Kat Armstrong was a heroin addict, disowned by her only daughter and serving a prison sentence of ten years.
Vulnerable to relapse, with no support, no money, no home and no skills, her biggest challenge was returning to the real world.
Clean for eight years, reunited with her daughter and mentoring other women inmates all over NSW, Armstrong’s journey is exceptional. The fact that she’s still alive is amazing.
Of the 50, 000 released between 2007-8, 450 died within five years of release; according to a new report by the Australian Medical Journal.
The AMJ says drug overdoses account for half this figure - but what happens to the other 30,000 inmates who are released each year? Or the 40 per cent of inmates who stay alive but return to their gaol cell within two years?
The answer comes from conditions inside; our prisons are in crisis. Mental health issues are rife and repeat offenders are commonplace.
In the ten years that Kat Armstrong spent incarcerated she claims inmate mental health, including her own, took a massive turn for the worse.
Inmates had “no trouble” getting access to methadone and other serotonin-inducing psychiatric medications to treat their drug and alcohol dependency; that also made them “zombie-like” and easier to control.
But Armstrong’s mental health problems were frequently misdiagnosed.
Large doses of the wrong kind of meds left her feeling unbalanced and paranoid, less able to communicate and do any of the work that was assigned to her.
She was not alone. At a recent meeting of the Crime and Justice Reform Committee in Sydney, Eileen Baldry, Professor of Criminology at the University of New South Wales, said the Australian prison population are “massively mentally unwell.”
The latest NSW inmate mental health survey showed between 60 and 70 per cent of men and women inmates suffered from alcohol or drug dependence; and between 40 and 60 per cent had been treated for a psychological problem within the last 12 months.
Women are at a higher risk of suffering “from everything in prison”, according to Baldry.
Of the 80 per cent serving time, usually as a result of alcohol and drug dependency, the same number are suffering from a mental health disorder - predominately a mix of anxiety and depression.
Comprehensive international research shows these issues in prison life are widespread and bound to get worse.
An American study conducted between 1960 and 2000 found that even though beds in psychiatric wards were going down, mental health lock ups were steadily increasing.
They also show repeat offenders are on the rise.
Armstrong says most inmates she now speaks to hate gaol, but the stability it offers, in comparison to their “normal” lives, makes re-offending a risk worth taking.
Professor Baldry agrees. With almost all of their convictions falling into the “low level crimes” bracket, she says many women cycle through prison, three to four months at a time.
Prison might seen an easier solution for offenders with mental health issues that make them “harder to deal with”. But locking them up, time and time again, without adequate treatment is no positive long-term solution.
Rising rates of recidivism in the United Kingdom drove a 2004 parliamentary enquiry into the rehabilitation of prisoners.
Its key findings praised German and Swedish penal programs that aim to provide prisoners with the best chance of “re-socialisation” and “damage reduction” – that included finding accommodation and work on return to the outside world.
To say finding a solution to this problem is complicated would be a gross understatement but finding alternatives to the current system is imperative.
Since 2006 the NSW state government has spent about $100 million creating alternative facilities for prisoners.
But the three new facilities, including a high-security mental health facility as distinct from a prison at Long Bay Correctional Complex, are limited in their reach.
Consistency, better communication and a focus on long-term care seems a good place to start.
Kat Armstrong says mentoring can be successful; her own life was “transformed” by her two mentors, one of whom was an ex-prison inmate.
She now spends several hours a fortnight visiting five female inmates; talking about their families, their kids, their problems inside prison, their mental health and helping them get access to social services on the outside.
“Sometimes having that person there helps you realise that you can survive too. It’s good guidance,” she said.
Treating people as humans has also been known to prove effective.
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