Penal reform,anti-carceral feminist campaigns and the politics of change in women’s prisons,Victoria,Australia

Introduction

Feminist critiques of penal change in women’s prisons have documented reform programs and their unintended gendered consequences (see Carlen, 1990; Davis, 2003; Hannah-Moffat, 2001; Hayman, 2006). This paper builds upon this important literature, but with a different focus upon the use of reformist strategies within anti-carceral feminist campaigns. The objective is to explore how such campaigns have shaped trajectories of penal change in Victoria, Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. This paper focuses on the 1993 ‘Save Fairlea’ prison protests that above all aimed to end the discriminatory practice of segregating women to men’s maximum-security prisons for punishment. Through the lens of this campaign, it is possible to highlight the particular ways that critiques and strategies have been used to advance anti-carceral feminist visions and actions. The ultimate purpose is to generate new insights about how best to navigate the risks and possibilities associated with the pursuit of reformist strategies in relation to the abolition project.

The campaign to save Fairlea was first and foremost aligned with the concerns and actions by women imprisoned in Fairlea. These campaigns were coalitional by nature (see Thuma, 2015) in that they involved feminist activists engaged in social change work through women’s only organisations and lobbying groups such as the prostitutes collective; government education; community development and advocacy organisations in areas such as the arts, legal, housing, health organisations and trade unions. This paper argues that a defining factor driving the popular groundswell and support for anti-carceral feminist campaigns in the 1980s and 1990s was that campaigners connected critiques and actions to struggles beyond the women’s prison. In this sense, challenging and transforming the continuum of structural violence and injustice spanning from prison to the community have been absolutely fundamental to anti-carceral feminist movements over time.

This paper is divided into two parts. First, I outline the methodological approach and provide a snapshot of the key events that comprise the foundation for analysis. I examine the strategies enacted by anti-carceral feminist coalitions in Victoria in order to illustrate the approaches taken to navigate the risks and possibilities associated with implementing reformist strategies in action. My intention is to demonstrate the reformist strategies and engagements related to system lobbying and direct action, and how these were negotiated through anti-discrimination campaigns in Victoria and namely the ‘Save Fairlea’ protests. The analysis illustrates how these strategies were operationalized to advance anti-carceral feminist visions for change. The coalitional nature of these campaigns and actions was a key factor in positioning and connecting anti-carceral feminist critiques and struggles to other social change movements and campaign work during this significant period. Before proceeding, I define and locate anti-carceral feminism against the body of abolitionist theorising, politics and practice.

The intersections between penal reformism, anti-carceral feminist and abolition social movements

I use the term anti-carceral feminism to characterise a movement grounded in intersectional feminist critiques, strategies, actions driven to struggle against and undermine structures of oppression that give rise to violence and injustice (see Harris, 2011; Thuma, 2014). These structures of oppression are understood by anti-carceral feminists to comprise an interconnected web spanning civil society and the state, forming the basis of institutions of criminal justice and so the imperative is ultimately to dismantle them. Anti-carceral feminism can perhaps be better understood in direct opposition to the resurgence of carceral feminism problematised by Davis (2016: 138–139) as ‘feminisms that call for the criminalisation and incarceration of those who engage in gender violence’, i.e. sexual assault, family violence. The consequence of this approach as Davis (2016: 139) argues, is to turn to institutions inevitably defined by vectors of oppression (race, class, gender, sexuality) and ‘heteropatriarchy’ ¹ as solutions: ‘so simply by focusing on the individual as if the individual were an aberration, we inadvertently engage in the process of reproducing the very violence that we assume we are contesting’.

In contrast, abolitionism is an umbrella term that covers a diverse cross section of political critiques, visions and activist practices that ultimately strive for the eradication of prisons, policing and surveillance. Prison abolitionists aim for the long-term goal of dismantling criminal justice institutions in addition to the logics and technologies that fortify its legitimisation and expansion (Russell and Carlton, 2013: 476). However, whilst fundamentally there are overlaps between the abolition and anti-carceral feminist projects, a central difference lies in the focus of abolition critiques and action. Particularly those that have emerged through critical criminology have traditionally been focused on institutional punishment and criminal justice (Mathiesen, 2000; Ruggiero, 2010; Scraton, 2016). In contrast, anti-carceral feminist critiques identify and target strategies and campaigns to resist what they see as a clear continuum between intersectional structures of subordination, oppression and violence and their institutional manifestation. I argue it is this very distinction that made the Victorian campaigns and Fairlea protests so visionary in terms of their capacity to galvanise widespread community attention, support and participation beyond the walls and struggles associated with the women’s prison.

Abolitionism continues to occupy a marginal position in debates regarding the role and politics of reform in penal change. Reviving critical engagement on this front is vital not least because the revalorisation of reform as an antidote to the over-use of prison, and particularly through its more radical iterations as reductionist in providing alternatives to institutional punishment has been simultaneous with the proliferation of imprisonment and its profound social and economic costs (Davis, 2003; Gilmore, 2009; Sim, 2009). However, equally and as the history of anti-carceral feminist activism in Victoria illustrates, direct actions occurring across social movements and struggles against structural injustice within the community and in prison are vital preconditions for the simultaneous positioning of reformist strategies within abolitionist politics and action.

Until recently, the sociology of punishment canon has privileged accounts of punitive and retributive cultures to theorise and explain trends in mass incarceration and the revalorisation of prison as a contemporary solution for dealing with crime (Garland, 2001). However, currently emerging critiques argue this focus obscures the paradoxical position of penal reform and its historical relationship to the expansion of imprisonment (Baldry et al., 2015; Cunneen et al., 2013; Farrall et al., 2016; Ruggiero, 2010; Scraton, 2016; Ugelvik, 2014). Moreover, recent accounts complicate these grand narratives insofar as they have sought to better understand how penal power has been altered as a result of shifts in practice. These theorisations have been concerned with how systems of disciplinary control have been reconfigured through non-punitive means, i.e. via rehabilitation and reform (Hannah-Moffat and Lynch, 2012). For example, there has been a contemporary revival of reform programs purported to mitigate the harms and repeat cycles of incarceration and redress the needs and experiences of disadvantaged and vulnerable groups within the system. Abolitionists have documented the various ways such programs have fortified social reliance upon the prison as the central modern sanction of punishment and social control (Brown and Hogg, 1985; Fitzgerald and Sim, 1982; Scraton, 2016; Sim, 2009). Indeed the growing numbers of disadvantaged people entering the system renders the paradoxical relationship between reform and expansion a pressing concern.

There is a newly emergent critical scholarship evaluating the revalorisation of reform discourses and agendas to mitigate the effects of mass incarceration and its impacts upon socially disadvantaged groups. However, there has yet to be a substantive contribution, canvassing the politics of penal change and the specific ways that campaign critiques and actions have informed institutional reform and by extension contributed to expansion.

Elsewhere with Carlton and Russell (2015), I have traced anti-carceral feminist systemic advocacy ² and campaign work against shifts in system change in Victorian women’s prisons in the 1980s and 1990s. There is a need to understand how feminists have in practice and over sustained periods simultaneously balanced reform or systemic lobbying with direct action and the implications of this work within the broader trajectory of change in women’s prisons in Victoria. There are two points of contributory significance in this analysis. First, a campaign-centered analysis examines the place of reform and systemic lobbying in relation to feminist abolition campaign critiques and strategies. It is argued that such campaigns yield new insights, given that abolitionists have yet to reconcile the paradoxical position of reform and its relationship to abolition politics and strategy.

The second contribution of this paper is to yield new insights regarding the intersections between intersectional feminist activism and abolition theorising and action. There is a radical tradition generated by feminist scholars, imprisoned intellectuals, activist researchers and advocates that places women at the centre of abolition analysis and action (Berger, 2014; Carlen, 1990; Davis, 2003, 2016; Law, 2009; Sudbury, 2005, Thuma, 2014, 2015). As Thuma (2014: 28) and Law (2009) have argued the occurrence of resistance in women’s prisons and the analysis of these contributions has for a time remained at the margins and peripheral to prison abolition social movements, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. This is certainly illustrated with reference to the work of European abolitionists led by Thomas Mathiesen.

Mathiesen’s (2000) seminal work provides a fundamental basis informing understandings for how official neutralisation and legitimation techniques, i.e. reform, work to defuse social change ideas and initiatives in ways that ensure the ideological and practical life of the modern prison (Mathiesen, 2000: 46). Historically, others have also responded to such critiques in seeking to explicate the opportunities and risks that arise when engaging in systemic advocacy and reform processes (see Brown and Hogg, 1985; Carlen, 1990; Fitzgerald and Sim, 1982). As with many of the European and critical criminological abolition scholars, Mathiesen’s critique prioritises the experience of men’s prisons and corresponding campaigns when these are qualitatively distinct from anti-carceral feminist campaigns. With the exception of recently emerging critical studies focused on the politics of cooption and the effects of reform-centred change in women’s imprisonment and in the post-release realm (Carlen and Tombs, 2006; Hayman, 2006), there remain few abolitionist analyses and accounts explicitly grounded in the experience of feminist anti-carceral campaigns and their use of and engagement with penal reformism.

In the 1970s and 1980s in the US, Australia and Canada, feminist anti-carceral social movements sprung up. In this paper, I draw from the work of Thuma (2014, 2015) in my development of the term anti-carceral feminism, which she has developed to refer to coalitional intersectional feminist campaign work undertaken within the US in the 1970s and 1980s. The historical critiques and strategies underpinning this movement were specifically aligned with institutional sites such as hospitals and prisons and developed distinct critiques and methods of action (Thuma, 2014, 2015). Thuma (2014: 28) demonstrates within her study of campaigns targeting the ‘prison to hospital’ pipelines in 1970s Massachusetts that women’s prisons functioned as ‘lightening rod for cross-movement coalition building and as a catalyst for intersectional feminist organizing and thinking’. Social action in this context was driven by a new form of intersectional feminism grounded in the appreciation of the interrelationships between the structural forces of capitalism, racism, patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality and institutionalisation. Moreover, campaign work was driven by critiques grounded in the recognition that there is an interrelationship between institutional and state-generated forms of violence and multiple structures of oppression (Thuma, 2015). The result of this approach, as documented through Thuma’s study, was to open up possibilities for new coalitional organising strategies, cross-movement fertilisation and the realisation of innovative community decarceration and social change projects extending beyond systemic investment marked by reform and lobbying. These possibilities are certainly epitomised through the anti-discrimination campaigns and ‘Save Fairlea’ protests, which provide critical illustrations of how anti-carceral feminist approaches have shaped possibilities for change in Victoria.

According to Harris, transformative change encompasses critiques, strategies, actions (including those that are reformist) driven towards altering and dismantling intersecting and mutually reinforcing structures of oppression and violence that span from the community to conventional criminal justice institutions (see Harris, 2011: 17). Anti-carceral feminists actively documented the movement’s strategies and actions as one campaigner reflected: ‘it’s important to record our history of the struggle – if we don’t do it, nobody else will and therefore we will be written out of history’ (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 21 December 1993). Campaign accounts in this context were strategically compiled to document alternative critiques, strategies and action. They enable focus upon the challenges posed by abolitionists and how these are targeted to work simultaneously within and against the system to disrupt the authority and legitimacy of the institution; pre-empt official responses; pressure for short-term and long-term reforms in the interests of institutional change. By extension such analyses have powerful potential to uncover the practical ways that reform has been harnessed and used strategically to serve decarceration and transformative change rather than being tied to the aims and values that drive system focused critiques, reform programs and prison expansion. ³

As stated above, the term ‘anti-carceral’ captures the concerns of a movement driven to undermine and dismantle the structural injustices that shape practices of criminalisation and imprisonment. The powerful potential that lay in links forged between liberatory struggles and social movements and anti-carceral campaigns is documented elsewhere (Berger, 2014; Davis, 2016). Historically in Victoria and other South Eastern Australian States such as New South Wales and Queensland anti-carceral feminist critiques have sought to highlight the continuum between structural injustices experienced by women in communities and the prison. This focus has translated into a strength of allegiances between women’s prison struggles and external campaign work linked to a range of social movements including anti-colonial occupation struggles, trade unionism, women’s and refugee rights (Baldry et al., 2015; Brown and Hogg, 1985; Carlton, 2007; Zdenkowski and Brown, 1982). In this way, campaigners sought to transform the intersectional oppressions and injustices driving the discriminatory criminalisation of women (particularly indigenous and migrant women) and also men in the community. This focus has been central to determining the extent through which anti-carceral feminist campaigns in Victoria have managed to mobilise public involvement and support, in addition to cross movement solidarities. The implications for prison-focused social movements and their strategies in the present are that reformist strategies pursued through the abolition project may only be transformative and liberatory in the longer term if they are informed by a broader politics and pursuit of social change. That is the critiques and the actions they inform must be levelled beyond the prison as a site of struggle for change.

Tinkering from within penal systems in order to improve conditions even out of necessity leads to expansion. Reform poses the biggest risk when it is invested in as the sole avenue for change. Spade (2011) argues this is the case with reference to three key points. First that often reforms change only what the law or policy says about what a system is doing, rather than practices. This is manifest through the failure of system responses to alter or redress structural or systemic conditions, which give rise to injustice. Second, Spade (2011) argues that reform has the effect of refining a system in ways that facilitate its capacity to target the most vulnerable people, whilst only reducing contact with the less vulnerable. Third, and perhaps most significantly, he argues that state reform projects often provide precursors, rationales and justifications for the expansion of harmful systems. Spade’s analysis is widely illustrated with reference to penal reform programs in their various iterations and their impacts in the US, UK, Canada and the US (Carlen, 1990; Hayman, 2006; Russell and Carlton, 2013; Shaylor, 2009). Whilst this paper does not aim to examine the impacts of women’s penal reform per se, it can certainly be argued given the trajectory of expansion in Victorian women’s prisons over the past three decades that reform developments have coincided with considerable expansion albeit this link requires further exploration (Russell and Carlton, 2013).

In a similar way to analysis being needed to foreground the potential that reform can have as a resistance strategy, it is also necessary to interrogate the assumed relationship between reform and rehabilitation. Reform is associated with critiques of harsh prison conditions and attempts to change the system. At the same time, it is aligned with system consolidation and expansion. Shaylor (2009) argues that the penal system’s co-option of the rhetoric of rehabilitation obscures the further entrenchment of imprisonment through new construction, population growth and financial investments. Critiques in Canada, the UK and the US (Pollack, 2011; Shaylor, 2009) continue to illustrate this has certainly been the case with women’s imprisonment, where gender justice frameworks have been implemented purportedly in order to address the disadvantaged position of criminalised and incarcerated women (Bloom et al., 2003). The paradox here again is that anti-carceral feminist work in these contexts has been central to the development and implementation of expansionary reform agendas designed to better address women’s needs in prison (Russell and Carlton, 2013; Carlton and Russell, 2015).

It is clear that punitive policy discourses continue to dictate expansionary trends in states with capitalist economies. However concurrently, we have seen a revival of discourses focused on the rhetoric of rehabilitation and reform (Farrall et al., 2016; Scraton, 2016). Not surprisingly, carceral net-widening and expansion have occurred in tandem with rehabilitation and reform programs and purported reductionism led by practitioners in places such as the US, where re-entry support services and structures have contributed to increased regulation and control of criminalised populations (Shaylor and Meiners, 2013). This is illustrated by way of a plethora of examples associated with restorative justice, justice reinvestment, therapeutic justice mechanisms and special courts for example (Cunneen et al., 2013). In Victoria, these developments are starkly illustrated by the most recent ‘Ravenhall Prison Project’, a newly constructed prison serving as a site for a range of new programs and initiatives. The Ravenhall project will ultimately provide more prison beds and for higher prisoner numbers in the Victorian system. However, the Department of Justice Victoria argues it provides a foundation for reducing imprisonment and recidivism among the Victorian prison population (Department of Justice Victoria, 2015). It justifies these aims on the basis of a new suite of rehabilitative programs and a ‘payment by results’ approach, which sets key performance indicators based on rates of recidivism for private prison contractors to meet. This development comes on the back of a decade when imprisonment and reoffending rates among women particularly have peaked at unprecedented levels (Department of Justice Victoria, 2015; see also Ombudsman Victoria, 2014, 2015).

In the UK, Carlen and Tombs (2006) have termed the phenomenon of ‘reintegration industries’ to describe the packages of correctionalist programs and policies targeting rehabilitation rather than punishment. In the wake of such discourses, innumerable system measures have been implemented to make prisons ‘healthier’ or ‘therapeutic’ in order to redress the ever-increasing experiences of disadvantage by growing sectors of prison populations. A key example of these responses is Canada, where the significant reforms in the women’s federal prison system following on from the Taskforce Report in the 1990s and the development of ‘Healing Lodges’ for ‘low-risk’ Aboriginal prisoners (Faith, 1999; Hayman, 2006), led to new forms of racialised and gendered punishment and higher prisoner numbers. Goldson and Coles (2005) have also demonstrated how attempts to integrate therapeutic programs in Young Offender Institutions in the UK have paradoxically led to more children being sent to prison and higher rates of self-harm and deaths in custody.

Mobilising activist knowledge: Methodological approach

Theorised accounts of anti-carceral feminist praxis have been relegated to the margins of the critical criminological abolition canon (see Law, 2009; Thuma, 2014). This project addresses this absence by analysing documents generated through a decade of feminist critique, labour, strategising, organising and action that was self-documented and undertaken at the coalface of campaigns for change in women’s prisons in Victoria. Examples of parallel movements can be identified within other South-Eastern Australian States New South Wales and Queensland and also internationally in Canada and the United States (Cook and Davies, 1999; Sudbury, 2005).

The research focuses predominantly on archives generated through multiple campaigns and penal reform programs occurring between 1982 and 2011. The methodological approach governing data collection and analysis can be characterised as the excavation of activist knowledge sources mapped against a genealogical reconstruction of penal reform programs within women’s prisons (see Carlton, 2007; Carlton and Russell, 2015).

Materials that inform this analysis draw from multiple actions manifest in systemic lobbying, direct action and legal advocacy that fall under campaigns to end the punitive segregation of women to men’s maximum-security prisons that peaked between 1991 and 1993. Sources include historical women’s penal reform archives, reports and documents from the Department of Justice Resource Centre collection in Victoria in conjunction with extensive personal legal archives supplied by campaigners. They relate to the Equal Opportunity Anti-Discrimination Inquiry and direct actions concerned with the segregation of women to men’s prisons for punishment (see Carlton and Russell, 2015).

Much of the labour associated with campaign work during this time was dedicated to reformist lobbying, documenting policy failures, discriminatory practices, women’s complaints regarding prison conditions and anti-carceral feminist tactics and actions. As one campaigner Jude McCulloch (Interview, August 2016) established: ‘We did our best to get alternative sources, to create a paper trail, to hold people to account, in a context where there [was] massive impunity and [we] hoped that in some ways that served as a restraining factor on power’. The activist files contain documents related to legal advocacy, prisoner complaints, inquiries, policy development and activist campaigns undertaken by Community Legal Centres, community organisations (e.g. women’s post-release support agency Flat Out) ⁴ and other individuals and community workers involved in campaigning in different ways and at different times. There is also a comprehensive file including photographic records and protest diaries compiled during the course of the Fairlea Vigil Protests in 1993. The diaries contain hundreds of written entries, protest flyers, phone trees, vigil rules and instructions for participants compiled by advocates, former and released prisoners, prisoner families and protesters documenting events of the campaign.

A select sample of semi-structured interviews has been undertaken to deepen the analysis of archival data. To date these have been completed with nine campaigners. One interview has been conducted with the ex-Director of Prisons and the Anti-Discrimination Commissioner Moira Rayner who led the 1993 Inquiry into allegations of discriminatory conditions at Barwon Prison. All the above sources comprise the basis for this analysis (Carlton and Russell, 2015).

‘We wish you weren’t here but we don’t want you to go!’ Anti-carceral feminist activism in Victoria

The 1993, ‘Save’ Fairlea Women’s Prison protests mark a watershed moment after a sustained decade of anti-carceral feminist campaigns dedicated to reducing women’s imprisonment and its discriminatory excesses in Victoria, Australia. These formal submissions, legal actions and protests, including various staged ‘WRING OUTS’ ⁵ peaked with government plans to close Victoria’s only women’s prison for cost-cutting purposes in favour of transferring the women to the Jika Jika High-Security Unit located within the men’s Pentridge Prison. ⁶ This controversial move followed decade-long campaigns to redress Dickensian conditions and discriminatory treatment experienced by women due to a complete absence of public policy, transparency and awareness regarding their experiences (Fairlea Research Group, 1982; George, 1993). Conditions experienced by women during the 1970s right up until the late 1980s that were cause for concern included: the punitive use of segregation for women deemed unmanageable or a security risk to men’s maximum-security prisons, brutality and assault, behavioural modification drugs and forced sterilisations, lack of access to quality medical care and rehabilitative programs and the separation of children from mothers in prison (Burnup, Hancock, Cook Interview, 2013).

Complaints by women about brutal transfers to and conditions in men’s prisons comprised one particular practice that galvanised campaign attention. One illustrative case was the transfer of a group of women to Pentridge G Division in November 1988. The transfer occurred following a peaceful sit in on the prison oval by Fairlea women prisoners over the treatment of an Aboriginal woman who had attempted suicide. The Federation of Community Legal Centres reported prisoner allegations of ‘a commando style raid at Fairlea women’s prison. Whilst the women were preparing their dinner in their units they were surrounded by the riot squad wearing bright orange boiler suits, gas masks and helmets carrying what prisoners believe were tear gas canisters’ (Federation of Community Legal Centres [Hereafter FCLC], 1988). On arrival in Pentridge’s G Division, women were faced with deplorable conditions: ‘the cell floors [were] flooded, human excreta and vomit [were] on prisoner’s blankets, medical equipment [was] on unwashed filthy floors, after two days of not being allowed a change of clothes and being refused permission to wash their own, the women were issued with male underpants and trousers’ (FCLC, 1988). Whilst officials maintained that segregation in this case was a last resort strategy to manage a ‘hard-core’ and ‘unmanageable’ group of women (Interview Griffin, 2015), the conditions remain emblematic of the punitive treatment experienced in similar post–protest transfers of women to the Divisions of Pentridge. These were also subject to vehement challenge by campaigners.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Government responded to arising anti-discrimination claims and campaigns (see Carlton and Russell, 2015) with the Agenda for Change, which encompassed a blueprint for introducing policies, practices and programs for women in the Victorian prison system (Office of Corrections [hereafter OOC], 1990: 12) ⁷ . However, at this time, the OOC made the paradoxical and controversial move of pursuing what was referred to as a ‘co-ed corrections’ platform and it commissioned a ‘women’s section’ within the men’s Barwon Prison. This was implemented even as the OOC (1990: 19) documents simultaneously acknowledged that housing women in male facilities had historically contributed to (their) discrimination, arising from competition with male prisoners for resources and the use of facilities. In this context, discriminatory and harmful practices, in line with those described above in G Division, continued to proliferate and in some cases these escalated in response to women’s protests in Fairlea (Federation Community Legal Centres [FCLC], 1991).

After sustained campaign efforts by the women held in Fairlea and anti-carceral campaigners on the outside in 1993, the Equal Opportunity Commissioner at the time Moira Rayner launched investigations into conditions in the women’s section of Barwon Prison (Equal Opportunity Commission Victoria [EOCV], 1993). It is unsurprising that the Commission of Inquiry found prima facie evidence of discrimination (EOCV, 1993). The Victorian OCCs refused to cooperate with the conciliation process that followed (Rayner, 2015). It was at this time that official plans to close Fairlea Women’s Prison and transfer women to the refurbished Jika Jika High-Security Unit were publicly leaked.

The ‘Save Fairlea’ vigil was immediately established. Protesters at the vigil maintained a 24 hours a day seven days per week presence over several months. The vigil aimed to prevent the transfer of women and closure of Fairlea as a short-term and emergency harm reduction strategy. The defining campaign slogan, ‘We wish you weren’t here but we don’t want you to go’, highlights the contradictory stance taken in defending against the prison’s closure (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 5 July 1993). However, it was clearly maintained that the critiques and actions driving this campaign aimed to abolish women’s prisons.

The protest mobilised considerable public concern including community members wishing to offer support, schools, students, other activists, politicians, media, OCCs staff and prison officers and released men, women and their families. As Fairlea was located on crown land, there was little the authorities could do to move protesters. With its colorful sea of tarps, banners and painted slogans, campfires and a caravan donated by the Clerks’ Union (Australian Services Union), the vigil became a campaign headquarters and focal point for political organising. Protestors monitored movements and events at the prison gates and documented the campaign through collectively kept diaries and photographs (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 1993). Each time rumors emerged of the imminent transfer of women to Jika Jika, hundreds of protesters descended to blockade the prison gates.

Following seven months in December 1993, official plans to move women to Pentridge were abandoned. The OOC announced that the Victorian prison system would be privatised (Department of Justice Victoria, 16 December 1993). Fairlea would after a short time close in favour of a new privately operated and managed women’s prison. Campaigns to end the punitive segregation of women within men’s prisons and also to pressure for the introduction of women-specific correctional policies, facilities and programs to better redress the needs of women had been a focus of anti-carceral feminist campaigns since 1982 (Fairlea Research Group [FRG], 1982). In many ways, campaigners initially believed these developments marked a significant win. However, they also knew that privatisation would bring higher prisoner numbers and overcrowding, cost-cutting of programs and services, deregulated labour conditions for prison staff and poor conditions, increased risks of harm and reduced transparency and accountability. In the aftermath of the Government announcement, there was uncertainty as suggested by one campaigner: ‘Now with our victory we are in a state of flux and need to think seriously about the future direction and nature of the campaign’ (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 16 December 1993).

The announced closure of Fairlea and the campaigns preceding it represent a defining moment of resistance and penal change in Victoria’s history. The analysis that follows uses this moment to explore the implications of anti-carceral feminist critiques, strategies and campaigns and both the risks and possibilities engendered in engaging reform in struggles to transform and ultimately dismantle women’s prisons.

‘Saving Fairlea’: Anti-carceral feminist strategies of reformism and action

In the 1990s, the announcement of Government plans to delay the closure of Fairlea in conjunction with privatisation invoked initial confusion amongst campaigners about whether the campaign had been ‘won’ (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 15–25 December 1993). The vigil played a significant role in achieving the end to discriminatory segregation practices. However, campaigners immediately began to reflect upon the multiplicity of issues raised by privatisation: ‘I’m wondering if it really is a victory … Fairlea will stay open until a new private prison is built … we have to consider the aim of the campaign and the best tactical move now. Is the aim to keep Fairlea? Keep women out of Jika? Keep a women’s only prison? Stop private prisons? Fairlea will only stay open for the foreseeable future. Is this enough?’ (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 12 December 1993). The diaries reflect a perceptible awareness that, whilst achieving victory in one sense, privatisation would bring expansion (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 15–25 December 1993).

Whilst historically abolitionists emphasise the dualism of reform versus abolition, anti-carceral feminist strategies in Victoria suggest this may be a simplistic characterisation, given the ways that reformist lobbying have informed actions and change beyond the walls of prison. It is the particular way in which these campaigns have been organised and strategised, which have enabled reform to be used to in radical ways to inform simultaneous resistance and direct actions for change. Anti-discrimination complaints and the Fairlea vigil provide good examples to elucidate both the risks and transformative benefits of this kind of anti-carceral work in practice. They also highlight the particular approach of anti-carceral feminist campaign work, which was driven to subvert official discourses about reform and centre women’s experiences and voices. Non-violent or hierarchical forms of organising and creativity were at the basis of all direct actions and protests. Also implicit in all these campaigns was a radical critique identifying the continuum between institutionally and state generated violence and multiple axes of structural oppression, patriarchy, racism, capitalism and hetereonormativity (Fitzroy Legal Service, 1988).

As stated above, campaigners pursued lobbying to end the brutal treatment and harming of women in prison as an abolitionist strategy (George, 1993). This is because it was fundamental to the concerns and survival of women inside. Prior to the Fairlea vigil conditions escalated inside and with the imminent promise that more women may be subjected to the brutal practice of segregation to men’s prisons, direct actions by the campaign were stepped up in response. George (1999: 196) was candid in acknowledging the seeming contradictory approaches necessitated through the pursuit of reformist agendas that culminated with the ‘Save Fairlea’ protests:

We were conscious of the contradiction that many of us who were abolitionists were campaigning to keep a prison open. However, our campaign to save the prison never minimised the problems of Fairlea or the futility of incarceration. We spoke of bashings by former governors and officers, psychological games that were de rigueur, women who were left to rot in observation cells, women who were suicidal being taunted by officers. 13000 strip-searches of Fairlea’s 100 or so women prisoners in the two years before its closure.

Mathiesen’s (1974, 2000) identification of the distinction between ‘reformist’ and ‘non-reformist’ reforms has fuelled debates about the place of reform in abolitionist strategy and many other abolitionists have critiqued the adequacy of Mathiesen’s framework (Brown and Hogg, 1985). In these debates, there has been some focus on how activists might pre-emptively identify threshold points where reforms can yield revolutionary change or conversely only work to fortify and restore the current system and its legitimacy (Faith, 1999). However, anti-carceral feminist campaigns highlight how such outcomes are less the point for abolitionists wishing to transform and dismantle systems.

Theories of action do not resolve the tensions and risks identified by Mathiesen and others about the contexts through which reform can serve as a liberatory tool. Rather and as the accounts of anti-carceral feminist campaigns illustrate, reform can directly inform work that is aligned with the imperatives of those who are imprisoned, serving as a trigger point for actions (whether lobbying or protesting) to prevent harm and death. Equally and as the anti-discrimination campaigns and ‘Save Fairlea’ vigil demonstrate, the simultaneous use of direct action and intersectional feminist organising in practice provided vital gains in the process of subverting public discourses on criminalised women, which is a fundamental pre-cursor for longer term dismantling and transformative change.

This can be vividly illustrated with reference to the systemic education campaigns and cross-movement solidarities facilitated through the creative direct actions surrounding Fairlea and the anti-discrimination case. The formation of ‘coalitional’ spaces, cross-movement fertilisation and a plethora of militant and effective ‘campaigns within campaigns’ is a hallmark of intersectional feminist campaign work that emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s both in Australia and regions such as the US and UK (Thuma, 2014). This latter point is critical, given that the fundamental challenge for abolitionism as a structural change project has always been to anchor its focus upon struggles located beyond prison walls (Sim, 2009). This requires identifying the continuum between social inequalities and broader forms of injustice, violence and harm within the community to the prison in order to ground and assist social change and dismantling. To focus in this way invokes a truly anti-carceral critique that is aligned with strategy and action. As Thuma (2014) demonstrates with reference to similar movements against behavioural modification practices in women’s prisons in 1970s Massachusetts US, this approach can open up spaces for anti-carceral strategies transcending reform such as grass roots public education, community safety interventions and visions of and alternatives to mass incarceration.

In Victorian campaigns in the 1990s, cross-fertilisation of movements occurred and solidarities fostered with trade unions, asylum seeker advocates, environmental groups, anti-racism and Aboriginal land rights struggles, to name a few. These allegiances were made possible through what Thuma (2014) characterises as an intersectional feminist critique and approach to coalitional organising, which fundamentally operated through a process of identifying and linking connections between structures of oppression along lines of race, class, sexuality and gender that give rise to harm and violence within the community to state violence enacted through institutions. At a very basic level, the forging of allegiances across movements strengthened the campaign’s public profile and galvanised practical support on the ground, including, specifically, the site of the vigil.

The Fairlea protests gathered momentum in the broader socio-political context of a movement against the neo-conservative Victorian State Kennett Government’s aggressive implementation of economic and social policies, which peaked in 1993. The rationalising of public expenditure and privatising public services translated into school and health service closures, reduced worker rights and attacks on unions, retrenchments and reduced government accountability and large-scale general strikes and protests in response. The Fairlea Vigil Diaries are replete with references to attendance at general strikes and rallies, the Richmond Secondary College blockade, Trade union pickets and strikes (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 5 October 1993). This context created opportunities and possibilities but also tensions. Campaigners had to struggle to convince the traditionally male-dominated trade union movement, about why the ‘Save Fairlea’ protest and women’s criminalisation more broadly comprise a public and mainstream concern. Campaigner Catherine Gow reflected for example that to obtain Trades Hall’s endorsement a group of the vigil protestors (women) had to occupy and ‘blockade’ union meetings where members continued to ignore the call out to support the vigil camp, dismissing it as ‘women’s issues’ (Gow, 2014). It should be noted these campaigners were also unionists mediating their own marginalisation as women within a male-dominated union movement. In Victoria, these struggles were productive insofar as winning the support of Trades Hall greatly lifted the visibility and broader community participation in the Fairlea protests.

The strategies and visions by a range of similar anti-carceral coalitions were well forged and documented in the 1970s movements against prison conditions in the NSW, which led to watershed events such as the 1974 Bathurst Riots, the Women’s Behind Bars public protests and ‘Close Katingal’ campaigns in New South Wales (NSW). These protests were well established by campaigners radicalised through the rise of Aboriginal rights movements, union activism and intersectional feminist campaigns (Zdenkowski and Brown, 1982). Prisoner resistance aligned and led campaign work related to a plethora of ill-treatment and abuse issues that culminated with NSW 1978 Royal Commission into Prisons (Zdenkowski and Brown, 1982). The critical point here is that the development of linkages between broader struggles for structural change both within and outside the prison provided anti-carceral feminists with a vital platform of opportunities for pursuing reformist strategies encompassed within a politics and practice of abolition.

The vigil and ‘WRING OUTS’ comprised feminist-inspired forms of protest that placed imprisoned women at the centre of action. This was achieved through both the physical mobilisation of community members at the prison gates and also the reshaping of institutional and public attitudes regarding the injustices and discriminatory harms associated with women’s criminalisation and imprisonment. George (1993: 14) reflected: ‘We wanted people to come to the prison, to see the wall to think about the women on the other side, to be heard by the women inside’. Members of the public who attended to support the campaign would not have otherwise been exposed to campaign critiques and alternative visions for justice.

On a very basic level by galvanising community presence, the vigil campaigners drew observers to witness institutional routines and therefore challenged the visibility and demarcated boundaries between women prisoners and the community. The community presence at the prison gates challenged the public legitimacy of the women’s prison itself. During this time, there were frequent recordings of protesters observing women released at the gates (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 13 August 1993; 8 September 1993; 9 November 1993); the welcoming of newly released women to the camp to trade information whilst waiting for family or friends arrive (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 11 November 1993; 8 December 1993) and family members sitting at the camp whilst waiting for women to be released (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 24 October 1993). There were also palpable images of pain. Vigil duty campaigners reported the experience of seeing a bus with two women being transported for reception at Fairlea with their young children and a child’s bike attached to the bus: ‘For some reason this sight has filled me with emotion. I waved and they all waved back. One of the women started to cry’ (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 12 November 1993). In August, an officer delivered one of many grateful letters from the Fairlea women: ‘We understand you have done everything in your power to prevent the move to from Fairlea to Pentridge … It is just good to know we have people like you all to stand by us in our time of need’ (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 25 August 1993).

The vigil site attracted politicians, groups of school children, community groups and activists engaged in other campaigns. For members of the public, the above images were completely outside their experience and humanised the women, highlighting their connection to the community. The vigil facilitated the effect of demystifying the unknown mundane aspects of institutional life that are sanitised and purposely hidden by official policy reform discourse (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 25 August 1993). By September, support had grown substantively with the petition swelling to 17,000 signatures. The petition was taken to Parliament House in Melbourne with a chain of purple and green balloons to mark every 20 signatures. A community protest and picnic was held simultaneously outside Fairlea and this culminated with a WRING OUT. One protester wrote in the diaries: ‘the response from the women was fantastic. We could hear them yelling and whistling [from inside]’ (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 5 September 1993).

The very presence of the vigil and these various tactics actively undermined the disciplinary power and landscape of the prison. Protestors hung banners to promote the campaign over the Eastern Freeway overpass nearby during peak hour traffic; they intercepted traffic coming in and out of the prison gates; kicked footballs over the prison fence; danced in defiance of prison officers on the prison gates and barricaded the prison gates during tense moments where it seemed a transfer to Pentridge was imminent (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 5 September 1993). These represent just a few examples of the many forms of action undertaken by women campaigners individually and collectively, which generated a large-scale community campaign opposing public policy on women prisoners. These actions were deployed at a time when campaigners had no other recourse than to oppose public policy. The protests also drew support from those who worked within Government and the system. The diaries frequently report support being provided by Fairlea prison staff, delivering newspapers, ‘hot toast and tea’ (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 30 July 1993) and at one point photographs of the Director of Prisons attending to speak with protestors is included in the photo collection.

The vigil itself comprised a non-hierarchical campaign and protest diaries were open to anyone attending to share information and insights. There are many reflections and visions for dismantling that illustrate the transformative and symbolic breaking down of walls within the hearts and minds of those involved: ‘Look there is only a 20ft high wall between us out here and us [sic] in there’. Not before have so many of us been so aware of each other (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 9 November 1993). Another entry stated: ‘this vigil is doing more than keeping an eye on Fairlea. Every time I come down here I learn something new and am made to think about how I think, what I say and how this impacts on others’ (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 13 October 1993). Those who were frequently on the vigil roster recorded their own visions of freedom:

I have a fantasy when I wake here on mornings like this. As the sky becomes lighter and the horizon blushes pink, the gates of the prison roll up and from the inside the women walk out blinking in the sunshine … When we stand to greet the women we see coming down the road and across the park and over the bridge all the thousands and millions of women set free from around the world, from all the thousands of prisons… And the millions that have died through false slavery, abuse and suffering, through starvation and longing, through fighting for what should rightfully be ours, I can see their spirits rise to join us from the earth, settle around us from the skies, greet us as sisters … Then I worry there will not be enough milk for all the cups of tea and coffee I have to make! (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 15 October 1993)

The last days of the vigil contain pertinent reflections about the personal and ideological gains of the campaign: ‘Hours have been spent here discussing, writing, debating and listening and exchanging ideas, experiences, hopes and dreams. These things can’t be taken away and will sure be remembered by all as being part of the essence of the Fairlea struggle, which will continue’ (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 15 December 1993). It was clear from these reflections that the campaign action had a deeply transformative and politicising effect in galvanising critical awareness around prison issues and for building a coalitional anti-carceral base in Victoria. One woman reflected: ‘I feel so changed every time I come out here and after meeting with this woman [just released] with her frankness, sadness, passion and love I really believe I have changed yet again. The fight is nowhere over yet lets not forget that for a moment. We may have won the battle but we sure as hell haven’t won the war’ (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 22 December 1993). One of the organisers of the vigil reflected on how campaign directions were now clear: ‘Last night [final night of the vigil] mirrored the first time we came to do a shift. That is we came by cab and talked at the driver about the issues. The difference was this time we know what we’re talking about and we now know where are going’ (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 25 December 1993).

On a cold and wet Christmas day in 1993, the vigil was packed up following a celebratory picnic lunch. In a final display of intransigence and also to mark the festive season, some of the self-proclaimed ‘vigilantes’ set off firecrackers. The prison authorities, now used to the intermittent disturbances caused by vigil protesters, responded promptly by calling the police who arrived to make their inquiries. As the final tents, camping gear and banners were towed away by a number of organisers, one vigilante recorded her reflections: ‘Well I must say I felt mighty proud to witness my rear vision mirror a convoy of cars/ute/mini buses carting the vigil away along Yarra Bend road’ (Fairlea Vigil Diaries, 25 December 1993).

Conclusion

The central point in this paper has been to reflect upon what anti-carceral feminist social movements and campaign work specifically can advance the debate about penal reform and its paradoxical relationship to abolition politics and organisation. This paper ultimately makes its contribution by rejecting the simplistic dualism of reform and abolition as mutually exclusive strategies for change to highlight alternative approaches born through anti-carceral feminist activism and organising. The focus has been upon the specific ways that anti-carceral feminist campaigns used reform as a fundamental resistance strategy in anti-institutional lobbying and direct action related specifically to the case study of the ‘Save Fairlea’ Protest vigil in 1993. Through this analysis, it has been possible to take more complex account of the contradictory role reform continues to play in generating a range of outcomes for abolition campaigns. This can be illustrated by the profound moment in December 1993 where the Victorian government announced following several months of sustained direct action associated with the ‘Save Fairlea’ campaign that they would cease the punitive segregation of women to men’s prisons in favour of a newly constructed and privately-run prison for women. This announcement coincided with a broader policy shift in Victoria to comprehensively privatise the prison system.

As stated frequently above, reform, despite the risks that it raises, remains a paradoxical yet necessary component of abolition strategy. This paper has provided focused evaluation of anti-carceral feminist strategies on the back of a decade-long struggle to end the punitive segregation of women to men’s prisons. The point is made that whilst reform comprises a system-oriented process, understanding its mechanics are key to identifying both possibilities and limitations in system change work. Reform lobbying, particularly during the period between 1982 and 1993 proved a central short-term harm prevention strategy for challenging the fundamentally discriminatory and brutal practices for women in a system designed for men. Yet paradoxically, this work had expansionary consequences and led to the institutionalisation of feminist critiques through women-specific policies and by extension the formalisation of a women’s prison system. This is reflected through the subsequent and iterative emergence of women’s penal reform programs in Victoria after this period, namely gender responsive discourses and rehabilitation rhetoric, which centres individual women as objects to be reformed and the prison as a solution for redressing their complex needs and vulnerability (Russell and Carlton, 2013).

The implications for this analysis are two-fold. First this work has sought to provide a more complex account of reform and its utility as a strategy for anti-carceral feminist activism surrounding women’s prisons. I argue the critiques and strategies that informed such movements, how they were organised and the connections fostered by campaigners with other social causes and campaigns had the effect of cross-fertilisation and this expanded the reach of abolitionist critiques and actions to other campaign struggles. Therefore, the interconnection of anti-carceral critiques and actions with other struggles and causes against discriminatory violence and harm linked in critiques of gendered, race and class oppression, galvanised community education regarding the interconnection between anti-institutional agendas and other social causes. This had the effect of consolidating cross movement solidarities in the struggle for structural and social change during a period where there was a groundswell of activism in opposition to the Victorian state government at the time. It is not my intention to argue that these movements have by any measure mitigated or prevented the harmful effects of penal expansion in Victoria. My point is they provide vital lessons for abolitionists and there is a place for reformist strategies within anti-carceral politics and action insofar as they are able to be intertwined with and informed by broader struggles for social change.

The above account is not intended to romanticise anti-carceral feminist work over other forms of abolition activism. However, it remains a movement that has with a few exceptions escaped rigorous attention within critical criminology accounts of abolitionism. As a movement, which emerged during the 1960s and 1970s in various contexts such as Australia, the US and Canada, it reflects unique and potentially powerful tactics for the future realisation of decarceration agendas through the enactment of intersectional feminist critiques and organising principles (Davis, 2016; Thuma, 2014). A broader issue yet to be resolved within accounts of social movements and anti-institutional work is how activists can work more effectively to undermine and resist the harms of reform, i.e. the neutralisation and institutionalisation of critiques and the subsequent expansion of systems and proliferation of harms done in the name of system change and reform. Whilst there is a need to develop deeper empirical accounts of the harmful and expansionary impacts of reform, by the same token it is important to mitigate the risks it poses as a revalorised discourse advocated by practitioners and scholars in ways that advance contemporary penal expansion.

The ‘Save Fairlea’ campaigns demonstrate how creative resistance and protest that take place on the margins of state institutions and processes can have a powerful public educative impact. This begins with building linkages with those in prison and aligning with internal struggles to build, politicise and support those movements. A further critical lesson is the importance of using complex and simultaneous strategies to challenge the system. Victorian activists have used system reform and lobbying in conjunction with direct action, public education, in-prison systemic advocacy, lobbying and legal challenges to create pressure for change and these strategies have driven a series of policy shifts, program changes, even if small, which have played their own role in mitigating harmful conditions within women’s prisons (Russell and Carlton, 2015).

Perhaps most significantly, the ‘Save Fairlea protests demonstrate the importance of connecting abolition struggles and building allegiances and solidarities with other social movements seeking to achieve liberation from structural violence and injustice’. Abolition movements experience a perennial marginality within the broader spectrum of campaign work dedicated to eradicating harm in its various forms generated by the coercive state, its institutions and other powerful actors. Work by Davis (2003) and others have highlighted that abolition is about decentring prisons from analyses and solutions in order to work towards the longer term goal of social change. Well before their time, Victorian feminist struggles for penal change embraced this vision. They drew allegiances with other social movements and campaigns in ways that generated public literacy for abolition critiques and a politics associated with resisting violence (inter-personal, institutional and that perpetrated by the state) and women’s criminalisation and imprisonment specifically and a sympathy for its causes.

Anti-carceral feminist critiques and strategies in action highlight the fundamental need to move beyond the assumed simplistic dualism of reform versus abolition. The key lesson here for critical criminological discussions on abolition is the need to move away from prisons as the sole point for analysis and action. As Davis (2016: 6) recently pointed out: ‘Abolitionist advocacy can and should occur in relation to demands for quality education, for anti-racist job strategies, for free health care, and within other progressive social movements. It can help promote an anticapitalist [sic] critique and movements toward socialism’. Histories of social movements and struggle inside and outside prisons provide a powerful arsenal of creative strategies to effect change. Taking stock of these moments can create opportunities to mobilise collective thought and labours in very different yet cohesive ways to transform and dismantle the oppressions, harms and violence, which provide a foundation for the very existence of punishment and prisons. The pursuit of reformist strategies, as discussed in relation to Victorian anti-carceral feminist movements, within a broader vision striving for social and structural change rather than just penal change is the only way forward.