When Ellie* left the gates of Brisbane Women’s Correctional Centre, one of the “screws” (aka prison officers) sniggered and said, “I’ll see you in a few weeks.” This, Ellie expected. Many of the prison staff had tyrannised her during her term: when she tried to enrol in a Bachelor of Arts, they thwarted her. “They hate people studying,” she says, sighing. “[One staff member in particular] would even state that prisoners shouldn’t be allowed to.”
After a 10-month campaign and constant derision, including being “screamed at” and having her security classification changed to maximum, Ellie was granted permission to study and ultimately finished her degree.
Despite taking initiative to rewrite her future, Ellie was humbled by a grim reality: once a prisoner, always a prisoner – even on the other side of the bars. After her release, she discovered she was to be routinely punished, long after doing her time. But Ellie is lucky. In an Adelaide park, there is currently a woman sleeping on a soiled rug barricaded by chairs, rubbish bins and tarpaulins she’d found.
This woman was released from Adelaide Women’s Prison into homelessness, with no support from correctional services and no formal referrals made to other agencies that could have assisted her transition.
She picked this particular park as it is close to the house she was evicted from, and where her five cats still live. Despite falling crime rates, Australia is building more prisons and jailing more of its citizens, especially women. In the past decade, the adult female prison population has grown by almost a third. From 2023 to 2024, the number of female prisoners increased by 8 per cent, whereas the number of male prisoners increased by 6 per cent.
Women make up about 7 per cent of the total prison population in Australia, with First Nations women comprising 46 per cent of the female population. In Western Australia, the female prison population increased by 25 per cent in two years, making it the state with the highest rate of women in jail after the Northern Territory. Sixty-two per cent of those sentences are for non-violent crimes.
According to Professor Hilde Tubex from The University of Western Australia and Associate Professor Natalie Gately from Edith Cowan University, many female prisoners are “criminalised” by circumstances outside their control, such as abuse and family violence, that put them on an unavoidable trajectory towards prison.
In other words, many of these women never stood a chance. Despite past research showing that 73 per cent of jailed women served less than 12 months, most must yield to a life sentence instead, the kind that follows them, like a forbidding shadow, wherever they turn.
New South Wales housing minister Rose Jackson says formerly incarcerated women are branded with a unique stigma simply by virtue of being women. “Women are viewed as innocent, soft and feminine. So criminality is considered completely antithetical to womanhood,” she says. “There’s a particularly profound misunderstanding around women who end up in jail, whether from landlords, employers or governments that believe, ‘Wow. There must be something really wrong with you.’”
They are met with slammed doors, making accessing even the most basic services a treacherous pursuit. They are often left with few choices to remedy their lives, leading them back into the belly of a carceral system that routinely renders them powerless.
Formerly incarcerated women are about 14 times more likely than the general population to die from suicide in the first month following their release; overdoses and injury would increase this number. This is what Gloria Larman, CEO of Women’s Justice Network (WJN), fears most. Her organisation provides support for women and girls affected by the criminal law system in NSW through advocacy and mentoring. “A lot of women, once released, are going back to violent partners because they see they don’t have a choice. This is incredibly dangerous,” she says.
Having immediate access to support services, such as housing, is a necessity for women endeavouring to find their feet after custody, but government services are severely lacking, leaving organisations such as WJN to try to pick up the slack and make real change.
Yet keeping these groups running requires money. “Funding is a major issue,” Larman says. “We only have one government contract [with NSW Department of Communities and Justice]. Programs [like ours] need to be funded on an ongoing basis. This financial year we’ve turned away over 100 women … because we don’t have capacity.” Nicole Yade is CEO of the Women and Girls’ Emergency Centre, a charity that provides crisis support for those facing homelessness. “Every time there’s a vacancy [in accommodation], our frontline staff are met with the difficult position of deciding who will be given a bed,” she explains.
Yade is also co-chair of the Keeping Women out of Prison (KWOOP) Coalition, an independent collective comprised of service providers, not-for-profits, universities, philanthropists (its major donor is the Judith Neilson Foundation) and women with lived experience working towards a singular goal: keeping women out of prisons in NSW. “For me, these [newly freed women] are the most marginalised people in our community.”
Seeds of Affinity is an Adelaide based non-profit organisation run by and for previously incarcerated women. Every Tuesday and Friday, it hosts a lunch for a small ensemble of formerly jailed women and their allies. Quietly, they produce care packs, filling them with shampoo, menstrual products, soap and other necessary items for women in jail.
Each meeting is guided by the stoic and resilient Linda Fisk, who co-founded the group with her former parole officer. In her office, she points to a grainy photograph of her in the 1990s cradling her newborn baby behind bars. But at the moment, she is furious. Seeds of Affinity has a property in Adelaide that could house up to 15 women, but due to a lack of state or federal funding, it is empty.
Still, for a lot of previously incarcerated women, Fisk is living proof that there can be a life after prison. One such woman is Hannah*, a lived-experience advisor based in Adelaide. She, like many women who have been to jail, describes having had myriad abusive relationships prior to her detention; an ex-partner had twice attempted to kill her. But the reason she was imprisoned was that police presumed Hannah was complicit in his offences. On Boxing Day in 2022, Hannah was paroled. “We can release you into homelessness,” the discharging officer said, laughing at her.
Shaken, she waited for a friend to pick her up and drive her home. While in prison, Hannah’s mortgage obligations did not cease, but corrections failed to give her several bank notices regarding overdue payments. “I was earnestly trying to get calls out and save my house,” she says. But her efforts were routinely foiled. Inmates must negotiate with staff to make business calls, and Hannah’s requests were often denied.
Her lawyers were turned away at the gates. Before long, she’d accumulated $30,000 of mortgage debt. It was a 40-degree day when she arrived at her house, which had been broken into, trashed and squatted in.
The fridge reeked of spoiled food, which was also strewn across the kitchen floor. Hannah was floundering, trying her best to have electricity and gas reconnected while making sense of the pigsty her home had become. Then a sheriff’s officer arrived to say she had a week to get out. “In those couple of years, I lost everything,” she says. “[Corrective Services] could’ve supported me to keep that house in some way, shape or form. Instead, I became homeless.”
In the interim, Hannah met a stranger on a dating app who was willing to temporarily house her. “It was that or prison. He didn’t do anything, but it was a horrible tension. I had no stability,” she says. Many women like Hannah are irremediable in the eyes of the justice department. They are left to pick up the pieces of a life marred not by their own design, but by systems reluctant to provide remedy.
To get Centrelink payments, Kelly, who was released from prison on March 18, needed identification. But as part of her sentencing, her bank account had been annulled, which meant she couldn’t apply for Centrelink. Kelly was finally offered housing through a government corrections department only after completing mountains of paperwork. “There are women who aren’t strong in their advocacy, and who are pretty much left at the gate by themselves. I hold these services accountable,” she says.
“The government wants nothing more than for me to fail.” Wendy*, who was released from prison last September, has similarly found that support services are inept. She initially deemed herself fortunate, given she once served in the Royal Australian Navy and was able to enlist support from a veterans’ housing service. But as she is a transgender woman, Wendy says the service “did not feel comfortable” that the housing they had was “suitable” because others who lived in the units might have been uneasy about her presence.
“So,” she says with a sigh, “they took away that opportunity.” A simple google from a willing prison officer could have provided Wendy, and many others, with a list of housing services. But no such information was made available. “It’s not the prison staff’s role to provide information when it comes to support services,” she says. “They believed they would get in trouble for doing so.
That’s something [Corrective Services] should be providing more of if they don’t want recidivism.” In Australia, 42 per cent of people released from prison will return within two years. Like Kelly, Wendy left jail without enough documentation to be able to access government services. “After eight months, I am only halfway through completing my MyGov documents,” she says. “There is no after support.”
Even acquiring a proof-of-age card has proved difficult, given it was assigned to her prison address rather than her current home address. Because of this, she cannot access her birth certificate, which means she also can’t get her driver’s licence. She couldn’t bank her leaving-prison cheques because her legal name is different to the name she was known as while in jail.
Then there’s Grace*, who was released about 18 months ago. She says that trying to satisfy the undue demands of the parole board has been nightmarish and punitive. “The parole board is immune from justice,” she claims. Despite having no restraining orders or any other rulings suggesting she is a risk to society, Grace found herself “banned from 40 suburbs”. “My lawyers and multiple parole officers said these were the harshest parole conditions they’d ever seen in the 25 years they had worked in the industry.”
While she was on the train home after a meeting with her parole duty manager, they called to say her parole conditions had changed: she was now banned from the suburb she lived in. “By going home, I’d have breached parole. But not going home, I’d have breached parole,” she says with a laugh.
To avoid being sent back to jail, she had to scramble to find new accommodation at a moment’s notice. “Women leaving prison require exactly the same rights we all do,” Fisk says, insisting that “safe, secure and sustainable housing is number one” in remedying the systemic faults facing women leaving prison. A t KWOOP, Yade’s goal is to halve the number of women in prison by 2030.
The coalition is advocating for reforms in bail, remand, housing, mental health and child protection; embedding lived experience in leadership, policy and service design; and scaling diversion programs that provide an alternative to prosecution, such as rehabilitation, treatment or intervention programs. “We’re going to do everything we can to keep that advocacy in front of the politicians,” says Yade.
Louise Kelly is the founder of The Women’s Hive, an OARS Community Transitions initiative for women leaving prison. Backed by the muscle of The Lady Tradies, a women-run repairs and maintenance service, she decked out a humble space in Adelaide to help reintegrate formerly incarcerated women into society. She stresses that it takes the support of an entire community to ensure a smooth landing for those women, but in its first year, The Hive boasts an “insanely low” 14 per cent re-offending rate. Each crusader is sure of one thing: that incarcerated women are as deserving, complex and meriting as the rest of us, eager to start afresh if only given the chance.
Seeds of Affinity sells beauty products, merchandise and gourmet treats, with all profits funding activities for women. You can also offer continued support by becoming a member for $5 a month, attend events or volunteer.
For more information, see seedsofaffinity.org.
