Women Exiting Prison by Bree Carlton Marie Segrave

Author:Bree Carlton, Marie Segrave [Bree Carlton, Marie Segrave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415831536
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2014-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

Prison and its aftermath

Over the past 15 years, Australian states and territories have ‘managed’ post-release needs largely via ‘throughcare’ – a policy approach characterized by the ‘continuous, coordinated and integrated management of offenders’ from the offender’s first point of contact with correctional services ‘to their successful reintegration into the community and completion of their legal order’ (Clay 2002, 41). Throughcare aims to give offenders planned and case-managed opportunities for rehabilitation. Although the approach sounds reasonable in theory, there is little evidence that it is being implemented successfully, with disconnects between services and agencies at all points, lack of appropriate supports in the community and a punitive criminal justice culture that sees large numbers of people (especially those with mental and cognitive disability) being breached and returned to prison on technicalities. There are numerous problems with this approach (Baldry 2010), especially in relation to Indigenous women, as follows:

It is individualistic – while Indigenous women have agency, resilience and strengths, and are by no means mere ‘victims’ of systemic control or offending and violence against them in the community, throughcare arrangements, on the whole, ‘manage’ and ‘control’ persons who are being imprisoned and then released, fail them if they get ‘off track’, and do not (in fact can not) address the structural factors that have criminalized and framed these women’s lives.

It is founded on observations and studies of male prisoners and ex-prisoners in the United States and United Kingdom.

It ignores the fact that the majority of prisoners (the flow numbers rather than the static census numbers) are in prison for less than 12 months, and thus assumes that prisoners have adequate time in prison to develop case plans and attend programmes.

It assumes that supports in and after prison, and programmes and services for Indigenous women are appropriate and available; however, this is not generally the case (Baldry 2010; Bartels 2010).

It ignores the situation of remand prisoners, when in NSW, for example, a quarter of the prison population is on remand, with Indigenous women grossly overrepresented among remand prisoners.

It assumes an orderly process of arrest, court, sentencing, prison and release, which allows a plan to be made. This is so only in a small minority of cases, with the reality for most being that women are released directly from court after a period of remand, court dates are often changed, prisoners are moved from prison to prison, and prisoners’ families often face serious problems related to housing and other social matters due to the prisoner’s incarceration.

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