Authors: Tanya Levin
Playing by the rules was not an important part of Parramatta jail on any level, it later turned out. Governor Floyd Peterson was a nice man in a big office, with a neat enough moustache. He was quiet and appeared quite indifferent to my arrival at Parramatta, which was a relief given the Mulawa governor’s keen interest in my most innocent moves. I don’t really know what Governor Peterson did, and judging by the ICAC inquiry into events that occurred soon after I left, neither really did he.
What I was to discover was that it was the Dep who ran the show there: Deputy Governor Jeffrey Strange, a burly, bearded Scotsman with a thick brogue that I couldn’t really follow. His name was only the beginning of the goings-on of the place. The Dep was shadowed by Officer Lackey, who searched the jail high and low for dirt on anyone, blue, green or in between, to take back to Master Strange. Lackey was a short, balding man with a crimson face and thin white beard who was delighted with his Bat Phone access to the boss. He made no secret of enjoying his power.
For me, the work was not so different from that at the women’s prison, it turned out. Inmates would request to be seen by one of us in the Coach House, and we would call them up one at a time. I mainly saw the men on remand, who were mostly interested in getting out. They desperately wanted a support letter for court to say that they had changed or that there were extenuating circumstances around their crimes. I did not encounter an inmate screaming out his innocence. Nearly all, though, had reasons why what had happened wasn’t really their fault.
I was amazed by the number of men who were satisfied that they had just been unlucky. If you commit a hundred crimes, though, and you only end up going to jail for five, maybe it does seem to be all about luck. I don’t know if bad luck is a criminal’s kryptonite, but viewing getting caught in a criminal act as unlucky doesn’t leave a whole lot of scope for change.
Others talked about what they had done by saying they had no choice. They had been caught up in drugs or problems in a relationship and before they knew it, it all fell apart. What else could they have done in the circumstances? What do you expect, given their upbringing? Very rarely did an inmate I spoke to take full responsibility for his actions, alleged or proven.
There were frequent promises of change, of course. Serious-faced men sat in my office staring at the floor as they recounted the things they had done, seen and had to pay for. Grown men wept as I struggled to respond to their tears. Were they real? Sometimes. The first-timer was genuinely horrified by the place he had found himself in. After a while, somehow the shock diminished and jail became a part of life. Then their tears were harder for me to gauge.
Picking who was genuinely in need of help was not always easy. There were ten staff – three in welfare, two in alcohol and other drugs, three in education and two psychologists – for five hundred men, many of whom were in crisis or needing a report for their ticket home. “When are you going to see me, Miss?” they would call out as I walked past on my way to anywhere. It was impossible to get to everybody on the list. Many missed out.
Another part of my role was to run health promotion groups about HIV and hepatitis C, alcohol and drug prevention and the like. Downstairs in the Coach House I held groups for generally uninterested participants on how not to catch blood-borne diseases. If they didn’t actively disrupt anything, they received a laminated certificate to show the judge or their parole officer down the track. So while the members of the groups I ran were not there voluntarily, they were glad of the opportunity to get a piece of paper, some proof that they were different to the other ten guys the magistrate would see on their day in court.
For my part then, once again I thought, oh so mistakenly, that things were going well. The worst trouble I knew of was with the photocopier and getting the certificates to print straight. I spent my days seeing as many on the list as could be seen, preparing for groups, writing reports and case notes and all the things welfare workers do. I held up the clear plastic bag that was standard issue for our personal items when I entered and left the jail every day. I got the files signed back in to the file room as quickly as possible.
But, you know, it’s never the clients, it’s never the customers. It’s always the staff. And from the outset the Parramatta jail staff were strange, and not just Strangey. Jimmy told me that anyone who works in a jail for a long time has something to hide or needs a place to hide. And so the politics continued.
I had been in the jail just over a week when a junior officer from the kitchen took a shine to me. Too much shine. Which might have been exciting, but he was married with a very pregnant wife. I was running out of excuses to avoid him when the attention he paid me was noticed by his colleagues. It soon got back to me that a senior female officer had fallen pretty hard for this guy just the year before. The affair ended badly, but the senior officer had not moved on. Suddenly this senior officer saw me as the object of her former lover’s affections, and the immediate object of her contempt. She was pretty tight with Strangey, too, and not long after that Strangey started making my life difficult.
I started feeling uncomfortable outside the Coach House, as if I were being watched, and not just by the crims. The trouble with being treated like a lunatic is that it can make you start sympathising with the other residents of the asylum. I began to wonder if their protestations of innocence and set-ups were not just lies for us on the classification team to roll our eyes at before stamping their file.
Prison officers are the poor cousins of the police force. There are many who have a history of failing to get into the force of their choice, or of having left the job for one reason or another. Still, inside the walls of a jail, in that parallel universe, their control is ultimate. While the police have enormous power on the outside, once their job is done, prison officers carry on their work for years after. It’s up to them who gets which privileges, whose letters get lost, who is put in the cells together, and who gets charged with offences in jail. Too many jail charges will not only take away an inmate’s privileges but also looks bad when parole time comes. The Parole Board has a very low tolerance of charges on the inside.
*
Despite the crimwife stereotype, I’m not a rescuer. Or, at least, I’m a selective rescuer. I take home only the strays I like. Truth is, I’d rather be rescued myself. I had a four-year-old son who required plenty of rescuing from thirst and hunger and boredom. At thirty-three, I was already becoming noticeably intolerant of other people. The thought of having a man live with me and inevitably tell me how to raise my child made my skin crawl. They move things around and breathe in your air. Being a single mother meant I hadn’t gone out for a long time, and this suited me fine.
I wonder still about how many different ways this could have gone, how it would have been different if a butterfly in China had only flapped its wings a split-second earlier. Maybe if there’d been milk freely available in the Coach House, my life would have taken another course. Jimmy had been extradited from Victoria and was being held on remand in Parramatta, due to a lack of space at the remand centre. Maybe if he’d been held in Long Bay or hadn’t got a job in the kitchen, a place I’m known to frequent, I wouldn’t have met him. There are a million ways we may not have crossed paths, but there is one thing of which I’m certain. Whether we’d met in Silverwater or Switzerland, I would have fallen for Jimmy. I still believe that my feelings for him had nothing to do with the jail environment. Or, as he liked to put it, I was broken way before he found me.
If it had been Switzerland instead, what would have happened after we met is anybody’s guess. It can be hard with any new relationship to know whether it’s a real romance or just a situational thing. Jail is a hyper-intense place, so it’s impossible from either side to know what’s real. Most of that doesn’t matter to me anymore. The only maze that my mind keeps walking me through is what I could have done after I’d fallen. Because when I fell, I fell so hard.
I had first met Jimmy a couple of days after I arrived at Parramatta. In order to fulfil my coffee requirements, and to make myself useful, I made my way to the jail kitchen. The kitchen provided food for over five hundred men, TV dinner style. It was the job of the three-inmate kitchen staff to organise the heating of the meals and their readiness for distribution to all the wings. They also prepared platters for staff functions and catered for staff barbecues. I always found it stunning how close the officers were prepared to let the crims, whom they despised so vehemently, get to them by preparing their food.
Being in charge of the food is a powerful position, so I can only imagine how Jimmy must have sweet-talked his way into that job. As I pushed back the thick plastic straps that acted as an entrance curtain to the eighteen-by-six-metre kitchen, there was Jimmy cutting laps.
Cutting laps was another facet of men’s jail that fascinated me as I learned about it; the ways that men managed their stress was much more physical than female inmates. Exercise was crucial to most. Laps were a way of getting rid of excess energy, but they also seemed highly social.
The upstairs offices in one jail building looked down on the main yard, which was fifty metres by thirty metres for three hundred men. On my way up or down the stairs to these offices, when time allowed, I stood and watched the men in the yard. Since they were usually out for just a couple of hours at a time, it was their only chance to communicate with each other and to exercise. And it was there I watched them cut laps. Individually, in pairs or threes or even more, they would walk at a slow, steady pace from one point to another, maybe a lap of the yard, or half of one. When they reached their invisible line, they would turn around and walk back to the start. And repeat. Sometimes for hours. It wasn’t just exercise or a time to talk over plans outside of the guards’ hearing. “What do you expect from caged animals?” Jimmy would later ask me. “We pace.” Cutting laps was a soothing ritual, too; one I would come to know well. It was compelling viewing, and I felt privileged to watch it.
Back in the kitchen, which was a good-sized space for doing individual laps, I walked to the officers’ station in the middle of the room, asked for some milk for the Coach House and got the nod from the officer on duty. On my way to the fridges, I stopped to talk to Jimmy. He was dressed in a light-green tank top and green shorts, rolled-over socks and joggers.
I don’t care what any of you say: he was hot. He had the most wonderful face I’d ever seen, with a mischievous smile out one side of his mouth, brown eyes, perfect muscly arms, thick football legs, a big strong chest, and he walked with a Marlon Brando swagger. When I first spoke to him, he was cool and funny and did not give a fuck.
Maybe that was it. For someone like me who worries constantly about everything big and sweats all the small stuff, meeting Jimmy was a gust of fresh air. He appeared to have not the slightest interest in what other people thought. He ran his own show.
Jimmy did not stop his laps for me, so I decided to do laps with him. When in Rome and all that. This laps thing had me fascinated and I wanted to know more. I introduced myself and walked slowly next to him as he ambled purposefully back and forth. Jimmy had different ideas.
“Women don’t belong in jails,” he told me. “They shouldn’t be here at all. I’ve always said that.” Immediately my back was up, and I asked him why. “They only make for bad thoughts for the boys, you see,” he said. “This is an all-male environment. Now I know there’s all you do-gooders who want to come in and help, but truth is: women don’t belong in here.”
I knew of research showing that having women in the forces – police, prison, even the army – could serve to defuse escalating situations and violence, sometimes merely by their presence. But Jimmy was emphatic that women should never have been allowed in the job to begin with, as they were obviously putting themselves in the line of fire unnecessarily and, it seemed, meddling in men’s business. That made conversation difficult, but I wanted to know about laps.
Jimmy didn’t think there was much to know about laps. He said it was a form of exercise, and that it could calm you down. I had already found, after about four or five laps, that the rhythmic steady movement was almost hypnotic. It made sense. Much later, I would get very apprehensive when the laps started. It meant there was trouble or deep worry. But for now, I was pleased with my new experience and bid Jimmy farewell. It did occur to me that there would probably be a report filed on me for walking with an inmate, but I took the risk. I wanted to know about the laps. So many of the inmates did them every day.
As soon as I left the kitchen, I forgot all about Jimmy. Just because I had seen an inmate who was gorgeous didn’t mean I gave him a second thought. He was an inmate, after all, a client, not on the radar. I saw him from time to time when I went to the kitchen and we would have a quick chat about the milk or the Coach House or whatever. Jimmy was usually bright, cheeky, funny, bouncy. He seemed as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Mainly he was concerned that jail in New South Wales wasn’t the same as it was in Victoria. But apart from those kinds of complaints, for someone who was locked up he seemed way less neurotic than me. I admired that attitude. Sometimes I would get to the kitchen and he would be doing chin-ups in the storeroom. He was strong and acted as if he worked out all the time. Jimmy later admitted that it was another set-up, that he’d only start once the other crims told him I was on my way in. But at that stage he was an amusing jail ornament, a character from the set and nothing more. He did have a sharper wit than the average prisoner, but when I left the kitchen with the milk for my coffee in the morning, Jimmy was not on my mind. Getting through the endless work in front of me was all I cared about.
I had enough to contend with from the all-seeing Tower Boys and their Fatally Attracted Managers, as well as my workload. I had no cause to see Jimmy outside the kitchen apart from coincidence. A colleague of mine oversaw his welfare needs. But as the months went on, we had longer conversations whenever we ran into each other, which somehow took place more often than it did with the others. He had a dry take on the world, and a funny streak which would come out after a passionate tirade about some issue of injustice. He was good fun to be with. But I had work to do.