sexuality. They dressed us in oversized men’s tracksuits and banned singlets outside of cells, just in case our male counterparts playing topless basketball on the other side of the fence were “distracted” by our bare shoulders.

The prison refused to recognise non-binary identities, and forbade queer relationships. On top of this, the people that staffed the system were relentless in their message that “you women” were somehow worse than the caged men.

Women were forced to labour in the prison sweatshop, sewing canvas gowns that their sisters who resisted subordination or were driven to a mental health crisis were forced to wear. Our recreation options centred around knitting, crafts, cooking, and colouring in, and our education was confined to basic literacy and numeracy.

Guards would patrol the units at night, peering at us through doorways or

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windows, and shining torches in our faces every two hours. We were routinely strip-searched: forced to get naked, remove tampons, squat, and cough. There’s nothing quite like statesanctioned sexual assault to suppress sexuality and quell resistance.

If you were unlucky enough to give birth while incarcerated, you were escorted to the hospital by guards, shackled to a gurney for the birth (because who knows what kind of witchcraft a woman can perform during labour?), and returned to the prison 24 hours later, without your newborn.

Prisons are the handmaidens for the punishing State. These central tenets of patriarchal violence are recognisable in Federici’s description of the female archetype to which women had to conform in order to be socially acceptable in capitalist society.

She must be “sexless, obedient, submissive, resigned to subordination to the male world, accepting as natural the confinement to a sphere of activities that in capitalism has been completely devalued”.

These are the exact beliefs that underpin the gendered violence prisons claim to be addressing.

Simultaneously, the Church had successfully framed women’s sexuality as the devil’s work; “the more pleasant to the eye, the more deadly to the soul”, Federici notes.

The Church is omnipresent in prison.

Prisons and parole systems are big fans of religious doctrine and faith-

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based redemption scripts. They offer incentives for religious engagement that are peddled as being important for release. To indoctrinate women, various denominations would tempt us with a rare haircut, special food items, Christmas events, and presents for our children.

Access to women’s children was far from charitable, however, with one group using those opportunities to demonise mothers and permanently sever their parental bond.

The work of the Church to reform or condemn women didn’t end at the prison gate. In fact, the only way some of us witches were getting out of there was by pretending to be ‘saved’ and then subjecting ourselves to months of religious practice in order to remain free.

The Conditional Release As a woman who resisted puritan and patriarchal ideology throughout my incarceration, I knew I would be joining my fellow witches down at the Swamp of the Condemned.

Before being approved for release, I had to face the parole board. The senior women blamed me for my “poor choices” regarding the men who abused me, and also in reference to an eating disorder that I had developed in response to being raped.

They said that women like me were “crazy”, as one of them tapped her temple for effect.

These very same women then mandated that I undergo unlimited forensic psychiatry with a man who had a reputation for being inappropriate and problematic. He would decide when I was “cured”, and he could also decide if my parole was revoked. Our sessions were in a locked facility, in his isolated office, where he would engage in commentary and questions about my sex life, my breasts, and my sexual fantasies.

This State-sanctioned sexual abuse was undoubtedly designed as a lastditch effort to force conformity.

In her feminist reflection on the framing of women as witches, scholar Maggie Rosen observes that for women to avoid scrutiny (i.e. being called a witch) she must remain feminine. Above all, our society strives to maintain gender order. When a woman enters a space that historically has only welcomed men, using a feminine apologetic allows her to be valued for abiding by the gender binary. Women in similar positions of public power, who push back against conformity, will face greater challenges.

Women are still on trial. Incarcerated women are not only collectivised as witches – the puritans and the patriarchy also attempt to separate us into the conformed and the condemned.

The condemned become the witches who are still oppressed, silenced and eliminated. Yet when we allow ourselves to embrace our inner witch, we can broaden our circle of solidarity among those of us who are still oppressed and sharpen our defiance towards our oppressors.

MODERN WITCH-HUNTS IN THE COLONY

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The move from prison to detention is a nightmare faced by too many.

A LIFELINE IN DETENTION WORDS BY: SHIVANI

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I am Shivani. I’m 30 years old, originally from North India, born and raised in a Hindu (Brahmin) family.

I am the second child of my parents. I have an older sister and a younger brother.

When I was born, my sex assigned at birth was male. Fine, let the doctor have his moment. But I didn’t choose to stay in a box of man and woman.

My dad is a businessman and my mum is homemaker.

My dad holds a very big reputation in my hometown. My mum told me that when I was born there was a huge celebration and happiness in the family because I was a boy, and my grandparents wanted a boy after my sister.

I was very feminine from childhood. Today, when I see photos of myself, my shyness, my feminine pose and my way of standing tells me who I was, and who I am.

When I was growing up, I was abused many times by my relatives because of my femininity. I never raised my voice, thinking it was okay to get abused, or that this was normal. I was shy and scared to tell my siblings or parents. I thought if I did, they might scold me or beat me, or accuse me of being too feminine.

I come from a small village and back then people were not educated about homosexuality. I faced so much bullying at school, in my neighbourhood and from my relatives.

I used to sit alone and cry, and I was scared of people.

Growing up I chose to wear my mum’s clothes and put on her makeup discreetly. As a child, when I was home alone, I remember taking out my mum’s most beautiful looking saree and draping it over my body, putting on her makeup and using a black shawl as my hair. I would act like a teacher and teach my toys.

My childhood was beautiful, yet it had many sad moments and memories. I love my mum and dad, and my brother and sister. I am very much attached to them and can’t think of living my life without them.

I realised from a very young age, around 11 or 12, that I was into men. I was not good at studies due to bullying and abuse, and I hated going to school. But I studied hard and eventually moved to New Delhi where I graduated in hospitality. I got my visa to come to Australia in 2014.

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“On the day of my release, I was so happy.

I thought I would go out and start my life afresh. But I found out that my visa was cancelled, and I couldn’t be released into the community. I ended up in detention”

I did an internship at a hotel in Perth before moving to Sydney.

In Sydney I completed my diploma in business management and leadership. While I was studying, I searched for gay pubs and meetups on social media to interact with people with a similar mindset. I made a few friends and I used to go out with them on weekends. I started cross-dressing and going to clubs on weekends for my own happiness.

I was also using Facebook to chat to men. I would never tell any of these men that I was not a female. I enjoyed the conversation and attention – it used to make me so happy and I would blush every time. I felt like these men liked me and spoke well of me, and I gave them happiness by talking to them, sharing my daily life, and listening to their stories about their day-to-day life.

Sometimes I would fall in love with them. I was 21 years old, I loved fashion and makeup, and the men I talked to would give me money to buy fancy clothes and makeup. I never realised this could impact so badly on my life. …

In 2017 I got talking to an Indian guy who liked me. He had no idea I was not female. We talked day and night, and he gave me money for my personal expenses.

After two months, he found out I was not a female. He got so upset and angry that he started threatening my life. He asked his for his money back, which I had already spent. I had nothing to return to him.

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I was so sad and scared of the threats that I chose to go back to India, because I could never live peacefully with the amount of threats I was getting. I thought I should go to India and once I am back he would forget this and life would be back to normal.

When I got to India, he found out where I was, and came with guns and around 10 to 15 people to my home at night to attack me and my family. My family was scared and shocked. My family asked who he was, and I had to tell them the truth.

My dad managed to control the situation with the help of local police and some politicians. They eventually left my home town but things didn’t stop there. My dad received daily threat calls, and so did my mum. The guy got my family contacts from the SIM card I was using in Australia and started calling people and telling the whole story from his side.

No-one wanted to listen my side of the story. I felt so helpless. I lost respect in my family. My mum cried all the time and my dad stopped talking to me. People in my home town started talking and spreading rumours about me and my family, which hit me so bad because, coming from a conservative background and a small town, it’s a big thing for my family to face.

I was so sad that I had let down my parents and family, and the name of my family in my home town. I chose to come back and start my life again in Melbourne. …

One morning, while I was living in Melbourne, two detectives arrived

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at my door. The same guy had put in a police complaint against me, and the officers arrested me and took me to Sydney.

In Sydney, I experienced a lot of trauma. I had never faced police in my life, and I had no clue how to handle the situation. I was so helpless. I couldn’t contact anyone because my phone was with the police.

They charged me for counts of “money obtained by deception” and I was sent to jail. I had no idea I could be put in jail for doing something that made me feel so good and happy. I lived in absolute hell for three months. I used to cry every day in my tiny cell. I was touched badly, abused many times, and threatened if I open my mouth.

Writing this is so sad, I can’t explain.

My hands are shivering.

After three months I had my bail approved by the Supreme Court because there was not enough evidence against me. There were many bail conditions which I followed truthfully and sincerely. My case was in the court for eight to ten months before I was sentenced.

I got sent to jail again for three months, where I lost myself completely. The trauma continued, I used to get hit by other people, abused physically and mentally, and there was no privacy for showering or using the toilet. I felt helpless every single minute inside. …

On the day of my release, I was so happy. I thought I would go out and

start my life afresh. But I found out that my visa was cancelled, and I couldn’t be released into the community.

first thing the next morning. She told me she would book a visit to meet me and discuss the matter further.

I ended up in detention. I was moved from one jail to another. The same things happened to me. I got judged every second. I met other detainees, but I was too scared to talk to them.

I faced many threats in detention. People tried to touch me inappropriately, and called me different names. I used to get kicked and slapped by other detainees, and the officers would never listen to me or hear any problems I told them.

These words from her mouth gave me some sort of hope that I might get freedom. When Alison came to visit me, I shared everything in detail.

She and her team worked on my case for many months, and gave me my freedom in 2019. …

I had no clue what was going to happen next. I received a letter saying I had 28 days to decide what to do next or I would be sent back to India.

I thought about my family who were all very upset with me, and the guy that had threatened to kill me or harm my family.

There were a few other Indians with whom I shared my story, and they helped me. They told me I could access legal help to fight my case with immigration.

One guy gave me a phone number for Alison Battisson, the Director Principal from charitable law firm Human Rights for All, and I called her

Today I am living my life. I am single and looking for a partner. I work for a retail company and I do drag shows on the weekend to earn extra money, and to live the feminine side of my life.

I miss my family and I want to reunite with them and talk to them, at least to tell them I am alive, living a good life and working hard. I don’t know how they are or what’s happening in my family. I hope one day I see them. I miss my mum the most.

I will continue working in retail and serving the community. I am so thankful to Alison and the whole team for helping with my case and giving me my life back.

I will be forever grateful.

A LIFELINE IN DETENTION

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Disappearance Jail MARIA GASPAR 2021 Disappearance Jail is an ongoing series that attempts to erase carceral geographies. A catalogue of images marking current prisons, jails and immigrant detention facilities in the USA gets obscured through various forms of perforation.

Stateville Correctional Center, Illinois (right) Cook County Department of Corrections, lllinois (next page)

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DISAPPEARANCE JAIL

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DISAPPEARANCE JAIL

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HOW YOU CAN HELP BEYOND BRICKS & BARS: TRANS GENDER DIVERSE DECARCERATION PROJECT A trans-led, community project that provides direct support to trans and gender-diverse people in prison, at risk of incarceration and those returning to their communities from prison.

FREE HER A campaign set up by Debbie Kilroy, CEO of Sisters Inside Inc, which raises funds to end the criminalisation and imprisonment of women and children.

END TOXIC PRISONS CAMPAIGN

We have compiled a list of organisations you can support, either through donations or lending your time, to help people with lived experience of incarceration.

DISABILITY JUSTICE NETWORK A national mutual aid fund to provide support to marginalised disabled people including financial support for surgery, medication, mobility aids and to put food on the table.

A grassroots organisation that advocates against the forced removal of First Nations children from their immediate and extended families.

FLAT OUT INC.

DECOLONISE SEX WORK

Flat Out is a state-wide advocacy and support service for women, trans and gender-diverse people (and their children) who have been criminalised.

A Blak sex work grassroots collective working to destigmatise and decolonise Blak sex work in socalled “Australia”.

BEYOND THE BARS

A campaign calling to end the incarceration of First Nations children and other criminalised young people.

Beyond the Bars is a unique series of live prison radio broadcasts that give voice to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander inmates in Victorian prisons.

DHADJOWA FOUNDATION

SISTERS INSIDE

Your donation will go directly to supporting families affected by a Black death in custody, including funeral expenses, travel, campaigning and gift vouchers.

An independent community organisation advocating for the collective human rights of women and girls in prison, and their families.

HOMES NOT PRISONS

DEADLY CONNECTIONS

Donations will be used to advocate for homes, not prisons, for criminalised women, gender diverse people and their children. All surplus funds will go to Flat Out Inc. for services and advocacy for women and gender diverse people leaving prison.

An Aboriginal Community-led, not for profit organisation that breaks the cycles of disadvantage and trauma to directly address the over-representation of Aboriginal people in the child protection and justice system/s.

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GRANDMOTHERS AGAINST REMOVALS

SOMEBODY’S DAUGHTER THEATRE A company of artists with a 40 year record of working with some of the most vulnerable and powerless in our society.

For more information and links to access these organisations, scan the QR code.

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