Sisters Inside: The power of standing on your own two feet

We quickly found that once you step outside the do-gooder’s vision for you, they ditch you. It is a relationship built on their power over you. Once you start to get your own power, and walk the same arena, they’re off. It happens again and again.

When, after my release, I formed a fledgling support group to advocate for the rights of women prisoners, there was no question about who would form the steering committee: Sisters Inside would be run by women inside. The management committee outside would listen, and then act.

But there was more to learn. In the beginning, Sisters Inside was focused on a group of lifers and long-term prisoners. These were the women who had formed my coterie, those whom I had come to know in prison, those who trusted me. In prison culture, there is a long-established distrust of short-termers and a general disregard for what is perceived as their “whingeing”.

When Sisters Inside was funded by the Queensland government to run its first program and employed staff, I was forced to rethink the power relations; I had to walk my own talk.

If Sisters Inside was to support women in prison it needed to support all women in prison. Before that, we were set up against each other, long-termers kept short-termers at bay. But trauma is trauma, no matter how long you endure it. I had to recognise that and so did the lifers. We had to focus on the system as the enemy, not each other.

This was personal. Storm Brooke, the woman who murdered Debbie Dick, the woman I had schemed to kill in revenge, was locked up in isolation for months after the murder. Several years later, when members of the newly formed Sisters Inside were meeting in the prison chapel, Brooke and her associates were still corralled, separated from other prisoners.

I knew that if the Sisters Inside’s philosophy was going to work and be respected, Brooke needed to be involved. We needed all the women on side, so we had to pull her in. And I had to convince the lifers that if it was going to be about all women, it couldn’t be all women except her.

Brooke – aware of the implications of my refusal to tell tales – readily accepted the invitation, and in the years since, we have slowly worked through our personal issues. At each Sisters Inside management meeting, we inch forward. It hasn’t been easy. I know she still struggles on a day-to-day basis with what happened, just as I do.

At least part of my struggle was resolved in the days of the do-gooders and their attempts to fix things in the aftermath of Debbie Dick’s murder. This was a time when I was still determined to kill Brooke, a time when I dreamed vividly of letting her blood run as freely as Debbie’s had.

A group of prisoners was asked to stand up in front of community representatives and other inmates to talk about their experiences of incarceration. I sat down to write. I recorded everything from my first taste of prison as a 13-year-old, when I was locked up in the notorious Wilson Youth Hospital, and the days of violence, abuse and tragedy that followed.

I had been no more than a tearaway child, a truant who brawled with my mother and regularly ran away from home. Wilson Hospital was my parents’ last-gasp solution. It was a genuine attempt to reform a wild, but scarcely criminal, daughter. It was shockingly ironic that my admission to this reviled institution had the reverse effect.

Months after I was admitted, my father died suddenly from a massive heart attack. The staff, who were determined to punish me as much as possible, told me I had killed him. It was a pronouncement that reverberated in my adolescent heart. It convinced me of my innate badness. It made me believe I deserved to be hurt and punished over and over. My life became a litany of violent relationships, alcohol-fuelled rage and a “come and get me” attitude to the world.