Crimwife (20 page)

On the other hand there are some women who either chose roles where they could be predators, or became accustomed to it once they start, such as bad nurses. In 1998 the Nursing Unit Manager of John Moroney Correctional Centre, Joanna Cunningham, was investigated by ICAC for corrupt behaviour involving four inmates. Cunningham, who had been working for the department for nearly ten years, was found to have had sexual relationships with three of the inmates during 1996 and 1997. She wasn’t accused of such corruption any earlier in her career but may have gone undetected.

With each relationship, Cunningham’s behaviour escalated. Inmate B engaged only in “mutual fondling and undress” with the nurse. Inmate A had sex with the head nurse several times at the clinic while the other staff were absent. She met up with another inmate, Nicholas Poole, after his release and, Cunningham testified, they spent a weekend in a hotel together engaged primarily in sexual activity. Both injected heroin over the course of the weekend.

All of the inmates described Cunningham’s encouragement. She had written a court reference letter for Poole that was glowing despite his ongoing failings. He was the only inmate who did not testify. Despite extensive searches, he could not be located for the hearing.

In the same report, Maree Barnes, an alcohol and other drugs worker, was investigated for an improper relationship with a client. Her office was installed with cameras due to Corrective Service’s suspicions. She was caught providing the implements to inject heroin to the inmate with whom she had fallen in love. This was despite the inmate’s prior sobriety of two years. By their own admissions, these women were not the victims here.

And then there are all the babies made in prison, including Emma and Shorty’s daughter, Julia. How many there are out there we’ll never know, but the stories are common, at least from the old days. I’m told that there are three siblings somewhere named after the jails they were conceived in. So if you have a friend called Long Bay, ask her why, but only if Goulburn’s not around.

Now that there is much stricter supervision, it’s much harder to get pregnant on visits, but not impossible. Some couples who are waiting out a long sentence still want to have children. Men have managed to smuggle out semen for themselves or a mate to a waiting crimwife at a visit. Children have been produced this way and it is humiliating and infuriating to the prison staff, so the crims love holding a baby they were never supposed to have.

Not all prison staff are against inmates having babies. The
Sunday Telegraph
published a story in July of 2009 stating that “three of the State’s highest-ranking prison officials” had assisted a “notorious gangland criminal” in couriering semen samples to his girlfriend. The woman involved conceived the second time.

*

What are crimwives to make of all this sex? Should a crimwife be worried that her partner will be raped, coerced into sex or seduced while he’s in jail? Should the partner of an officer be similarly worried? And is it the crims or the officers you have to look out for? The topic of jail sex is indeed a tangled web, sticky and poisonous.

You’d think one of the best parts of being a crimwife would be knowing where your man is most of the time, even though you may not see him most days. You would also assume, if you were haplessly and helplessly in love, that unless he was going to have gay sex – and there’s no way your man would – he’d remain completely devoted to you. Since he almost never has contact with women, by process of elimination he will find you the most beautiful woman in the world. And because the love you share transcends all understanding, he could not want for anyone but you.

These would be tragic conclusions to draw.

It is a classic stereotype that the moment men step onto jail premises they will either be raped or have consensual sex with other men. While it’s not as simple as that, there is some truth to it.

Australia’s history of imprisonment is one of men being isolated with other men. In
The Fatal Shore
, Robert Hughes writes:

One would naturally suppose that, in a remote colony whose proportion of men to women varied between 4 to 1 in the city and 20 to 1 in the bush, homosexuality would have flourished. So it did, especially on the chain gangs and in the outer penal settlements, but it did not leave much official evidence behind.

This was not only because sodomy was a capital crime. In the eyes of the law, sodomy deserved death, but in the eyes of social custom, especially the customs of English and Irish working people, it was especially loathsome.

Hughes goes on: “Buggery, it has been said, is to prisons what money is to middle-class society. It was as utterly pervasive in the world of hulks and penal settlement as it is in modern penitentiaries.” Hughes also quotes the convict George Lee: “The horrible crime of sodomy rages so shamefully throughout that the Surgeon and myself have been more than once threatened with assassination for straining to put a stop to it … [It] is in no way discountenanced by those in command.”

Robert Pringle Stuart, a magistrate on Norfolk Island, described how male convict couples called themselves “man and wife,” and that there were probably 150 couples, not counting more casual attachments, and that they could not bear to be separated.

Until the 1840s, rehabilitation was not a part of the penal colony’s philosophies. The guards’ role was merely that: to guard the convicts. In terms of rape, the guards had no duty to interfere in sexual abuse among convicts.

Modern-day prisoners may no longer be on chain gangs in the wilderness, but they are still subject to the same long years of isolation that many convicts knew.

Are men having sex with other men in jail? You betcha. Condoms are available throughout jails and the vending machines are regularly empty. Even allowing for the percentage of those that are used to wrap up contraband and the lube used for hair gel, that’s still a lot of missing condoms. Margarine can always be substituted for lube. Are these men gay? No way. It wouldn’t even cross their minds. There are so many men who have sex with men but still believe wholeheartedly they are straight that they have their own acronym: MSM. Australia is founded on it.

According to Jimmy, none of this jail sex takes place in Victoria. He’d never heard about it till he went to New South Wales. Maybe things are different in Victoria. Craig Minogue, who is serving two life sentences for murder there, has stated:

No I have not witnessed any sexual violence while detained or been aware of it. I am a keen observer, analyser, and recorder of my prison time and I have never seen it … Apart from three instances that I take to be reliable, I have no experience of sexual violence in prison with the exception of the borderline sexual assault of the strip search?

The prisoners rights, human rights activists and academics working around prison issues that I work with on a regular basis, all tell me that sexual assault is prevalent in the Victorian prison system, but it has totally escaped my notice.

He also said that he had only ever met three openly gay men in jail, but conceded that “in Victoria if a man is gay, and in prison, he conceals the fact.”

When the idea of consensual sex between two men is raised, most inmates will tell you they’ve seen more pigs fly. While Australia is one of the gayer countries in the world, the last thing the stereotypical Aussie male will be is a poofter, and this staunch masculinity dominates in jail. Denial is a powerful tool of the criminal mind. The most private thoughts, memories and information will be carried to the grave.

Rape in prison is now an accepted part of the college boy’s humour landscape. The idea that men rape other men in jail has been a great source of jokes in cutting-edge comedies like
Family Guy
. Somehow, rape is funny when it is about inmates.

In 1993, the NSW Minister for Corrective Services, Michael Yabsley, told ABC’s
Four Corners
that “rape is inevitable in prison and that the fear of rape might be a useful deterrent factor to those thinking of offending.”

The research conducted is conflicting and full of problems.

In 1998, the NSW magistrate David Heilpern published a book called
Fear or Favour
, the result of ten years’ research into prison culture and sexual assault. In 1995 and 1996, Heilpern interviewed 300 male prisoners between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five in NSW prisons. Twenty-six per cent of prisoners reported having been sexually assaulted in prison at some time, while more than 50 per cent said they had been threatened with sexual or other assault at some time in prison. Two-thirds of the inmates interviewed were fearful of rape. The Uniting Church did its own survey in 2009 with 150 ex-prisoners: 37 per cent said they’d been sexually assaulted in prison; 75 per cent reported knowledge of a sexual assault in prison.

Yet in the same year, NSW Corrective Services released a report announcing that, pretty much, prison rape is a thing of the past. The department even goes so far as to give itself the credit, due to case management. Its researchers did phone interviews on jail premises with 400 women and 1400 men in Queensland and New South Wales. I don’t know if these calls were monitored, but an inmate might suspect they were, which raises a bunch of questions.

In this study, 80 per cent of men were in a heterosexual partnership before prison. Ninety-five per cent of men identified as heterosexual, 3 per cent as bisexual and 1 per cent as homosexual. Only 6 per cent of men admitted to any sexual contact with other men, including touching. Five per cent of men had this contact consensually. One per cent did it for protection, drugs, food, tobacco or debt.

Same-sex attraction is much more tolerated in the segregated female environment than in the male one, in part because the staff are sympathetic. A great many women in Mulawa walk around with T-bone steak hickeys on their necks, proudly displaying their mark of ownership. The earlier days were much more brutal, with more rape and less security. Nowadays most of the sexual assault that takes place is to find out if the new girl brought in any drugs.

The women responded to the Corrective Services study much more openly. Although 70 per cent were in a heterosexual relationship before incarceration, 36 per cent of women said that they’d had sexual contact with women in jail. Twenty-nine per cent reported having consensual sexual contact with women, 2 per cent said it was for protection, and 4 per cent said it was for drugs, tobacco, food or another debt.

Draw your own conclusions from the statistics and the anecdotes, but gaining objective results from sex research is hard enough in the mainstream population. The prison population is extra tricky. Sexual activity in prison is kind of like life after death. It doesn’t matter what anyone says, no one really knows until you go there yourself.

The views from Long Bay Jail, of the headland and the bay itself, are picturesque. I don’t know if the inmates ever get to see them, but whenever visits end, the views help a little with the post-visit slump. The excitement is over, there is a journey home without that special someone, there’s a new mission starting from the moment the visit is over that doesn’t end until you get back in again.

In some jails, they announce each separately: “Visitor for Green, finish up your visit,” while at some jails they all end at the same time. Sometimes the officer has given the nod to Jimmy before I know what’s going on. Many times we finish early, before they tell us to, so that we gain a tiny atom of control over the macabre date that we go on over and over again, just the two of us and eighty of our closest friends and enemies.

Walking down the hill from the jail, I start talking to another visitor. This is not uncommon, especially after the visit is over, when there’s less to lose. I have comforted and been comforted by other women when the moments of lucidity in the jail nightmare rush in. Some visits are easier. The mission is smoother. Some days are harder, when you’re scared or tired or broke or angry. Visits are propelled by duty or love or both, but these are never enough. The sobbing comes randomly. We all understand that. Someone might cry because they’re leaving their partner behind in a jail for a crime he obviously didn’t commit, though neither of them can convince the court of that. On this stupid jail spectrum we’re all crying for the same thing.

When, after hours of being in another world with your lover, you step out into daylight, it’s like walking into the lobby after watching a tear-jerker, and not wanting the usher to know you’ve been upset by the movie he’s seen fifty times. You walk down the street pretending that you’ve got hayfever. But at least then you could say you’ve just seen a sad movie.

You walk out of jail and it’s back to the car that just made it there. It’s back to the kids who were left with whoever would take them, whoever approves enough of what you’re doing. It’s back to the washing and the workplace and the relatives. It’s back to everything else except what you had ten minutes ago, which is what you really want.

So walking down to the carpark from the Bay, I start talking with a wife. She is attractive and well put together, confident and not jarred by jail, as I am, no matter how often I try to desensitise myself.

She tells me her husband will be out next week. She says she has called Welfare every day this week to make sure his release goes smoothly. I never call Welfare, in case they know who I am and make Jimmy’s life hard.

This lady is talking as though Long Bay has a lifestyle section I didn’t know about it, and the staff are travel agents, finalising her husband’s flights. She is not afraid of them at all.

“We’ll go straight to the city,” she tells me. “We’ll have to make a few stops, of course.” She says this in a “boys will be boys, after all” tone. I look at her. I smile. It’s best to smile. I’m not armed, and smiling is the best way I can generally think of to show that.

“What kind of stops?” I ask.

“Business,” she says, and starts to outline some sales and marketing that need to take place with their properties, cars and businesses.

“So, you’re not expecting him to get out and go straight then?” I ask her.

“No,” she says. “Of course not. You wouldn’t want to live straight, would you?”