FROM THE INSIDE OUT

Where's the gain in sending women to prison for minor offences? Geesche
Jacobsen talks to five who've been behind bars.

Briony had been in trouble with the law since she was 12. After years of
community service orders and good behaviour bonds, she was jailed for a
robbery three years ago. It was not until she came to a halfway house in
March while on parole that she stopped using drugs for the first time in 13
years. By then she had lost her two children and 12 years of her life.

Briony wishes she had been sent for rehabilitation much earlier. "I think
my kids would be with me now," she says ruefully.

There is a long waiting list of women in jail who, like Briony, are hoping
to find a place in a halfway house to help them put their lives back
together. But Guthrie House, where Briony is staying, is the only
residential rehabilitation service for women in the whole of NSW - and it
offers just eight places.

The absence of such rehabilitation services has been condemned by a
parliamentary committee which has this week highlighted the escalating rate
at which the State is putting women in jail and has demanded that the
Government actively seek better options. (See panel, right.)

Briony is one of five women currently reclaiming their lives at Guthrie
House - all of them have been in jail, all of them have had drug problems
and all of them have children.

Tracey got heavily into drugs after her partner died, leaving her with
three young kids. "I just wasn't coping ... I had family support, but not
the support that I really needed."

She fell behind in the rent, was evicted, got caught stealing a car and
spent six weeks at the detox unit at Mulawa Detention Centre. "The girls
were picking on me. I was harassed by the officers. I was scared to leave
my cell. I decided there was no way I would go back there."

At Guthrie House she is free of drugs and says it has been her salvation:
"It was the only way for me to start afresh... I am doing very well."

Guthrie House co-ordinator Anne Webb makes the point that many of the women
who come to the sprawling 19th-century home in Sydney's inner west know how
to live in jail. "We train them how to live outof it."

Webb says of all the women who've stayed at Guthrie House in the last seven
years, only one had completed her HSC, and most had dropped out in years 7
or 8. Many were Aborigines. Others were abused by their families.

Guthrie House - Government-funded but managed by a community organisation -
has room for only the most marginalised women, those who would otherwise be
homeless when they got out of jail.

Its work takes time: "We can't overcome a lifetime of disadvantage in [a
few] months," says Webb. And while some women check themselves out after a
week and go back to their old ways, the recidivism rate of less than 30 per
cent is low, compared with the rest of the jail population. And so is the
cost. At $30,000 a year, it costs less than half what it does to keep a
woman in a NSW jail.

But Webb emphasises that there is more involved than money: "I think it is
more damaging to put the already damaged women into prison and expose them
to the brutalising experience."

But for Kelly, jail was, at least at first, a "blessing in disguise". She
had previously dropped out of detox centres after a few days but at Mulawa
she was forced to "dry out".

"I didn't like it ... but it did me good," she says.

But she quickly found there were few drug and alcohol counsellors, no
rehabilitation and no support.

There was a time when Kelly did not care about herself and felt she had
nothing to lose. She had been using heroin for 18 years, and thought she
was too old to start her life anew.

Now, after more than three months at Guthrie House, she is getting her life
back together, doing a computer course at TAFE and rebuilding the
relationsh ip with her family and children.

"Here I've grown up a lot. I am treated as an adult. In there [jail] there
is no encouragement. If you want to organise your life, they will help you
here."

Lisa joins the discussion to say her two days in jail for shoplifting,
while awaiting bail, were "the worst ... of [her] life", not least because
she lost her two young children, and now has to fight to get them back.

Lisa grew up on a housing commission estate in Toongabbie where, she says,
most people were using drugs, so she got into them, too. She concedes that
while she thought she "was a good mother ... maybe I was not looking after
the girls the way I should have."

Now she's clean and on bail, awaiting her court hearing. Her record at
Guthrie should help her stay out of jail. The thought of going back
horrifies her: "I would prefer to die."

While Lisa was in jail just days, Kerry spent five months at Mulawa after
breaching an AVO taken out by her former partner and torching a car. She
had problems with alcohol and drugs.

But what no-one knew was that she was sick - depressed and psychotic - but
she is finally receiving treatment.

She has learnt how to deal with harassment by her former partner, and now
wishes her medical problem had been treated earlier because she might then
have been spared time in prison.

Webb realises there is a role for jails but wonders what the value is for
those women who are in and out of them for decades on end. "The answer is
very much more places like this, a diversion from the system," she says.

Prison was no real punishment for Briony. But not much help either.

She saw a drug counsellor twice in five months, but decided to stay off
drugs to get out of prison. But if her parole request had been denied, and
she had been asked to serve out her term at Mulawa - till 2002 - she would
not have tried to stay off drugs. "I would have joined the others and
partied every night," she says.

"I would have walked out 20 times worse than when I went in."