In this chapter we consider two key official responses to the growing systemic advocacy campaigns and rising number of women’s complaints highlighting the discriminatory violence and harms experienced by women in both Pentridge and Fairlea: the Agenda for Change reform blueprint and the Equal Opportunity Commission Victoria investigation into conditions at the Banksia Unit for women at Barwon Prison. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate the rhetoric associated with the shift towards progressive reform in the women’s correctional system (...) during the early 1990s. We do this using the activist archive to illuminate the gulf between government policy documents and practice. While there was a shift on paper during this time towards recognition of the unique needs and experiences of women and respond to these through the design of new prisons, the promotion of co-ed prisons, and the roll-out of gender-responsive programmes, services and employment opportunities, the activist archive tells a conflicting story of compounding discrimination and sustained fatal harm that was building in sections of Pentridge and Barwon prisons. Ultimately, it is argued that the gender-responsive reforms promoted by the Office of Corrections could never achieve meaningful or transformative change due to the fact that they cannot alter the very structure of the prison and the violence it reproduces. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on Women Against Prison (WAP), a grassroots feminist activist group that formed in Melbourne in the mid-1980s to organise against women’s increasing criminalisation and imprisonment. Tracking the internal dynamics and politics of WAP against the broader context of a burgeoning and diverse feminist movement in Australia, this chapter explores how feminist activists built a critique of the prison as part of a continuum of gender violence that spanned interpersonal and institutional realms. WAP activists developed politicised connections with (...) imprisoned women and emphasised the prison’s role in sustaining intersecting gender, race and class oppressions. They sought to place women’s prison issues squarely on a broader feminist social change agenda. WAP also raised questions about the legitimacy of women’s imprisonment itself. By fomenting an abolitionist vision for women and promoting decarceration through broad-based social and policy change, WAP’s public education and coalitional organising efforts provide a window through which to explore the challenges and potential of feminist forms of anti-carceral activism. The mixed perspectives and positions held by WAP members about how to respond to men’s violence against women and children shed light on the difficulties associated with cleaving politics from emotions. This diversity also reveals the emotional effects of a long history of state sanctioning and neglect of gender violence; and the ways in which the prison has become psychically embedded within our culture, structuring our worldview, even among those aware of its inherent violence. (shrink)

Prison abolitionist scholarship provides useful frameworks with which to assess and critique prison-focused activism and advocacy, penal reform and carceral expansion. The struggle to achieve prison abolition is one for ‘broad-based social change’, which ‘challenges multiple and overlapping sites of inequality and the discourses that ensure their institutionalization and exacerbation’ (Russell and Carlton 2013, 476). Our contribution is primarily concerned to document and explore historical lineages of feminist and abolitionist resistance to carceral violence. This focus—and the strategic practices of the (...) anti-carceral feminist movement we examine—necessitates consideration of the broader structural conditions of inequality that reproduce the violence, oppression and injustice of incarceration. Abolition is a challenging social change project that begins with locating the historical and ongoing linkages between imprisonment and other forms of social control and harm. (shrink)

This chapter investigates women’s transfers to the high-security units of Pentridge Prison—an archaic bluestone penal complex designated for men—during the 1980s. It charts how inside–out collaborations facilitated a powerful public campaign against this routinised practice. To explore some of the risks, possibilities and barriers associated with organising across prison walls, this chapter examines a particular instance of this form of institutionalised violence that took place in the late 1980s. Building unrest inside Fairlea Women’s Prison sparked critical events and official reactions (...) that led to a mass transfer of women to Pentridge’s G Division in 1988. In conditions of extreme deprivation and violence in G Division, imprisoned women formed connections with activists and lawyers to challenge and speak out against the brutality and discrimination they experienced. (shrink)

In our concluding chapter, we reflect on the politics of history-making and the erasure of both carceral and activist histories in the present. As we outline the contemporary context of gendered prison reform and expansion, we bring our analysis full circle, commenting on the broader legacies of anti-carceral feminist contributions for abolitionist movement building and future campaigns dedicated to dismantling carceral systems of violence and injustice.

This chapter investigates the relatively short-lived period of almost total privatisation of the women’s prison system in Victoria, from 1996 until 2000. The Victorian State Government’s embrace of neoliberal models of privatisation in many sectors, not only prisons, demanded that anti-carceral feminists come to terms with and build critiques of a burgeoning political economy of the transnational prison industrial complex. While Australia in general and Victoria in particular have sustained a radical and widespread programme of prison privatisation to this day, (...) outstripping the US in terms of the proportion of prisoners incarcerated in privately run facilities, the excesses of violence and dysfunction at the Metropolitan Women’s Correctional Centre under the management of Corrections Corporation of Australia prompted a dramatic state government takeover of the facility after four years of private operation. Despite this ‘success’ for the anti-private prison campaign waged for almost a decade by activists, the legacy of the privatisation era in women’s imprisonment is still palpable—for it heralded a new regime of surveillance, securitisation and carceral expansion that has only been extended in the government’s hands. (shrink)

This chapter analyses a series of large-scale protests initially conceived and organised by the Coalition Against Women’s Imprisonment in Melbourne in 1988, which was spearheaded by Women Against Prison. The ‘Wring Out Fairlea’ demonstrations mobilised hundreds of people on four separate occasions to completely encircle Fairlea Women’s Prison as an abolitionist action. Protesters made creative use of visuals, space and sound to facilitate connections and dialogue across the carceral boundary and increase public scrutiny of the prison. Through radio broadcasting, live (...) music and spontaneous noise, and enabling opportunities for ‘mutual sightings’ between imprisoned and non-imprisoned activists, the Wring Outs challenged the dominant ordering of carceral space. Designed to segregate, invisibilise, silence and quarantine prisoners, the prison boundary was appropriated and repurposed by activists on both sides of the wall as an interface for collaborative and performative protest. The Wring Outs also allowed feminists and other activists to negotiate new ways of seeing the prison. By placing Fairlea Women’s Prison at the centre of collective political activity and the life of the social movement, the protests dramatically challenged and subverted the traditional location of the women’s prison at the margins. (shrink)

This book explores the dramatic evolution of a feminist movement that mobilised to challenge a women’s prison system in crisis. Through in-depth historical research conducted in the Australian state of Victoria that spans the 1980s and 1990s, the authors uncover how incarcerated women have worked productively with feminist activists and community coalitions to expose, critique and resist the conditions and harms of their confinement. Resisting Carceral Violence tells the story of how activists—through a combination of creative direct actions, reformist lobbying (...) and legal challenges—forged an anti-carceral feminist movement that traversed the prison walls. This powerful history provides vital lessons for service providers, social justice advocates and campaigners, academics and students concerned with the violence of incarceration. It calls for a willingness to look beyond the prison and instead embrace creative solutions to broader structural inequalities and social harm. (shrink)

This chapter examines the establishment, duration and end of the ‘Save Fairlea’ vigil. The vigil maintained a continuous and visible activist presence outside Fairlea Women’s Prison for five months during the latter half of 1993. It came to serve as a campaign headquarters in the fight against Fairlea’s closure, which would see women, once again, transferred en masse to a high-security men’s prison. The Save Fairlea vigil monitored the prison’s activities, especially prisoner transfers, subjecting official movements in and out of (...) the prison to increased public scrutiny and activist interventions. The vigil demonstrates that sustained protest at the prison gates can open up possibilities for an abolitionist imagination, as activists’ conversations at the camp and reflections on ‘bearing witness’ to the prison and its mundane routines sparked aspirational ideas and visions for a world without prisons. The daily life of the vigil and the broader campaign to ‘save Fairlea’ are captured in the collective diaries, which now serve as an invaluable archival resource, shedding light on the debates, practicalities and critical self-reflections that shaped this era of the movement. The vigil concluded in December 1993, when the state government announced that Fairlea would remain open, but only until construction of a new private women’s prison was completed. (shrink)

This paper reflects upon the adoption of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex rights discourse and imagery in police public relations and problematises the construction of police as protectors and defenders of gay liberties and homonormative life. Building from a foundational conceptualisation of policing as a racial capitalist project, it analyses the phenomenon of police rainbow branding practiced in nominally public spaces, such as Pride parades, and online through news media and social networking sites. Drawing on critiques of queer liberalism (...) and complicities with state violence, the paper explores the contours of carceral homonationalism, arguing that ‘officially anti-homophobic’ police image work attempts to obscure the role of the carceral state in producing sexual and gender oppression. However, this image work has also given rise to new forms of political action. Counter-movements against police and ‘carceral pride’ are actively reworking the distributions of space and visibility within LGBTI movements. (shrink)