Crimwife (3 page)

Organised criminals can arrange for their wives to pick up money from their brother-in-law or wherever the cash that the Crime Commission hasn’t found is. For the disorganised crims’ wives, it can be a much greater sacrifice. But you wouldn’t want him to go hungry or cold now, would you?

It’s hard to find child care for jail visits, so often the kids come too. It’s not the best environment for role modelling, but for some crimwives there’s no choice. Entertaining children on a visit is challenging, even with the occasional jail gifts of colouring books and pencils. They must behave, so that the other inmates don’t think his kids are trouble. Your job is to control the children, ensuring they are affectionate towards their father, without making him feel bad by letting them cry when it’s time to go.

Some jails let you bring food in. You must find out the particular rules and shop accordingly. There may be barbecue facilities. Nearly all have vending machines. The machines at the Metropolitan Remand and Reception Centre are the second busiest after those at Sydney’s Central Station, so make sure you have change. Chocolate is hard to come by in jail. You can’t just stuff it in a dead pigeon or a tennis ball and throw it over the fence, like you can with drugs.

Make sure you get to the jail half an hour before your visit. That way, if there’s an unforeseen lockdown or delay, you can be ahead in the line of lateness. Bring a book in case you’re kept waiting by whichever truck or ambulance has to leave before you can go in.

Parking on jail grounds means your car can be searched, so make sure you don’t have anything incriminating in it. When you get to the jail, make a bee-line for the desks with the visits forms. Some jails require your fingerprints or retinal scans. All require photo ID and a Visitor Identification Number. Don’t forget them. There are no exceptions to prison routine. Some jails won’t let you in if you’re more than fifteen minutes late. Lining up quickly with your filled-in form and ID ready is a fine art. My personal record is twenty-three seconds: name, address, Visitor Identification Number, relationship to inmate, done. Take your ticket or place in line and wait. You may be processed straight away. It may take more than two hours.

Be ready for the dogs and the dog boys. The officers on the dog squad have a smarminess that is all their own. They wear jumpsuits, not slacks, drive the dog around in a company car and are in charge of checking visitors and inmates for drugs. The dog boys, who were invariably disappointed when the dogs didn’t sit next to me to indicate the presence of drugs, would search my wallet and bag and would invariably be disappointed again. In an attempt to reduce the number of random searches I had to endure, I always gave the dog boys my opinion on how frightening and inappropriate dogs were in this circumstance, what with my being a cat person and all. Lots of people come from countries where dogs are vicious police weapons, and they should think carefully before forcing people to be close to them. The dog boys are not generally found to be in possession of much humour.

Once your eyes, your forms and your scent are processed, after you’ve waited for five minutes or two hours, you will step through the metal detectors, through the gates and doors, down the hallways or up the hill, and into the visits room. There you will sit and wait until he comes out, or he will be waiting already. And then, and only then, can your jail clock slow down – it doesn’t stop. From the time you call bookings until you see him in the flesh, anything could get in the way of the visit.

During the visit, you may hug and kiss but not too much or for too long. If anything is deemed sexual, the visit can be terminated instantly. It all depends on the level of security. Some visit rooms are filmed and bugged. Minimum security jails have cafeterias, play areas for kids and grass to sit on. At some you can sit outside and smoke. Some will charge you for the International Roast coffee and some will give it to you for free.

There is to be no crying on the visit. Misty eyes at the end, perhaps, but no one can see that the jail has got to you – not your partner, not the officers, not the other crims. Save your tears for when the visit is over.

Once at Long Bay, Jimmy was in segregation, where the inmates’ visitors were admitted one at a time. The inmate’s visitors who were booked in before me were late, and their delay reduced our visit to twenty minutes. I started to cry when the guard came in to give our five-minute warning. I tried to look sweet and asked him if we couldn’t have a longer visit since we started late. He said no. Jimmy was angry at me for weeks for asking. I had given them another chance to say no. By then I’d heard the word so many times I didn’t see why it mattered.

You are your inmate’s representative, a mascot of sorts. Your presentation is always of high importance. Think
Grand Theft Auto
, because that’s how they see themselves. You will be expected to be as perfectly laid out and designed as his cell. He may expect you to be as OCD as he is. He is being watched all the time, so how you look means a lot.

The life of the crimwife is anything but easy. Although he is locked away in a cell, you may not simply do as you please. There are certain ways you must act and obligations you must fulfil to make his jail time as bearable as possible. You are his link to the outside world. You may be his only source of strength, money, companionship, hope and an address for parole when the time comes. You are extremely powerful within the inmate’s world. Your input makes a difference to his current and future happiness.

Everything less than death is a privilege in jail because, like life itself, anything can easily be taken away for a trivial reason. To be spared a flogging or allowed a TV is something that can change at a moment’s notice. It’s the same with contact with the outside world. Visits, mail and phone calls can all be stopped or interfered with easily enough. And the duration of the particular punishment can be extended for as long as the authorities like. Without any family, the screws have nothing to use against him. With you in the picture, his options for punishment are much wider. The officers will use you as leverage against him and so will the other crims. As one crim summed it up, “It’s a double-edged sword, having a missus.”

The screws can use a wife to threaten or bribe an inmate in a range of ways. She can be mocked, leered at, have her letters delayed, visits cancelled. The standard punishment for a dirty urine sample, one that has tested positive for drugs, is to place an inmate on box visits, where no contact is allowed and the visit is in cubicles separated by thick perspex. If the next urine test is dirty, the length of time on box visits is doubled. And so on. But if no one visits the inmate anyway, it isn’t a punishment. Neither is withholding parole as threatening. Without any attachments on the outside, the inmate is freer to rebel against internal jail rules. Many inmates refuse contact with anyone on the outside during their jail time to prevent the distress that it causes them and their loved ones.

Put very simply, for every day he spends in jail, you spend a day with him.

You do jail when your partner is sick or in prison hospital. You do jail knowing that any medical treatment he can hope for is random and full of internal politics. He may or may not see a doctor. He may or may not get the right diagnosis, medicine, intervention. And, overall, between jail moves, roster changes, staffing shortages and a general lack of interest in prisoner welfare, it’s unlikely he’ll be OK.

He may just get something that will shut him up for good.

You know that if he dies on the operating table, and the autopsy shows a set of handcuffs in his stomach, there will be no public outcry. Who cares if an armed robber dies in a jail hospital bed from an operation gone wrong? Your existence may be the only reason he survives. Many inmates have no one who would notice if they died. Let the doctors know that you care, that you really care, and it may save his life. Learn to mention the words “Coroner’s Court” as a gentle reminder any time you feel he may be in danger.

And, finally, there’s the side of jail you do that he doesn’t. Your personalised version of hell, which you have all to yourself. You make your own sacrifices to the gods of Corrective Services, who are angry, jealous and vengeful. You enter into contracts that you’ve never read, much less signed, with a parallel universe. You take the random searches and side comments and disgusted looks from staff. You learn not to let them see your face change, no matter what humiliation they throw at you. Then you find yourself breaking down sobbing hours later, hunched in a ball on the living room floor, knowing they got to you after all.

You cry and you cry and you cry, outraged and grief-struck by the reality that jail is for the both of you. You cry more than you expected to, from the guts and the heart. You cry when things go well, and you cry when the visit ends in the middle of an argument, knowing it won’t be fixed because too much time will have passed before you see him again.

My helplessness used to strike me as an insurmountable wall, just like his: no amount of money or any outside crisis could get him out of jail. There was no way to work for it, apply for it, study for it; nothing would get him out but time.

It’s hard to get things done when you’re a crimwife. It’s hard to find a job that will allow you time off to visit three times a week between the hours of 8 and 3. A ninety-minute visit doesn’t include the booking time and the travel. It’s hard not to have a job when you need to send money in for buy-up and phone calls and sneakers that wear thin so quickly and thermal underwear for winter, but there’s a lot to attend to while you sit at home to wait for phone calls: letters to write, lawyers to call, outfits to try on for visits.

While you’re passing messages on to his brother, or trying to reach his psychologist, you’ll find that your old friendships can take a back seat. Most people don’t understand or want to know why you are pursuing a relationship that is clearly doomed. You stop socialising when your life revolves around visits, when your body clock is set to prison routine. If you know the phone will ring just after morning tea, it starts geting easier to make sure you’re there. Like your partner, you are incarcerated until the department decides otherwise.

Being a crimwife is not for the faint-hearted. But then again, it’s a role that often chooses you, not the other way around.

Women don’t seem to play much of a role in the underworld. Extortion, drug dealing, violence: they’re bloke things … but most of them, the wives, girlfriends, lovers of career criminals, they either don’t have a clue what their men do or they refuse to acknowledge it.

Why are they attracted to guys who are bound to end up in jail or worse? What goes on in their minds, in their secret hearts? I don’t know. I suppose every woman’s prepared to pay her price for love.

—
Underbelly
, Season 1, Episode 7: “Wise Monkeys”

I am sitting at a dinner party among witty and educated companions when the topic of this book comes up. The guest to my left swivels round to look at me directly. Her conversation has thus far been full of worldly wisdom and life experience.

“So, are they all just really obese,” she says, telling me more than asking. I wasn’t expecting this generalisation from her, but it’s a typical reaction. It’s incomprehensible to most people, and often even to me, what case of the crazies a girl would need to have to date an inmate.

The Australian setting complicates things even further. The bulk of what the average non-criminal knows about jail comes from American TV, whether reality or fiction. There are some enormous differences between the prison systems to keep in mind. With an average sentence of just over three years, the partners of Australian criminals are not looking at the twenty-year sentences Americans can pick up more easily than a gun. Australia has no equivalent to the American “three strikes” rule, where a life sentence may be imposed even if the third strike was a stolen chocolate bar. If Jimmy lived in the United States with the same criminal record he has here, I doubt he would ever be released.

There are 2 million people in prison in the Land of the Free, more prisoners per head of population than in any other country in the world. This means that the majority of research on women who love men in jail has been done in an American context, often focusing on extreme cases such as the serial-killer groupies, who are defined as severely personality-disordered, with such low self-esteem that Death Row is their only hope of picking up.

The US prison community websites offer forums for women to discuss every issue imaginable, even how to move on once your loved one has been executed. In one post, a woman was heartbroken that her Death Row boyfriend had dumped her for a younger, prettier college girl. She had been with him for five years and had flown across the country to see him twice a year, supporting him in every way possible. She was not angry; rather, she missed him terribly and her new relationship did not come close in comparison. “We were best friends,” she lamented.

These emotional experiences are similar for crimwives around the world. The rollercoaster of power games is the same everywhere, but in the United States the risks are greater, the stakes higher, the consequences more severe. Intrinsic to US prison culture is the influence of gangs inside and outside working together. With so many lifers having nothing to lose, killings inside are widespread. The US crimwife performs the same tasks as the Australian one, plus many more. She visits, writes and accepts reverse-charge calls. But if he asks her for money or drugs and she doesn’t deliver, it’s way more likely that either one of them could be killed than it is in the Lucky Country.

In the United States, there is also a growing culture of women shopping for a criminal partner online – at inmate.com or romanticjailbabe.com – where inmates enter their descriptions and postal addresses. You can see the difference immediately between the two countries given the high number of US inmates whose earliest possible release date is “N/A.” Australia hasn’t made it there yet.

Before we examine why a woman would choose a life with an inmate, it makes sense to look at how the relationship began. Contrary to cable TV, most crimwives do not meet their partner when he’s already in jail. Imagine something illegal your partner might do. How would you react? What would you do if his laziness caused an accident at work? What if his road rage put someone in hospital? Or his penny-pinching led him to drive instead of taking a cab on a drunken night out? You may not be a crimwife this morning, but a wrong judgement in traffic could make you one tonight.

If I were to draw a flow chart, the difference between women who become crimwives and those who don’t would be found in their attitude to crime. There are people who are prepared to accept personal association with the wrong side of the law and there are those who are not.

The partner of a criminal sits on a spectrum of awareness. Some have no idea of his law-breaking activities or history, some hold suspicions and others actively join in. The “How much did his wife know?” question is almost impossible to answer, because the mark of the finest, most loyal crimwife is her insistence on being oblivious, except maybe among her girlfriends. Often he tells her nothing, because the authorities, and other crims, can’t get out of her what she doesn’t know.

Some women have partners who are jail-bound, and neither of them knows it. He may commit a crime that was not premeditated. It might be self-defence in a pub fight, or sleeping with the wrong woman, the one who cries rape for revenge. Driving charges are one of the most direct ways to go straight to jail. So many days behind bars could be attributed to passion, partying or romance gone wrong.

Maybe he sells pot after work to help pay the bills or he helps out the boys with favours when they ask. Maybe he steals from the cash register or the company’s account. It may be driving unlicensed to the shop for baby formula, a remarkably common defence in court. It may be going out to get some drugs for their own use. Or, of course, it could be way more serious and complex.

Crime has a lot of people on its payroll and its employees are diverse, with a multitude of skills. Does she ask where the extra money comes from for nights out? Did she send him out for nappies knowing that he shouldn’t drive?

When the allegations against a woman’s partner are news to her, the process of deciding whether to stay can be slow and agonising. Loyalty and disgust can both be powerful drivers when the man she loves is accused of behaviour that she did not know about or cannot believe. I remember the scattering of late-in-life convicted sex offenders in visits rooms, standing out in their inconspicuousness. Grey-haired men in prison overalls drinking coffee with their grey-haired wives of thirty-five years, who’d travelled four hours from the farm to visit the man who made going into their small hometown centres impossible anymore, even for the groceries.

At the other end of the spectrum is the crimwife in the know, and she may benefit substantially. Her love can be as fleeting as his profits, however. Some women are delighted to be on the arm of a drug dealer when he’s rolling in money and good times, but will disappear on the day that he’s arrested. Some women share the knowledge, and spoils, of their partners’ crimes, white and blue collar, underworld and petty thief, aware it’s probably only a matter of time. They may live their whole lives with his criminal activities supporting their family, on the side or full-time, and he may never do a day’s jail. Still, they live in fear of their secret getting out one day. They know the complications attached to what he does. They are prepared for the crimwife’s duties, and they’ve already contemplated the sacrifices a thousand times. In a lot of ways, the crimwife in the know is no different to her partner.

*

But they were all scared, even if they didn’t show it, even if they didn’t know it exactly. Even if they were doing what crooks do all the time which is block out the thing they must know. They must know it. Which is that crooks always come undone. Always. One way or another.

—
Animal Kingdom

Whenever the crimwife becomes aware that her partner has broken the law, she reaches a fork in the road. The loudest cynic and biggest eye-roller towards a crimwife is America’s Judge Judy. The good judge would expect a woman to gouge her own eyes out before having anything further to do with a man in trouble with the law. Yet, there are innumerable factors involved. Depending on her sympathies, the length and intensity of their relationship, her fears of him or for him, and her sense of obligation, she may stay or she may run as far as she can. Many excuse or justify their partner’s law-breaking because they encouraged him or benefited from it. If he protests his innocence, she may believe him, whether that belief is reasonable or not.

Once she agrees to stand by him, knowing what she does, one small step towards her partner is one giant step towards being a crimwife. Unless she cuts all contact, she begins her complicity with a world where other laws can be broken, authorities can be challenged, and the concepts of right and wrong take on new shades of grey.

When her partner is interviewed, charged and arrested, she must make another decision: whether to stay with someone who is now involved with the police, courts and a criminal record. She may have to give statements and testify.

If he is held in jail, she takes another step into the system. He may not get bail. Should she stand by him during a trial? And if he is sentenced to a prison term, should she enter the world of prison with him or remove herself from it? These decisions need to be made quickly. At each point, as the situation grows more serious, she must decide yet again whether to stay or go.

As soon as he is in jail, he will call her, write to her and ask her for things he needs to survive. If she’s a woman who can’t say no, she has to think quickly. When he turns to her, she may make promises with no idea about whether she can keep them. She may see it as only writing or sending money at the start, but when she does, she has reached out to the faraway planet and all the aliens on it, so further contact is inevitable.

These situations, in which crimwives are new to crime, are different from those of women who have grown up around crime, raised by criminals. After all, a 1999 study by Ronald D Lambert found that in Australia 22 per cent of the population claimed to descend directly from convict stock. You might even suppose an Aussie girl needs no reason to be courted by a criminal other than to honour the traditions on which this country was founded. For some families, going to jail is very much part of their cultural identity and history. They view it as an inconvenient obstacle to getting on with business or pleasure.

Jail is a part of these families’ barbecue conversations: who’s going in, who’s coming out. When enough relatives have been to jail over generations, the mothers, daughters, sisters and friends are bound to meet men who have been to jail or are on their way. Their social circles are tighter and more closed, because the judgement of outsiders is usually harsh. Often the only people who accept you for having a father or brother in jail are those who’ve been there or have a family like yours.

A US psychiatric study of the wives of convicted felons produced in 1970 by Samuel B Guze, Donald W Goodwin and Bruce Crane claimed that “convicted felons, the great majority of whom come from grossly disturbed families, marry women from similarly disturbed backgrounds.” In both groups the family backgrounds were characterised by instability, parental discord, broken homes, alcoholism, criminality, frequent suicide and suicide attempts, and frequent psychiatric hospitalisation. Sociopathy, alcoholism and hysteria were found at greater levels in the male’s immediate female relatives and among their partners. Both these groups also showed “an unusually high rate of police trouble.”

Penny was the third and last child of a working-class criminal family. Her father was a small-time, old-school crim, who lived off break-and-enters, robberies and selling pot. Growing up, her older brothers lived reasonably stable lives, even though their father went to jail every couple of years. Their mother had been a heroin addict since she was sixteen and had found life with Penny’s father more stable than life on the streets. But when Penny was four, her parents lost a baby and took up drugs. By the time she was thirteen, Penny was homeless. She ended up living with her seventeen-year-old boyfriend, who was already heavily into crime. They had a baby, but after a few years his violence and the jail routine proved too much to bear. Penny has since had two more relationships and two more babies with men who are long-term criminals. There’s no asking why with Penny. She’s been visiting jails all her life, to see her parents, one of her brothers and a lot of their friends. Her brothers remember a life with her parents when there was still food in the cupboard. Penny can’t.

Jimmy often said, “I’m telling you, there’s two separate communities out there,” whenever my more naïve side would emerge. And he is right: there is a community that remains mostly invisible to law-abiding eyes. The unschooled don’t notice the stream of visitors to the neighbour’s house. At a shopping centre they’re oblivious to the shoplifters, the drug dealers, the carjackers and ATM bandits who are scoping the area for future targets or operating under their noses. They probably feel sorry for the man standing with the trolley by Kmart offering to sell the brand-new TV he just bought for half price, because he’s had a fight with his wife about it and she’s walked off. They can’t imagine that people walk out with massive appliances all the time, straight past security, and sell it twenty seconds later, right outside the shop. They don’t for a moment suspect that they’re shopping next to a professional thief, who’s picking up today’s orders.