Participatory action research with ex-prisoners: Using Photovoice and one woman’s story told through poetry

Abstract

This paper provides an unexpected and extraordinary example of research data from a Photovoice project conducted with ex-prisoners in South Australia. It focusses on the contribution made by one of the participants who chose the pseudonym ‘Deer’. Deer joins me as a co-author, her voice shines in this paper, albeit through a pseudonym she chose for the project. Photovoice, a qualitative research method, uses a feminist framework and typically produces rich thick accounts of lives and experiences that cannot be adequately captured by quantitative research. Both qualitative and quantitative methods of research data collection each have merits, but qualitative approaches tend to engage the researcher, participant and later the reader on a more personal level. Moreover, unexpected findings are more likely to arise when researchers ask participants to express what they believe is important to their experience. This paper provides such an example, where the unexpected gift of poetry adds a deeper dimension to research findings.

Keywords

Photovoice women ex-prisoners poetry feminist research

Around the world, the number of women being sent to prison is rising at an extraordinary and unprecedented rate. At the same time the growth of the prison industrial complex continues, rarely questioned by communities who are fed on a 24/7 mainstream media news cycle that fosters prejudiced mentalities and fear of the criminalised ‘other’. Under capitalism, almost anything can be turned into a commodity; punishing regimes such as prisons and the industries that service them are no exception.

Prisons across Australia are at capacity, most are overcrowded. Here in South Australia on any given night, close to 190 women are imprisoned, but what that figure does not show is that every year there are around 300 receptions, or women entering and leaving prison. Even though the South Australian Courts award the longest custodial sentences of all states in Australia, over 40 percent of the people in prison here are un-sentenced and a significant proportion of them serve short sentences (ABS, 2016). However, even a short custodial sentence means that women are likely to lose their children, housing, possessions, employment and their companion animals. Significantly, a short sentence is still notifiable when seeking pre-employment clearances—thereby impacting on ex-prisoners’ (in) ability to gain employment after a sentence is served.

Prisons have become warehouses for the poor, the addicted, the mentally unwell and the marginalised (Sudbury, 2013), while governments continue to pour millions of dollars into a system that fails to do what it says it will. Upon their release, the community expects that former prisoners are ‘reformed’ by ‘learning’ to become productive members of society. This is despite them having spent weeks, months or years in spaces devoid of societal cadences, liberties and responsibilities. In an environment that cultivates despair and self-doubt, it is no wonder that any different outcome could result from a prison sentence. Much like leaving a violent interpersonal relationship, leaving prison can be a dangerous time, where the risk of post-release death, especially for women is high (Davies & Cook, 1999).

This research builds on my experience as a social worker in a secular NGO in South Australia that supports people in conflict with the law. I was employed in a program that supported women and men whose criminal activity was linked to their problem gambling, numbers of which spiked after the arrival of electronic gaming machines (EGMs) or ‘pokies’ in South Australia in 1994. These EGMs are ubiquitous in hotels and clubs, most often situated in suburbs of disadvantage. In what were once places to socialise, ‘pokie’ venues are reminiscent of miniature casinos. It is acknowledged that for every ‘problem gambler’, between 5 and 10 people are directly affected (Smethurst, 2014). Program funding allowed people other than the gambler to seek support if they chose to. It was in this work that I began to understand the collateral damage caused by the imprisonment of a loved one or family member. Within a few months, I saw for myself the revolving door of imprisonment and that despite their best intentions, for many people the only guarantee that a prison sentence provided was that they knew how to be a prisoner.

For women, leaving behind and forgetting about their prison experience can be difficult, as stigma and shame oblige women to be silent; to ignore, deny and thereby minimise the impact of their criminalisation (Hampton, 1993, p. xvii). Yet women’s sharing of experiences is central to how we interpret personal and social issues (Coates, 1996). Furthermore, women often make strong, deep bonds with women they serve time with and upon release are torn between the prospect of freedom and severing those bonds (Davies & Cook, 1999; Hampton, 1993). Compounding their sense of isolation upon release, women know that it can be a risk to reconnect with their pre-prison associates as former prisoner Debbie Kilroy articulates:

The importance of severing ties when I got out was tied to survival. I knew that if I kept one link in that vulnerable time, and then if something happened, I would have to go with my loyalty to those old links. So it was about staying strong, and it’s the most isolating, lonely place I’ve ever been my whole life. (Olsson, 2005, p. 179)

I wanted to ensure that the usually silenced voices of formerly incarcerated women and men who participated in this research could speak freely and be heard. The participants’ keen desire to share their thoughts and experiences—sometimes very emotionally—was in a way a testament to their unmet need to be listened to. This paper explores just one of those testimonies.

Theoretical framework

The theoretical framework that informs this Photovoice project combines feminist theory, Marxist philosophy and Paulo Freire’s ideas about raising critical consciousness. Both Marx and Freire saw the need for collective action to be taken by the oppressed to challenge those in power. Freire’s ideas themselves were formed from his understanding of Marxism, including the recognition of the value in the use of arts as a means of resistance (Davis, 1984; Fischer, 1963). Photovoice is firmly grounded in feminist theory where existing operations of power are challenged, including the power of the researcher over the researched. Common amongst these three theories is the idea that research should not be produced to sit on a shelf gathering dust in a university library or behind a journal paywall. Instead, knowledge gained through research must aim to create social change. Activism sits at the heart of this research method, thus the importance of praxis in Photovoice projects, where particpants’ data are used to inform policy and to challenge common (negative) assumptions and stereotypes.

Although it has become somewhat ‘fashionable’ to dismiss Marxism as ‘irremediably flawed and useless’ (Gimenez & Vogel, 2005, p. 5), nothing could be further from the truth. For Giminez and Vogel, it is impossible to understand ‘exploitation and oppression’ without employing Marxist theory. Combining Marxism and feminism means being of the belief that it is capitalism that ultimately drives all layers of oppression, including the sexist ideas that oppress women, of which the capitalist system ultimately benefits (Davis, 1983; Ebert, 2005; Gimenez & Vogel, 2005; Lorde, 1984).

Building on this theoretical foundation, I have used intersectionality as a key concept in this project. By using an intersectional framework, rather than gender oppression as a stand-alone lens, I understand that other overlapping oppressions such as race, class, (dis)ability and sexuality all operate to different degrees. Although the idea of the ‘triple jeopardy’ of gender, race and class was employed by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn early in the first half of the twentieth century (Silverman, 2012), and later by Davis (1983) in her classic text Women, Race and Class, the term intersectionality is usually credited to law professor and critical race scholar, Kimberle’ Crenshaw (Crenshaw, 1991, 1993). Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality developed from her own experience as a lawyer where she found that when asked to moderate on anti-discrimination cases, the law was incapable of addressing gender and race simultaneously. For Crenshaw, the objective of liberation could only be met if the ‘intrinsically negative frameworks in which social power works to exclude or marginalise’ (Crenshaw, 1991, p. 1242) could take into account differences within groups.

Researchers and workers in the area of imprisonment know that the incarceration of members of the working classes is much higher than for people who have middle and upper class privilege. Women, who make up a growing majority of the working class (Gimenez & Vogel, 2005) are the world’s largest growing prison population. Even though the criminal justice system is built on the premise that all people are treated equally before the law, due to their unequal social circumstances, women who are charged with a criminal offence are more likely than men to be assessed as ‘high risk’ and remanded in custody (Seeds of Affinity, 2014). It is important to understand that a significant number of women cycle through the prison system often for relatively short sentences for minor, non-violent crimes or are returned for parole or home detention breaches such as a positive urinalysis result or missing appointments. Often women are given longer sentences than men for similar crimes due to their (perceived) higher level of ‘risk’. Yet ‘risk’ is, in itself, a measure of oppression. Women who have experienced violence and abuse, have unstable housing and employment—if any—are First Nations, or have poor mental and physical health are automatically ‘categorised’ as high risk. This is evident in the fact that in colonised countries around the world, First Nations women and women of colour are imprisoned at a higher rate than their non-indigenous contemporaries (see for example Sudbury, 2013).

Aguilar (2015) maintains that in the 25 years since Crenshaw’s work brought the concept of intersectionality to the fore, it has been mutated and de-radicalised along with the project of feminism itself, the responsibility of which she places firmly on the ‘corporatisation of the academy and its increasing subservience to a neoliberal global regime’ (Aguilar, 2015, p. 203; also see for example, Eisenstein, 2009). In her critique of this co-option of intersectionality, Aguilar argues that there have been problematic ways that intersectionality has been deployed by feminist academics. One is that scholars have attempted to ascribe the experience of gender, race and class oppression in equal measure, thereby ignoring the complexities that intersectionality is meant to address. The other is the avoidance of employing a macro-level, class-based analysis which considers how capitalism is the basis of domination and oppression. For Aguilar (2015), Eisenstein (2009), and Giminez (2001, 2005) without class as central to women’s oppression, feminism plays into the hands of the global elites.

Contrasted alongside ‘male-stream, scientific’ research, feminist researchers and the methods they use may appear unruly, bold or haphazard because they are prepared to change their assumptions and rethink their research questions. This is not a case of being haphazard at all, instead we enjoy being challenged by research participant’s evidence as we know it stretches our thinking to places and spaces we had never previously considered. Feminist research aims to destabilise and disrupt socially constructed categories with the understanding that social differences like class, sexuality, race, ability and gender cooperate to produce overlapping, multiple oppressions (Crenshaw, 1991). Although feminist research is not bound by gender, it is always grounded in gender. Feminist researchers locate themselves in their research; there is no detached, passionless or cool objectivity (Reinharz, 1992). Our research is political and it is personal. We embrace complexity rather than trying to tame or discipline participants’ testimonies. We do not point out the limits of our study to ensure reliable, valid and trustworthy findings. We know that lives and practices are often messy and complex; because of this, there are no clear cut or straight lines in the progression of ideas. As a result, we embrace the most interesting findings and value them as precious gifts.

The research

I used the participatory action research tool called Photovoice to hear from nine women and three men who had all spent time in prison in South Australia (Jarldorn, 2016a, 2016b). Usually used within a group setting, for this project I modified the method used by Wang and Burris (1997), meeting with participants individually. The practice of modifying Photovoice is not unusual with many people doing so to suit the dynamics of a particular project (for example, see Sethi, 2016). The only participation criteria in this project were that the person had served a prison sentence in South Australia and that they did not want to return. Each participant met with me initially to hear about the rationale behind the research. Here, I showed participants a journal article which demonstrated how Photovoice findings are written up academically. Then I provided each participant with a single use camera, a small instructional handbook I had created for the project and their research question: ‘if you had fifteen minutes with a policy maker or politician what would you want them to know about your experience?’ Participants were then asked to take photographs that represented those experiences (for more, see Jarldorn, 2016a, 2016b).

This paper combines two voices, mine (Michele) as the researcher and ‘Deer’ (a pseudonym chosen by her), one of nine women ex-prisoners who participated in this research project. I identify as a radical social worker (Ferguson & Woodward, 2009). Social workers who operate from a radical perspective understand that people’s pains, while seeming to be experienced individually, stem from issues of structural, social inequality. Radical social workers take seriously the powerful statements in our codes of ethics (AASW, 2010). We do not see them as rhetoric, but keep them close to our hearts as we agitate for social change. Radical social workers resist the culture of neoliberalism and managerialism (Ferguson, 2008). Both of these ‘isms’ have constrained the practice of social work and welfare provision to a narrow location that privileges individual responsibility and resiliency over resistance and the public good. To address this, radical social workers seek pools of dissent amongst our colleagues and align ourselves with service users, as allies and advocates, working collectively with them (Beresford & Croft, 2004) in challenging their oppression.

When we met to discuss how we would organise this article, Deer decided that despite the length of time since her release, it could be a risk to her career aspirations to use her real name as co-author of this paper. This is such a telling indictment of the latent power of incarceration that criminalised women experience. Thus, rather than feeling confident in publicly stating her successes and achievements, Deer will be known by the pseudonym she chose, silenced because of her punishment and in fear of the consequences of being ‘outed’ as a former prisoner. What follows then is Deer’s story and contribution to this project.

Deer: My parents were Roma people, sometimes called travellers or gypsies who met and married young, against my grandparents’ wishes. Roma people have been persecuted throughout history, we have suffered discrimination, forced sterilisation, forced assimilation and genocide (for more, see Marin Thornton, 2014). When I first met Michele I began my story by telling her about my parents’ daring escape from their home in Eastern Europe a few years after the end of the Second World War. They had to cross a dangerous river in a rowboat while being shot at by soldiers. It was only luck that they made it out of the range of fire and safely to the other side. After spending some time in a refugee camp in Europe, they eventually migrated to Australia where my father, like thousands of other post-war migrants, worked as a labourer on the Snowy River Mountain Scheme. The work was gruelling, dirty and dangerous, and living conditions were harsh (Migration Heritage Centre, 2011).

With fragile mental health and a propensity to self-medicate past trauma with alcohol, my father decided that we should move to Adelaide in South Australia. Once we arrived, we never lived in one place for very long. My father drank more and more often—the more he drank, the more he physically abused my mother. I remember many times when mum would gather us kids up, get into the car and drive around the city looking for refuge from his violence. I clearly remember me and my sisters frantically knocking on doors for help but no one answering. While I now understand the dynamics of intimate partner violence, I remember as a child growing frustrated with mum returning to my father once he had sobered up, knowing that before long, the cycle of violence would continue. Eventually my mother met another man, leaving my father and his violence behind. But while mum found safety in her new relationship, I did not feel welcome and soon had to survive on my own. None of my post-family living arrangements were stable and as a result, much like my parents, I never stayed in one place for long.

I eventually completed high school, even though I was isolated from my family and had no support network. Soon I found solace, friendship and excitement in the injecting drug culture. It was here, using heroin on a daily basis that I found what seemed like my place in the world—a place where I fitted in and felt accepted. My male partners were often physically violent, something that I rarely questioned at the time because I had seen violence and abuse as ‘typical’ between intimate partners when I was growing up. Over the next few years, my drug addiction took control of my life. I did sex work to support my habit and myself. Violence was ever present.

During this time I spent around four months in prison on a minor charge. The day I got out, I had nowhere to go except to live with my violent ex-boyfriend who was also a drug dealer. My addiction actually became worse once I was released. Eventually, with what I still remember as a ‘raging habit’ I was able to check myself into a publicly funded residential rehabilitation centre, staying for months until I felt strong enough to leave. I then transitioned out of rehab into a halfway accommodation for another six months before returning to the community. I attended Narcotics Anonymous for over five years afterwards. From the day that I entered rehabilitation I have been clean. Once I was clean, my life chances changed dramatically because of a short-lived social policy that offered newly released prisoners the opportunity to attend university fee free and with financial support for the first 12 months. I jumped at that chance. I have earned two degrees—one with Honours—thanks to that start. I now work full time in a human services role, have a good relationship with my children and I am a proud grandparent.

Michele: Although Deer had been out of prison around 20 years at the time of this project, I was struck by her powerful story and could sense that after all this time she was still angry at the ineffectualness of the ‘system’. Even though she has been out of prison a long time, the parallels between Deer’s story and those of other women in this research project who have been out of prison less than two years are strikingly similar. Unlike women who are imprisoned or still on parole (Fine & Torre, 2006), Deer had been out of the reaches of the imprisonment machine for long enough to feel safe in voicing some of the intimate details of her experience, albeit under a pseudonym.

It was around a month after our first meeting that Deer called me to say that she had completed her contribution to the project. Deer had taken nine photographs. She gave each image a name and spoke about what they meant in a recorded interview which I later transcribed verbatim. Four of her images and accompanying narratives follow.

Deer’s research findings

Deer’s testimony provided a number of insights. She described how deeply the latent effects of trauma can interfere with the health of individuals, families and communities. While Roma people continue to endure oppression and discrimination by society broadly as a group (Doherty, 2016), both Deer and her mother had been oppressed physically and emotionally by patriarchal violence—violence that went largely unchallenged, seen as a part and parcel of marriage. Deer’s firsthand experience of the lack of women-focused services in the community at the time, remind us that these services must be easily accessible, and outside of normal business hours for crisis situations. Figure 1, which cleverly includes a glimpse of Deer’s reflection in a real estate agent’s sign, helped her to articulate the hypocrisies that criminalised women negotiate. For Deer, performing sex work was the only well-paying job available to her, yet she was condemned for doing so, noting that customers rarely drew the attention of the police. The fact that she spent the money she earned to buy the drugs that she used to mitigate the pain in her heart and mind was irrelevant to those who decided on her punishment. She rightly questioned who is it that decides which acts are considered immoral or deviant and which ones are not.

Figure 1.

Unacceptable work. This picture says that I was a working girl in my previous life. Nearly all of the women I used drugs with were working girls, a lot of women in prison were working girls. We are expected to use our bodies in our relationships and at work but being a sex worker is the one time you can be exploited but actually earn some money. Because our politics are mixed up so tightly with religion, we cannot separate the two, hence why women who do that line of work are deemed unacceptable because it’s an ‘immoral’ thing to do. I grew up in the institution of marriage between my parents. It wasn’t good. It was a culture where the women were getting beaten and the men were bullies. Somehow, being a working girl was more immoral than being an abusive partner.

In the image titled Beauty in Prison (Figure 2), Deer asks us to understand that the prison environment itself is one of the causes of women returning to prison. Deer saw the over representation of women of colour in prison, years before it became mainstream knowledge. Being a woman of colour herself, she remembers the collective nature of imprisoned First Nations Australian women, whose solidarity supported her in the absence of any formal, institutional support.

Figure 2.

Beauty in prison. This photo represents the women I met in prison. I met some wonderful women in there. They were very supportive of each other. I particularly got on well with the Aboriginal women, they were very protective of me because I was a newby. I saw that for the Aboriginal women especially, prison had become such a part of their life. They were in and out of prison like they were placed into a revolving door with no exit.

In terms of her post release experience, Deer provided a picture of a dry and withering tree (Figure 3) that represented how she saw herself after her prison sentence. Even though the participants did not work together on this project, Deer was not the only woman to submit an image and narrative like this. Deer was adamant that one of the few things prison is guaranteed to do for women is to teach them how to be a prisoner. Even though her imprisonment was a result of her addiction and the work she did to support that addiction, she experienced firsthand that prison does not cure or address addiction. Deer’s testimony shows that safe, appropriate post-release housing is a necessity and that a variety of publicly funded, freely available rehabilitation options are integral to successfully staying out of prison.

Figure 3.

Me after prison. I walked out of prison with nothing, feeling just as barren as that picture looks. The little tree, with the hole next to it was me. I had no home to go to, I had shrivelled to nothing. Prison left me with nothing new, nothing learnt, less of myself than when I went in.

The final image (Figure 4) in this paper provides Deer’s thinking on the possibilities for criminalised women if they can be afforded decent opportunities to build lives with meaning and purpose. Deer knows that even though it can take time, with extra support women who have been to prison can flourish. Importantly, Deer alerts us to the continuum of violence endured by criminalised women; that violence is not only interpersonal but can be structural, sanctioned by the state and enacted by individuals in institutions, whether that institution is a prison or a marriage.

Figure 4.

The women. I wish that the women I met in prison had the opportunity to be like these flowers. It’s almost as if the colour they were in prison is an off yellow rather than a bright yellow like in this picture. Their self-esteem is so beaten, by parents, by boyfriends and then that is reinforced by the system. I wanted to use this picture to say that anything is possible, they can even grow in cracks of the cement. I was just one of the lucky ones that ended up like a seed, falling in one of the right places. I didn’t believe that this was how my life was meant to turn out, but they were lessons I needed to learn. My drug use, my time in prison was my lot in life, but I knew there was something more. To me, the picture shows that given a chance, every women in prison can blossom in spite of adversity.

Surprises

One of the most exhilarating aspects of conducting participatory action research for me has been witnessing the creativity of the participants. Some of their images are profound, beautiful and technically precise in terms of photo composition. Often, seemingly simple images provided a platform for discussion and deep reflection that would not be possible with ‘conventional’ research methods. Deer’s contribution was no exception. The images she produced for the project are cleverly conceived and match well with the messages she wanted to impart as her contribution to the project. I will hand over to Deer to explain what happened next.

Deer: When I met with Michele to discuss my photographs, I gave her a poem that I wrote which told my story, while following the nine photographs that I took. Michele asked why I had written the poem, this is what I said:

Poetry comes easily to me … I find poetry to speak a lot deeper than if I am writing a paper or an essay. I love writing poetry and have written poetry since I was a child. I am able to think on a deeper level when I write it. At first I wrote it with just four or five verses and then I went back to it a couple of days later because I wanted to talk about my initial journey, where I had ended up. I wanted to talk about my addiction, the prison, the women in prison and how you can hold your head up high when you walk out. It is bloody possible; I wanted to describe how I put my middle finger up to the prison when I walked out.

Michele: I realised just how powerful this poem was when given the opportunity to speak about ‘anything of interest to me’ at an International Women’s Day (IWD) event being held at my university. I chose to present Deer’s story alongside her photographs and finished with a reading of her poem. Reading her work aloud for the first time, instead of to myself from my computer screen brought Deer’s story back to life, reminding me of the 2 hours she spent telling me about her experiences as we sat on a couch in her home. Deer’s poem is entitled, At this time my life was barely together …

At this time my life was barely together

It always seemed like perpetual bad weather

Forever raining, forever storming

I could not move without warning

A life not chosen but thrust upon me

By parents who struggled to be free

From their own memories, demons and ghouls

They tried so hard but remained such fools

I left my home as such a neonate

And entered the world not knowing my fate

I strode down many lanes of danger

Looking for the one true loving stranger

One day I found what I thought

Would be my saviour and always bought

My sanity, oh how expensive it was

Yet kept me alive until the next shot

Then one day I sat on my bed

Knowing that I was not right in the head

I prepared my daily dose of singular bliss

And indulged my veins with never enough of this

A sudden knock on my door there came

I was thinking it was a friend the same

When opened it was revealed

People unknown to me with intent concealed

The home that they removed me from

Looked like it had been hit by a bomb

It was my life it was my place

Even though it seemed such a disgrace

They took me to a place known to me

Only through others and what I’d read

They stripped me of all I’d known

And pushed me into a room all alone

I sat there and knew what I’d become

A lost soul like the rest, just a sum

An unregimented unit of the whole

Of too many people with lost souls

All the beautiful women that I met

In this caged place just seemed to set

A picture of many who had suffered

A life lived full totally unbuffered

Women with children, families and partners

Missed loved ones with a passion unharnessed

They had worked in jobs socially unaccepted

And were put down and incessantly rejected

The distance in there between us all

Was done by others, this was their call

The chemist shop that I desired

Was also in this place when I required

Tough to get what I thought I wanted

Was a process that made me hunted

By those in charge who stood above

And when discovered they became so rough

And when they were done with their punition

I held my head high and walked from that prison

Sill nothing resolved and nothing forgiven

Just another soul even less life driven

So to all you women locked away

Remember you are loved with fervour beyond your stay

And think of yourselves as humans beautiful

Who got lost in life, yet are full of fortitude

Discussion

Feminist and poet Adrienne Rich once wrote, ‘when poetry lays its hand on our shoulder, we are to an almost physical degree, touched and moved’ (Rich, 2007, p. 423). This is certainly the case with Deer’s poetry where the powerful message it conveys is a combination of creativity, strength and beauty. I have read this poem in public on a few occasions now and it never fails to move me or the people who hear it. I am in awe of just how much of Deer’s story has been captured in her simple yet profound words. Poetry certainly invites us to read and re-read because as Deer has so skilfully demonstrated, poetry has the potential to communicate complex social phenomenon. Deer’s poetry stayed faithful to her data in emotion, tone and texture, magically compressing a life into just a few verses.

A few months after reading Deer’s poem at IWD, I met the initial objective of my research when I was granted a meeting with the Minister for Correctional Services in South Australia along with his adviser to discuss my research However, I believe that the greatest impact of this project by far has been taking the research out into the public realm. The work has been displayed at a variety of functions, community groups and conferences, while the material has become central to my teaching, thus being seen by hundreds of social work students I have taught over the last few years. By doing so, future social workers are invited to think about the long-term ramifications of imprisonment, rather than rendering the experience invisible or ‘deserved’.

Feminist-based action research must challenge the usual imbalance of power present between the ‘researcher’ and the ‘researched’. It should have a social impact, aiming to give back to participants. While I wish Deer could have been formally acknowledged for her contribution to this paper and my research more broadly, she now has a laminated poster of her work and word clouds of her poetry and transcribed interview. Later, I will be her silent ally, providing editorial support as she revisits her honours thesis to seek a publication under her own name. Personally, my life has not gone untouched by the experience. Four years after embarking on this project and because of the connections I have made through employing an action research method, I now volunteer weekly with a women’s ex-prisoner community group whose activities are designed to restore dignity and provide opportunities for criminalised women, opportunities that can never be provided within a regime based on containment and punishment. I have learned from this experience that no matter what our intentions, whenever we work within a system like the prison industrial complex (Sudbury, 2013) we are constrained by it. Much like my post-graduation work discussed earlier in this paper, through this group I have met family members, from children to mothers who have been traumatised by their loved ones’ dehumanising experience of the imprisonment machine. One of the strengths of this community group is that we become a stable connection for women who are lonely and isolated.

There has long been a tension as to whether social work is a science or an art. The push towards ‘professionalisation’ where social work endeavours to justify itself by proving that it is a science, has disempowered the people that we work with. Sometimes this is evident in our research and practice, which can exhibit a cool, objective and passionless approach. The profession’s push for social work to be a science means we have lost the idea that social work is also an art, where just like it is for poets, there is no one truth but instead lives are ‘constructed upon a lifetime of experiences, values and meanings’ (Furman, Enterline, Thompson, & Shukraft, 2012, p. 8). Poetry is a form of storytelling, a means of understanding the human experience, in this case, the experiences of Deer.

This paper has shown how qualitative, arts-based, action research methods can capture the complexity and nuances of people’s experiences. It is exactly because of the fluidity of feminist research methods that participants can tell us their stories, stories that transgress the researcher’s potentially narrow research questions. Stories that create new knowledge, challenge assumptions and contest dominant discourse. In this project, each participant became a researcher and had control over what they wanted to contribute to the project. Many of the photographs would be beautiful even if they were not accompanied with a narrative. What the narratives achieve though is an invitation to contemplate the complexities that shape the life histories of the participants. Given the freedom to create their own data, each participant has provided a unique perspective on what life is like for them as ex-prisoners. Deer embraced that freedom by capturing her own experience on film and in prose. Thus, she invites us to see and understand criminalised women’s experiences through her lens.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biographies

Michele Jarldorn is a PhD student in Women's Studies and Social Work at Flinders University in South Australia.

`Deer' is a woman with lived prison experience. She currently works in human service delivery in Adelaide, South Australia.

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