Crimwife (6 page)

Kari was furious. By this time she knew his ways, and she says she waited, fuming while feigning sympathy, for Mark to get to the point.

“Can you just do this thing for me, baby? Please, just help me.”

“OK,” said Kari, furious, but worn down. “I will. I just hope one day I find someone who really loves me.”

Mark looked at her confused, as if she were speaking a foreign language.

“I love you so much,” he said, and started weeping again. “You’re all I’ve got, if you want the truth. I wish I didn’t have to ask you. I wish there was someone. I’m sorry.”

“OK,” she said again, “so what do you want me to do?”

Mark’s tears dried instantly, Kari says, as he looked up at her.

“It’s so easy, babe,” he said and proceeded to describe how to wrap the drug bag in condoms. Very simply, he told her she was to insert the parcel into her vagina and act natural. As soon as they were able, the drugs would be passed over.

Kari did as she was told. Mark called her with a phone number. Kari called the number and arranged to meet with the people on the other end of the phone. She picked up a bag, took it home, wrapped it up, as per instructions, and allowed her feelings of hatred for Mark to begin to work their poison.

The first visit was easy. Actually, the first three were. There were no dogs or checks. Her visit was processed, her name was called, and she dawdled her way into a crime scene like an old-time pro.

Kari wore skirts and would slip her hand underneath when the officers were otherwise distracted, retrieve the package and push it into Mark’s hand. He would either drop it down his overalls, or swallow it if security was high. Down his overalls he would manoeuvre it inside his shorts, his underwear and up his anus. He would wriggle around on the seat for a while, and then he would say, “OK.” Kari found all of this hideous, but was surprised by how accustomed to jail she had become. She also couldn’t help feeling wanted by Mark more than ever. The smile on his face was never bigger than when she had picked up for him. His praise was lavish.

“You’re an expert, babe, a champion. You are the bomb. I love you so much.”

This made things harder. Kari didn’t want to risk so much for a man in jail she’d known well for mere months, but she loved making him happy. And the parcels made him so, so happy. Kari started bringing in drugs when Mark wasn’t expecting it, or buying him extra.

On Kari’s fourth visit with drugs, she saw the dog squad outside the jail, and her heart started pounding. But as she stood in line with the other visitors, the dog ran straight past her, twice. The visitors were thanked for their time, and the dog and the squad left. Kari felt excited that she’d beaten them at their game.

When Mark was moved to a country jail, things got even easier. He didn’t pressure her for more drugs or harder drugs, just pot as often as she could. He also expected her to pay: his contact had been locked up, so Kari now had to do the shopping herself.

Country jails have much less technology than city jails. Kari found it so cruisy that some days she was unnerved by how laid-back things were. There were no iris scans or 360-degree cameras. Just fill in a form, get the food you bring in checked, and go have yourself a barbecue. Kari honed her muling skills.

“There’s a lot of money to be made in here, babe,” Mark told her. “A gram of heroin is a thousand dollars. There’s fifty takers right now. I can get a hundred bucks a pill for Es. Cash. Now.”

Kari would smile. “Well, you’d better get a bigger idiot than me to visit you,” she’d say.

One Saturday, Kari arrived at the jail later than usual. Drug carriers don’t generally have early morning starts, so Kari liked to get there at 8.30 am when visits opened, to lower the chance of running into the dog squad. As she expected, there they were. No problem, thought Kari, although her packing skills had been a little lax the night before. Resentful and tired, she hadn’t perfumed it the way she usually did.

“Good morning, ladies and gentleman,” the dog squad leader said, starting the familiar introduction to the search. Once they were given the option of handing over the contraband material immediately, and had declined it, the dog ran back and forth in front of the visitors. He stopped and sniffed at Kari, and then kept going. On his way back, he stopped and sniffed again. Then he moved on happily to his guardians.

The line dispersed, but as Kari started walking, two prison officers approached and asked her to stay put.

“The dog has given an indication that you have drugs on your person,” one officer told her. “Is there anything that you would like to tell us before we proceed?”

In a split-second, Kari ran through the responses she had planned – the party she’d been to the night before where people were smoking, the dodgy dry cleaners where she’d picked up this jacket, the “How dare you accuse a citizen like me of a thing like this?” approach. None of them now seemed to make any sense.

“I don’t know why.” She answered the officers.

They brought the dog back over.

“What can you tell us, boy?” they asked him, as the dog excitedly jumped at Kari’s crotch three or four times. They looked at each other. Kari stared at them, trying to look blank.

“We’ll have to call the police now, you understand.”

Kari nodded.

Kari says she felt like one of the Bali Nine when they were tapped on the shoulder. The world was spinning. The dog squad told her they would search her car. There was nothing that she knew of, but she now worried they would find evidence of something there. She unlocked her car. For the first time, she knew how Mark felt, being jail property. She hated him more than ever.

The dog left the car with nothing to report. The officers left her to sit outside the jail and wait for the police. Then, about half an hour later, they returned.

“There’s no female police officer on this morning,” they told her. “There won’t be one on till the shift changes at 3. So we’re going to terminate the visit and let you go home.”

Kari tried to disguise her relief as disappointment.

“OK,” she said. She knew Mark would soon find out the news. She hoped against hope he would be devastated.

When he called her an hour later, all he kept saying was, “As long as you’re safe, babe. As long as you’re safe.” Kari knew she couldn’t be angry, because the listening-in squad would know the dog squad was right.

Kari had been saved by inadequate rostering at a country police station. If there’d been an officer there to examine her, she knows her life would be very different today.

“I’ve always wanted to travel,” she says. “A drug record would have ruined all that. I didn’t know after that whether Mark understood what this meant to me, and that sealed it for me. I started visiting less, writing less, making less conversation on the phone when he rang. He ended up doing four years all up, and, well, after the dog incident, I just lost interest. I think the fear did that to me.”

Kari says Mark’s letters kept coming until, she thinks, the lack of money or drugs put him off. The last she heard from him, he said he would always love her and would look her up when he got out, if that was OK with her.

Even the mills of Justice’s employment section grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. It was seven months from the time the Department of Corrective Services advertised for a Drug and Alcohol/HIV Health Promotion Officer at Mulawa Correctional Centre for Women until I started work.

It was going to be the perfect job: fifteen minutes from home, and a pay increase. Real money. I had finally finished my social work degree, having worked for years in the field of welfare and community services, which pays slightly more than volunteering. I had started my career in HIV prevention and had moved on to work in a women’s refuge before the job at the jail came along.

I had training and experience in most of the major issues that affect disadvantaged women, such as homelessness, substance use, domestic violence and child abuse. While I’d had clients who’d been to jail, I’d had little to do with the criminal justice system itself. This would be a great opportunity to consolidate my skills and use them in a new and serious setting. While many of my colleagues and friends were horrified at the thought of working in a prison, I found the idea fascinating. I like to go behind the scenes to places where few are allowed to venture.

There was no training before I started. Despite feeling ready, I soon realised that my ears were dripping wet when I arrived for duty on that first crisp winter’s day. I had no idea what happened inside a prison, but I was willing to learn.

My earliest impressions of the idea of jail came from hearing about it from the pulpit. Visiting pastors at the Pentecostal church in which I was brought up would preach about their ministries to the greatest of sinners: those whose sin could be seen. It was incredible that these well-dressed evangelists shared the faith with the lowest of the low, the homeless, the alcoholics, the drug addicts, and sometimes the pastors themselves even went into prisons. People in jail were, of course, the hardest and most evil people in society. They were living evidence of where sin leads you: punishment from society as well as punishment from God. Prisoners were a wonderful example of those who had not obeyed in time and had to suffer consequences that forgiveness from God could not erase. We gasped in amazement that such holy men would humble themselves so by visiting them. Prison was the modern-day equivalent of a leper colony.

Everyone knew these hardened criminals were not like us. Even if God remembered their names, they were not high on his list of recruits. They could be born again, but they shouldn’t really hope for more than a Bible group they could run so as to demonstrate their remorse. And maybe, one day, if they got out, they could testify about finding God in jail to a crowd like ours, and we would clap and try not to shift too uncomfortably in our seats.

My road to hell was paved with good intentions, too.

For quite some time after I started at Mulawa, the horror on my face was, I’m told, quite noticeable. It felt as if my head was permanently tilted to one side, my jaw dragging on the ground. We still do this to people? Jail on TV is not like jail in real life. To witness people being herded to the clinic, to their cells, all dressed the same, all captive, is very different from watching it on a screen. It’s over in eight hours for the staff, but the scene doesn’t fade for the prisoner. There are no credits rolling. They cannot leave. They cannot go home, not even for an hour.

While the rest of Sydney was up in arms over water restrictions and not being allowed to hose down their driveways due to the drought, here, not far from such middle-class controversies, was a prison camp. It made my head spin as I drove over the bridge towards the centre, the sun sparkling on the river, knowing that just across the way were two human warehouses, one containing over a thousand men, and another next door for around three hundred women. They were just a couple of hundred metres away from a river that they’d never see. And around them neighbourhood business went on as usual.

If you ignored the razor-wire fence, Mulawa looked like a school, with a few brown-brick buildings and some demountables. Inside those innocent-looking structures, however, were real cells.

Although I’d applied for a job in a jail, I was in no way prepared for the reality. For one thing, I was surrounded by more Aboriginal women than this city girl had ever seen in one place. Indigenous women made up one-third of the inmates according to the stats, but it seemed like three-quarters to me. Suddenly, after over twenty-five years of living in Australia, a deep sense of this country’s racism came rushing into my mind. After everything this country had been through with its people, why were these women still in slavery? Was this OK with everybody here?

It seemed to be fine with everyone else, so, scraping my jaw off the ground, I began to see the clients that wandered up to the cottage that held the welfare offices.

“Women are impossible to deal with,” said everyone who worked at Mulawa. “Men are so much easier. You tell women they can’t have a phone call and they want to know, ‘Why? Why? Why?’ And they go on about their kids or threaten to slash up. You tell blokes ‘No’ and they say, ‘OK, Miss.’”

Having not worked much with men, I didn’t know if this was true, and in any case I found that the inmates didn’t make extraordinary demands on me.

But it is true that jail is not the same set-up for women. There are very few men who act like crimwives. When men go to jail, there’s often a woman, a girlfriend or a mother who will maintain his life on the outside, look after his kids and his house. When a woman goes to jail, more often than not she risks losing the lot. The stakes are different. Women’s sentences are an average of six months, so their problems may not be as long term, but the short-term consequences are usually more severe.

For the first three weeks, I sat in with the Risk Intervention Team, composed of a nurse, a psychologist and a prison officer. Inmates reported to be at risk of self-harm or suicide were placed on an RIT order for a set time period, a week or two, and brought in as often as daily for an assessment by the team. They would be asked how they were going, and if there was anything they needed to discuss. Usually they would say that they were doing much better. They might say they wanted new jail greens or extra blankets, but whatever had brought them to the attention of RIT had since passed. This was pleasing to me, to see the crisis over. At the end of the review, which generally took five minutes, the prison officer would ask in the most relaxed way possible, “Do you think you’re going to have any thoughts of harming yourself at all?”

“No,” they would assure him.

“And if you do have any of those thoughts, you guarantee us that you will put your hand up?”

“Yes, of course,” they would say. They were then dismissed and the next case ushered in.

Then in one meeting, when I was starting to get a handle on this process and was thinking that maybe jail helped after all, an inmate put her hand up. She said that she wasn’t sure whether or not she was going to go back and hurt herself in her cell. She asked for help.

Within an hour she was in a safe cell, under cameras, with nothing but the clothes she was wearing. She was not allowed anything to read or eat or smoke. She was screaming out her regret, and I realised that what we had offered these women at risk was not what they received. The jail’s way of assisting those in danger of self-harm was to prevent any means of its happening – under lights and 24-hour surveillance, in a cell clear of hanging points. I could no longer go to RIT meetings and nod with certainty while the officer implored the women to avail themselves of help if they were having harmful thoughts. I couldn’t take part in the charade.

Any objection to a jail decision is met with one response: security. Security is the most important job of the jail. Security overrides everything. Besides, as psychologists, welfare, and drug and alcohol workers, we were all “Carebears,” crimlovers, neither blue nor green – so anything we said was seen to come straight from a bleeding but ignorant heart. Jail procedures come from a faceless jail god, and Jail Knows Best.

I came to know the handful of women who were in maximum security, “down the back” of the jail, the few who stayed in isolation cells for twenty-three hours a day because they were too dangerous to mix with the rest in the main. They were complex and intensive self-harmers, but the only intervention they received was having their cutlery taken away or their phone calls cut. There was also a re-rostering of staff around the time any of these five or six women started gaining trust in a staff member. Any progress made with a psych or case manager regressed immediately when they were told that they would no longer be seeing that person.

Their cells each had a tiny courtyard, which was open during the day. The women could sit there at the end of their cells and call out to each other, and see the sun. They went out one at a time for half an hour or an hour each day. I was referred to see one of them, and I sat on the ground outside her cell while we talked and smoked. Inmates were allowed to smoke in their cells, as it was considered their home. Finishing the discussion one afternoon, I made sure she got her cigarette lighter back. I knew how important an inmate’s property was to them.

I didn’t know that lighters were banned, or that the officers down the back had been watching me closely. I explained this to the governor the next day, when I was summoned to answer reports that I had deliberately armed an inmate with a lighter. The governor was understanding and said that since I was still new, she would treat it as a mistake. She told me we were simply having a conversation, not any kind of disciplinary meeting.

“You know what street-smart is?” she asked. “You need to get jail-smart.” She also mentioned that I should attend the training course that was a standard requirement for the role. I agreed.

So I kept to the rules that I knew and made some inroads in setting up programs, seeing women in their cells or in the office, and trying to triage those who were most at risk. Handing over the inmates’ problems to those in blue was not easy. Security overrides confidentiality, dignity and any other human rights you can name. I tried to keep it simple: Centrelink, Department of Community Services. Filling out forms.

The yard sweeper, Madison, was a transgender inmate, male to female, who had delighted in suing the department for discrimination to pay for her sex change. She’d been in jail a long time, first in men’s jails, and now in the far more placid but cattier women’s jails. Nothing fazed her now.

As we both waited for the guard to let us through a certain gate in the morning to go to our respective posts, Madison would talk to me. One day, while I was waiting for an inmate to attend an appointment, I stood outside the office cottage and smoked. Madison was also there smoking, and we chatted. The topic moved on to her operation.

“You were in jail at the time. Did it all go OK?” I asked her.

“Oh yes,” she exclaimed, and, lifting her shirt to reveal her naked chest, she grabbed her man-made breast and squeezed it. “I can even make milk!” She put her shirt down, and I calmly congratulated her.

I thought this would be easier to explain to the governor at our second meeting, since it was Madison, not me, who had been out of order. She’d done it in broad daylight, where a casual passer-by could have seen I had nothing to do with her actions. Why would I want to incite such behaviour, anyway?

The governor was again understanding, reminding me that there were appearances that had to be kept up in the presence of inmates, and that I had to keep learning to take charge. “You’ll get this a lot more once you’ve done your safety and security training,” she told me. By this time, I was booked in for the three-week course. Again she informed me that I was not being disciplined, and signed a meeting report with this outlined at the bottom.

Aside from these incidents, I was learning more about jail, its individual Standard Operating Procedure, and the competing cultures it housed.

The crim culture was a bucket of cold water dumped on my head. The well-meant belief that no one wants to go to jail is simply wrong. Plenty of people go to jail by choice. For some, being homeless in winter is harder than being in jail. Being with an abusive partner is another reason: women already involved in crime can see jail as an escape from the beatings.

And for the career criminals, jail can be a necessary evil, par for the course – even stress leave. One inmate told me she appreciated the break. She spent her time outside robbing bottles of wine from liquor stores to sell to restaurants cheaply. She said six months a year was plenty. The way she saw it, she could work for six months and go to jail for six months. Jail got everyone off her back for a while.

The first time a client referred to herself as a crim, I corrected her. “You don’t have to see yourself like that, you know,” I offered.

“Nah, Miss, I’m an excellent crim. I make heaps of cash on the outside.”

“Who am I, then,” I asked her and the universe, “to get in the way of an Australian and their jail?”

Freedom is like sobriety: it’s not everybody’s goal. The old joke says, “How many social workers does it take to change a light bulb? One, but the light bulb has to want to change.” As I worked, I learned daily that my imagined experience of jail was nothing like the real thing.