The Issue: ‘Jailing is Failing’
Australia spends 6 billion dollars a year on prisons, while prison populations and recidivism increases. Prison is detrimental and traumatising, it inhibits rehabilitation, is very expensive and does not keep the community safe (Justice Reform Initiative).
The violation of prisoners’ human rights may be something Australians associate with war-torn countries, however there are currently many imprisoned Australians experiencing human right violations (Brolan & Arley, 2018; Mackay, 2020). Most notably indigenous people and those living with disability who are hypercriminalised (Baldry, 2018; Dowse et al., 2021; McCausland & Baldry, 2023). Human rights violations in the Australian criminal system include the hyperincarceration and hyperpolicing of Indigenous people (Horton, 2022); abuse of prisoners by staff and other prisoners (Human Rights Watch, 2018); prison isolation and indefinite detention (McGee, 2019); detention of children (Grewcock, 2009) and abuse in juvenile detention (Fitz-Gibbon, 2018); the overuse of remand (Carcach & Grant, 2020); abuses related to overcrowding in some Australian prisons (Mackay, 2020; Simpson et al., 2019), and police brutality (Porter & Prenzler, 2012). These violations were reported in the recent “Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture (OPCAT) report on the Australian criminal justice system”.
Impacts of experiencing these violations are reported in research on the health and wellbeing of criminal justice involved individuals, particularly those who have spent time in prison. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW) confirms that these individuals have higher rates than the general population of mental health disorders, chronic physical disease, communicable disease, tobacco smoking, high-risk alcohol consumption, and illicit use of drugs (AIHW, 2018). Criminal justice scholars confirm these findings showing that criminal justice involved individuals, pre- and post-incarceration, are disadvantaged in many measures of the social determinates of health and justice (McCausland & Baldry, 2023).
These individuals are said to die at extremely high rates (Binswanger et al., 2007; Ranapurwala et al., 2018), have elevated rates of unemployment (Western & Sirois, 2019), homelessness (Bashir et al., 2021), and re-arrest (Morrison et al., 2019). These inequities are significantly worse for Indigenous people who are incarcerated. From his report on the ‘unequal justice’ suffered by Indigenous Australians the former Chief Justice of Western Australia, Wayne Martin states that, “Indigenous men are imprisoned at 11 times the rate of the general population, Indigenous women at 15 times the rate of the general population, and Indigenous youth at 25 times the rate of non-Indigenous youth” (Martin, 2018, p. 35).
People who have been incarcerated are some of the most highly stigmatized people in the world (LeBel, 2021), often suffering stigma and marginalization for the entirety of their lives post incarceration. Additionally, the multiple and intersecting forms of stigma, including self-stigma have very negative impacts on their health.
The Project:
The Drawing Free virtual exhibition is an output of an arts-based research study that is a part of the “Phenomenology of Violence: Investigating Subjective Experience of Violence for Justice Theory and Practice” project at the Justice Health Program, UNSW, Sydney. It resulted from findings of human rights abuses in Australian prisons reported by research participants. The arts-based study – “Expressions of abuse and agency: Art-making addresses human rights violations in the Australian Criminal Justice System” was inductive, grounded in arts- and community-based participatory research (CBPR) (Leavy, 2022), the integrated knowledge translation (IKT) method (Krendler, 2018), and it takes an offender-based approach (Topalli et al., 2020).
Arts-based research was chosen because it can generate self-insight, reach suppressed feelings, support the development of agency, and elicit the rich subjective data required by this project (Visse, Hansen & Leget, 2019). Seed funding from the Australian Human Rights Institute, supported the design and facilitation of a day-long arts-based research workshop focused on experiences of incarceration. It ran in September 2024 with 9 people who had lived experience of imprisonment.
Participants art works and their stories are the focus of this virtual exhibition and provide the data for the “Expressions of abuse and agency: Art-making addresses human rights violations in the Australian Criminal Justice System” project.
Acknowledgements
We wish to thank the nine individuals who participated in the arts-based research workshop. This exhibition would not have been possible without their courage and commitment to the project, and their generosity in so openly sharing their experiences of imprisonment.
Many Thanks to
The Australian Human Rights Institute, who funded the Expressions of Abuse and Agency project.
The CSNSW Violent Offenders Therapeutic Program – Maintenance and Outreach Team for their support.
Professor Rebecca Ivers and the School of Population Health, UNSW, for their support of the project.
Associate Professor Daniel Joyce for his time and generous advice.
Dr Jane Hwang, Dr Paul Simpson in the Justice Health Program at UNSW; Professor Prue Vines, UNSW’s School of Law, and Associate Professor Adrienne Withall, UNSW’s School of Psychology, for their advice and support.
Associate Professor Sally Nathan, UNSW’s School of Population, and Ms Jane Costello, Positive Life NSW, for their help.
Professor Eileen Baldry AO, UNSW’s School of Criminology, for her time and advice.
Lyndelle Barnett, Barrister, for her generous support and advice.
Rev. Andrew Collis and the South Sydney Uniting Church, for hosting the Workshop.
Stephanie at The Catering Specialists, Sydney, for her delicious food that sustained us through the day of the Workshop.
Mr Joel Carteret, Stories in Motion, for Video filming and editing.
Mr Ricardo Moreira, Composition and Music.
Ms Paula Schalke, Workshop Assistance, Audio Transcription, Stills Photography, and assistance with exhibition design.
Ms Belinda Browne for her generous and timely transcription services.
The Image library
The workshop participants each received a copy of the image library to support the creation of their art works. It provided suggestions for techniques that could be used such as ways to use colour to suggest emotion. However, as suggested in the Image Library, the art works in it were not there to copy.
References:
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