Crimwife (22 page)

Now I find myself punching the air and jumping around with the thrill of defeating a faceless monster. They said they wouldn’t keep him there a day longer than necessary, and they could have. Plenty of good inmates have their parole application refused for no apparent reason. He is still not out, but it is getting so close.

Jimmy calls after lunch.

“You got parole,” I burst out through the recorded message, “you got parole. You got parole.”

“Are you sure?” he asks me.

“Yes, I spoke to head office,” I say, Jail Panic surging through me.

“They haven’t been to see me,” he says.

“Well, I spoke to them,” I say.

Beeeeeeeeep.

“I love you,” he says.

“I love you,” I say.

Beeeeeeep.

“You got parole,” I tell him again.

Beeeeeep.

Well, at least he knows. How do I tell my son?

“Jimmy is getting out of jail,” I say, figuring it’s the best start, when he gets home from school.

“When?” he says.

“About two months,” I say. “So it’s a while yet.”

“It’s OK, Mum,” he says. “But I want to be able to cuddle you whenever I want.”

“I know,” I say. “I know. Of course you can.”

*

Even now, I can see myself sitting on a bench outside the jail. It is just a huge wall with some doors in it. The sun is rising in my face, and I am distracting myself with the crossword book my neighbour gave me to endure these last two weeks waiting for today, for this moment when all will be revealed.

Today is
the
day. I sit outside the welfare office and I am struck by how ordinary the day is. The air is early morning fresh, but smells the same. Officers stream in for their 8 o’clock start and none of them shows any awareness of today’s magnitude. Jimmy could have died where you people work. He didn’t. So today you guys let him go. Simple as that. Meaningless as that. He’s one that lived and nothing more. I’ve already made my presence known to the night shift finishing up, without mentioning Coroner’s Court at all. Surely I shouldn’t have to today.

Then, through a small window like the one at the Wizard of Oz’s door, an officer answers my peering eyes with, “He’s just got to be signed off. Then he’ll be here.”

Nothing is guaranteed with a jail process until it’s over. I feel stupid as I wait. I want a quick escape from this world and for us to be zapped into the next. What have I set myself up for? After all this wondering, I’m about to find out. Maybe I need one more day.

And then, unceremoniously, Jimmy pops out of the huge wall from a jail onto the street and into the sun. He is dressed in a t-shirt and jeans and carries a knapsack, like a backpacker come to see the countryside. He kisses me and starts walking.

In fact, he walks straight ahead of me, and any feel-good coffee commercial I was hoping to re-enact is shot right down. Even more ordinary than the day around me is the person I had come to see. What can I do? I follow him till I catch up. He’s making a beeline for Macca’s. At least our lives can begin again.

*

But they never really did begin again. We never seemed to get anywhere. We seemed merely to have moved the jail. We turned my house into a wing with a few cells. It was the most minimum security he’d had for some time, and a brand-new prison routine for me.

There’s no running off on holiday when you’re on parole. Within a day or two of release, you have to check in with your officer. So we were at Parole first thing in the morning. We were at most things at that time. Jimmy was used to early starts, getting everything done, so you could relax in the afternoon.

When Jimmy had become officially institutionalised, I couldn’t say, but he used to joke about it, saying I shouldn’t worry if I found him washing his undies in the shower. Jimmy’s day had been much the same for over fifteen years. Up at 6 am, coffee and cigarette, breakfast at 7, appointments from 8.30 till lunch. Lunch, rest, activities till about 3. Then, the day is over and all that’s left is the preparation for dinner.

So when he got out, got back, got home, nothing much changed.

When you get what you wish for, it doesn’t always feel like it did when you wished for it. Sometimes it’s just a case of “Now what?” The day the newlyweds get back from honeymoon. Now what?

Jimmy had learned to be alone. He had spent three years in segregation, completely isolated, about ten years before we met. It is unimaginable for me, being so isolated for so long. My blood pressure explodes if the Facebook feed takes too long to refresh. Where does your mind go after the first, second, third year of staying in a small room without contact with anyone but guards? What is it like to leave that? I can only hazard a guess.

So it was a loner who moved in with me. This was way past independence. This was Robinson Crusoe. It’s hard dating Robinson Crusoe, much less living with him. And Robinson had absolutely no idea what to do with himself now that he was finally rescued and back on the mainland.

Getting out of jail is one step. Staying out is a whole different matter. Apart from parole requirements, I had once believed it was a matter of keeping within the law. But people tend to do what they know. They stay with what’s familiar. Law-breaking isn’t a hobby. It’s a way of life. It’s hard to change your way of life.

The statistics vary, but around 40 per cent of men released each year will be back in jail within the following two years. The criminologist Diana Johns’s 2010 report on recently released prisoners quoted an inmate, Scott:

When you get out, you think, like, the sun’s gonna shine every day and you’re gonna, like, have a thousand dollars in your pocket every day, and everything’s gonna be good and, you know, you’re gonna be able to go and buy whatever you want …

The initial euphoria and excitement of release soon fades,

but you gotta pay bills and methadone and medication and you find out like you got no money to live on and you know, you’re doin’ things like this to get a $20 food voucher, just so I’m not going out committing crime … one of the biggest things about getting out is the loneliness, even though you’ve got your circle of friends … they’ve got their own lives … and you know you visit them once every now and then but … in prison it’s like this [at a city café], you wake up every morning, it’s this every day, you know, things are going on – there’s a confounding sort of loneliness in that that’s not there anymore, so that becomes really difficult, you’ve lost your network of friends in that sense … the company and the activity.

Being released from jail is also bad for your health and your life expectancy. Studies find consistently that the rates of death after release from jail are much higher than for non-inmates of the same age. Deaths due to injury, suicide, poisoning or the acute and chronic effects of alcohol or drug addiction represented over 60 per cent of all deaths. The risk of death for released prisoners is four times greater in the first six months of freedom than after one year.

Hospitalisation rates are substantially higher than the community average for the first year after a prisoner’s release. So is contact with mental health services.

I watched it unfold before me. Jimmy tried. He stayed at home. He stayed inside. He went to the government appointments and back to the computer. His anxiety got worse. He stayed home more. He went to the mental health services, who had no idea what to do with someone who’d done so much time. They changed counsellors every six months on rotation anyway. The forensic psychologist didn’t know either. Jimmy went to the sessions. He explained himself to them. They did their best for an hour a week. He went to Parole.

Over the months, he grew quieter. He was deeply unhappy, and neither of us knew what to do. He was at the doctor’s office more often, increasing his visits to twice a week. One day he left home swearing he’d get something to knock himself out. He returned with a prescription for Xanax with five repeats. I saw him swallow them like Tic Tacs. I had promised him that if he got out, it would get better, but it hadn’t. Not for him, and not really for me. The local medical practice didn’t know what to do when he presented in distress. Five repeats of Xanax was candy for the baby.

For two weeks he swallowed Xanax at the first signs of consciousness and slept most of the time. When he was awake, he spent his time making nasty remarks, complaining and blaming me for the state he was in. Jail, he slurred at me, was better than this. It was my fault he couldn’t face the world. He spoke constantly of suicide.

(He was never easy to please. When he discovered this chapter’s title, he told me that, as usual, I had come really close to getting something right, only to miss out. “Coming Home” by the Radiators isn’t played when you get released from prison. It’s played when you get back from a day in court by the boys back in the cells.)

Every afternoon during that time, when I came home from work, I would race in first to check that he was alive before letting my son in the house. Then one morning he demanded I drive him to his psychologist, which would make me late for work. I refused. He called me at 9.30 to tell me he’d gone to the wrong building. I told him to call back after the appointment.

Somewhere after that call, Jimmy, who claims no memory of the entire period thanks to the brain-deleting tool labelled Xanax, decided to ditch his appointment. His next recollection is being pulled over in the stolen car he was driving. His parole was revoked within three days and Jimmy went back to prison to serve a minimum of twelve months. The benzodiazepine family, such as Valium, Serepax and Rivotril, which are Xanax’s older, weaker cousins can often result in people stealing. Many a story exists of a good bloke who runs into a friend who shares some pills, only for the same good bloke to wake up in a prison cell with no memory of the shoplifting or thieving that is on the CCTV. Waking up driving a car is a common one.

I was there at the Local Court to see his bail refused. Parole said they were waiting on the court’s ruling before they breached him. The court said they were waiting for Parole to make their decision before they ruled. I had no idea what to do and no big bank account to pay a lawyer. Jimmy had never filled me in on what to do should all this happen. It wasn’t part of the plan.

His viciousness had evaporated, replaced with the open face of vulnerability I hadn’t seen for so long. With him mouthing, “I love you,” whenever he could, I watched the lawyers go through the motions and the court officer lead him away.

Jimmy had twelve months to serve automatically, because he still had about two years left of parole and that meant a year minimum as soon as parole was breached. That’s why stuff like driving was a big deal. One broken law would mean a year away. And if I was the breath in his lungs, as the letters said, then how would he withstand such a long time apart?

Following the court appearance was a barrage of letters. They were full of “I’m sorry” and “How could I?” and “Will you forgive me?” I felt very little. I had said that if he was locked up again, I wouldn’t support him. What he hadn’t realised was that while I was threatening him, I had been making a promise to myself. During those twelve months I visited Jimmy twice and wrote about once a month. The passionate belief in infinite possibilities had fizzled out.

While the letters filled with new promises and new understanding were admirable, I didn’t have the conviction to believe them again. But I hadn’t given up entirely. Twelve months later I was there for the home visit from Parole, and the drive to the jail, knowing it was all going to go the same way.

Jimmy disagreed. He insisted his taste of the outside world had taught him what he needed to learn. He could see where he’d gone wrong. He was so committed to us that he’d had “Tanya” tattooed on one tricep and my son’s name on the other by a mate in jail. Not a bad job, but, at risk of sounding ungrateful, it didn’t seem to mean much. Tattoos don’t pay the rent or take me out to dinner. I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t appreciate someone’s sacrifice of skin in my honour, until I realised the tattoos had nothing to do with me at all. They were just more letters from jail.

During World War I, they called it “shell shock” because it was believed that shock waves from the artillery shells caused damage to the nervous system. This was somewhat of an improvement from the American Civil War’s terms of “soldier’s heart” and “nostalgia.” Shell shock was supposed to be a short-term reaction to the trauma of war, but its effects often took years, if not a lifetime, to manage. The high number of soldiers who presented with what appeared to be a psychiatric disease overwhelmed the medical profession. While some recognised what we know today to be post-traumatic stress disorder, others decreed it was merely unwillingness to fight or cowardice.

With the injuries and trauma of the war itself, in his own undiagnosed hell, it’s no wonder that Great-Gramps just sat on the porch for the rest of his life silently staring off into space. Or was so violent. Or so drunk. And poor Great-Grandma, who was supposed to be eternally fulfilled by his mere survival of the Great War, spent the rest of her life walking on eggshells with a smile on her face.

These days we’re inundated with diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder, without any need to go to war. While there are always those types who break a nail and go on stress leave, we’ve become far more aware of the effects that traumatic events can have. Being the victim of a crime or a car accident can produce the same symptoms, although they may be less severe in intensity.

Living with PTSD is hard for the sufferer. It can also be hard for anyone living with them. And being with someone whose last two decades have been daily trauma ain’t too easy either.

One afternoon, just after lunch, the topic of sentence reductions came on the news. The story ran for just a couple of minutes on a guy who had cooperated and had his time cut.

Jimmy, who never liked to be seen paying attention to such things, started talking about getting time off in the ’90s in jail in Victoria. A lot of his sentences started with “In jail in Victoria in the ’90s …” but this time it wasn’t just a complaint about NSW Corrections.

“In Victoria in the ’90s,” he said, “they used to give you time off if you witnessed an act of violence.”

“How much?” I asked.

“Well, it started off that if you saw an act of violence, you got twenty-eight days off.”

“The end?”

“Yes, the end. They’re not going to send you home for a month and bring you back.”

I never knew how to manage these conversations. My ignorance made me nervous, but I didn’t want to say nothing at all. These talks had the habit of suddenly derailing.

“So how often could you get that and how would you prove it?”

“It wasn’t always easy,” he said. “But then they added another part.”

“What?”

Jail stories are fascinating because they’re always different. Some of the stuff about the brotherhood can be hard to stomach, but Jimmy always opened up a new crack in the wall for me to peek through. And he smiled while I ooohed and ahhhed at what he showed me. I know he enjoyed my naïveté about evil and its doers. It was a break from everyone else he’d met.

“Well, they decided that if you witnessed a death in custody, you would be granted three months off your sentence. Started off with blokes waking up to someone’s suicide or seeing it. It was the department’s trade-off for their mistakes in some ways.”

“So did lots of people wake up to a
suicide
all of a sudden?” My Lieutenant Columbo trenchcoat is never off. Living with Jimmy was a wonderful opportunity to see if I could solve crimes.

“Well, no, that’s not what happened really.” Jimmy was thinking now. He smiled, but his face was intense. I learned to recognise that smiling and laughing were not necessarily indicators of happiness. They were often just defence mechanisms.

“It’s one thing if there’s just one bloke that sees it, he’s alright, but if a death takes place in the yard …”

“Everybody there gets the three months?” I warm into my jail thinking.

“Exactly. So what happens next is that, well, we ended up having a betting ring for who was going to go next.”

“You mean they planned it?”

“Of course they planned it. Come on, it’s the quickest way to get three months off your sentence, everybody’s sentence. Got to a point where you’d thank God for a lockdown ’cause at least it meant you were alive for another day. Even if you didn’t get out, at least you didn’t get knocked.”

“And no one said anything?”

“No, babe, no one said anything. Would you want to be the one who stops another six hundred blokes from getting three months off? You’d make some people pretty angry.”

“So how did you know it wasn’t you on the list for the day?”

“You didn’t. That’s how the ring started. You had to put in one pouch of Ox every day and you were off the list. Then you could sit back for the day and relax.”

“What if you didn’t have a pouch? Oh, I get it, you found a pouch, you did what you could to put your pouch in. Did you know who was on the list?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes it was hard not to say ‘Hey, George, watch your back,’ or ‘Hey, George, do you have any idea how close you came to it all being over, mate?’ But you can’t do that.”

“You can’t, maybe, secretly give him a sign?”

“Are you for real? And you don’t think it would get back?”

I contemplated what I would do if I found myself living in a situation like this, and I was immediately concerned only with how I could protect myself from death. Even in my imagination I cared little for looking out for others in a war zone, where every day a random factor could cause your own death. The reality of actually living this on a day-to-day basis was out of my range of understanding. I get anxiety when dinner’s not ready on time. What would this stress do to the mind?

Turning to see what Jimmy was making of all this, his face had turned stormy. But I persisted.

“How did it all end?”

“They changed the law,” he answered quietly. He wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Didn’t anyone investigate all these deaths?”

“Not in those days. It was just jail violence.” He got up.

“So did you win the bets at least?” Jimmy started to pace in the hallway, doing laps, just casually.

“Babe.”

“What?”

Then there was an outburst. “I told you I don’t like talking about these things, but you go on and on.”

“I thought you were happily discussing it. How am I supposed to know?”

“Nobody asks war vets these questions. I don’t know why you do it to me.” And he left and went to the computer room.

I didn’t know how to fix these things either. What do you say? I’m sorry? No, “Sorry’s just another way of saying ‘get fucked’ in jail,” Jimmy always said.

That took me years to understand, but if your actions have huge consequences, sorry just doesn’t cut it. “I apologise,” was acceptable, but I knew it meant the same as sorry.

Once he was in traumaville, it was too late to bring him out. Jail was in a lot of ways our common ground. Jimmy insisted jail was a big part now of who he was and where he had been after all these years. But if I talked about it at the wrong time, it would trigger an aggressive withdrawal. It was more than sulking. It was post-traumatic stress on post-traumatic stress on post-traumatic stress. Layers of things Jimmy had seen, heard and been through, so severe that my “How do I pay the electricity bill?” questions seemed ridiculously irrelevant.

Jimmy had told me that most of his first year in jail in Victoria in the ’90s was spent in hospital recovering from the bashing he received there.

Some of the horror scenes he detailed were so terrifying for me that it took me much time to write them down, while he had already lived through them. I couldn’t relate to the severe and brutal degradation and fear. There’s no saying “I understand,” no way possible.

Jimmy spent some years at the Bluestone College known as Pentridge. He told of the nights that the Squad would come in and walk the halls of the jail. Every inmate would get prepared. Slowly, the Night Squad, the kind that the 9-to-5 psychs and the welfare staff don’t see, would drag their weapons along the bars of the cells. Jimmy said that at one time another crim would play “Savin Me” by Nickelback and it would break the deathly silence, a sign of resistance, anonymous, defiant. I’ll be the last one standing. We know you’re here. We’re ready.

“Did they know who it was who played the song, though?” There would have to be more trouble.

“Yeah, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t care. If they’re gonna flog you, they’re gonna flog you. May as well go down strong.”

He said the Squad would pick their targets. There were those who had displeased the officers, or the governor, and knew they would receive “therapy.” Jimmy always referred to it as handing out therapy. The others were picked at random as a reminder to the rest. This could be you. Therapy was being run in on by the Squad and bashed. If you fought back, you got bashed twice as long and hard, but if you didn’t, sometimes they went harder anyway. It wasn’t a case of avoiding it: it was unavoidable. Sooner or later, you were next. It was how to deal with them that was the challenge.

The Squad’s visits were spasmodic, but dependable. Predictably random. You did not know when to sleep, in case when they woke you it was too late, they were already in your cell. Then you had no defence at all. So it was better not to sleep, or to sleep defensively. I never enjoyed waking Jimmy from his naps. If I was careless, he jumped up ready to fight for his life.

For Jimmy, being in jail meant the threat of being killed at any moment and thrown onto the body pile. And yet he went back.

Then there was the food poisoning. The times they weren’t let out of their cells for days. And if both things happened at once, major violence could erupt.

The most vulnerable place for a prisoner to be is sitting on the toilet. Jimmy told me of times where there was one toilet, no door, in a yard of a thousand men, as well as a couple of showers. Jimmy said it was better for crims not just to go unwashed but to let nature take its course and clean up later rather than be found on the toilet. Especially if someone was after you.

That one took me about a year to process. Imagining that level of fear, of being constantly hunted, and to have to suffer public degradation rather than die, on a regular basis, is too much for me. I’m not myself without a shower in the morning. But it gets worse. So skip this next bit if you’re a bit weak in the guts.

Although I was never blessed to see “bronzing up,” it does bear explaining. When relations between prisoner or prisoners and staff have reached an impasse, or when the crims are determined to get their way for whatever reason that deems it necessary, they will bronze up.

Bronzing up involves rubbing human faeces, your own or, I guess, someone else’s, I never thought to ask, all over your skin, as much as you can stand. There are not many prison guards who will take on somebody covered in poo, and a group of them is a fair army. How far bronzing up ever got anyone, I’m not sure, but it does burn the skin I’m told. And, you know, it’s hard to get the smell out for a while.

Again, this is beyond my understanding. The desperation behind such ploys. The hopelessness. The willingness to do whatever it takes to survive. And if the toilets aren’t flushing and no one’s doing anything about it or there aren’t enough of them or they’re sick of the food poisoning, maybe bronzing up is the only way to get the staff’s attention.

It’s so hard to climb inside the mind, let alone heart, of someone who’s lived through all this in Australia not so long ago, especially when that same person expends all their energy keeping appointments and complying with lawful community behaviour, as Parole expects. Yes, he put himself there, but I was still left reeling when I looked at him and wondered what else he had seen. Jimmy said his nose had been broken sixteen times. He’d been beaten so many times in the head, there’s no doubt he had brain damage. Frontal lobe injuries give people problems with social behaviour and impulse control. That in itself caused its own cycle of crime.

One time he’d been handcuffed to the police car when they started driving and ripped out his shoulder. So when he moaned “My shoulder, my shoulder,” was I supposed to give sympathy?

People who rob banks get their shoulder ripped out. People who don’t can avoid it. Is that a bad attitude?

Concussion was like shaking hands for Jimmy. The police had shot at him; he’d done his knee in during a chase through bushland. During one court appearance he’d pleaded insanity and been sent to a psych unit where he said he had them almost convinced, à la Jack Nicholson in
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. Right at the last minute, though, he dropped his guard when he thought no one was around and was sent straight back to maxo.

You would think that you’d make sure never to return. I was amazed to hear about the times the boys had the next round of robberies planned and were just waiting for Jimmy to get out so they could get going. And Jimmy had been excited about his release to get back into it. What could be worth it? I never understood and I still don’t. Jimmy said that those few days of mayhem, of total freedom, were worth the following years of hell. He never backed down from that statement.