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Speaker 1: The public has had a long-held fascination with detectives. Detectives see a side of life the average person is never exposed to. I spent 34 years as a cop. For 25 of those years, I was catching killers. That's what I did for a living. I was a homicide detective. I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys. Instead, I'm taking the public into the world in which I operated. The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories from all sides of the law. The interviews are raw and honest, just like the people I talk to. Some of the content and language might be confronting. That's because no one who comes into contact with crime is left unchanged. Join me now as I take you into this world. In part two of my chat with Kerry Tucker, we delve deeper into the life in a women's maximum security prison. Kerry talks about a role she found for herself in prison that got her the respect from fellow inmates and even the Corrective Services officers. We also discuss how prisons could be improved, the hurdles ex-prisoners face, how Kerry has truly turned a life around through education and advocacy, and how the character of Bea Smith in the women's prison show Wentworth was actually based on Kerry. I love stories of redemption and Kerry's story is inspirational. We're back again for part two of I Catch Killers with guest Kerry Tucker. In part one, Kerry told us how she went from the sort of suburban housewife, two kids, two young kids, white picket fence and found herself in prison. We discussed the fraud-related, the white-collar crime offences that Kerry committed and And then the fact that she's owned her mistakes and pleaded guilty. She was hoping to get two years in prison. I think it came seven years. You got, Kerry?
00:02:02
Speaker 2: On top, yes. Seven on top, five on the bottom.
00:02:05
Speaker 1: Okay. So a fairly, well, not a fairly, a very lengthy sentence. We're going to talk about how you survived in prison in some more detail. In fact, survives probably underselling it. You flourished in prison. And the things that you learned and the person that you became has been the sort of cornerstone of your life since you've left prison and obtaining a PhD, education, and also advocacy for people in prison. But before we do, and we're going to get into some heavy stuff and painful stuff, before we do, let's just wind back to the end of part one, talking about how you, your story became the main character in the Wentworth TV series. which was about a woman's prison.
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Speaker 2: Yeah.
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Speaker 3: When I was in prison, sort of I need to go forward to come to that point, but when I was in prison I ended up getting a computer. It just had Word on it because I was doing my Master of Arts in there and I diaryed everything, every day. I diaryed two to three pages handwritten and then when I got the computer I was off. I was doing three and four pages every day of writing what, what phone calls I made with the girls, what they'd said, were they happy?
00:03:23
Speaker 2: Were they crying?
00:03:24
Speaker 3: You know, if I needed to go and negotiate between two, two warring factions on the compound, I'd sit there and type it out first. Like, you know, Jenny's connected to her and she's connected to her. So I've got to be careful of her and it become a, you know, my, my best friend. And when I got out, I had about a million and a half words. And cause I did it Every single day because I knew also it was a unique experience. I did it also slightly from an academic point at times being a participant observer. Nobody else could make the observations about why is this girl behaving like this, you know, this sort of stuff. What was her crime? And then really funny stories as well. So when I got out, I'd been on Australian Story and Big Jack Productions. They had seen it and rang me, got my number and rang me and said, look, they're doing a rewrite of Prisoner, the old Prisoner, a re-imaging of Prisoner, and they wanted me to be involved as like a co-script writer.
00:04:25
Speaker 2: And I used a lot of my journals, in fact, the main.
00:04:30
Speaker 3: Character B was based around me in the sense that, you know, to make the character move forward, fraud wasn't going to cut it. Yeah. And it was sort of like, what's the next best thing you could do? And I said, kill my husband. Of course I didn't mean it. Of course I didn't mean it. I was just about to caution you.
00:04:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Of course I didn't mean it. All in jest.
00:04:51
Speaker 3: And so that's what they went with with B. All the characters that were re-imaged from Prisoner were people that I spent time with. And it was very, very obvious because they'd say, hey, that's Wendy and, you know, that's sort of Sue. So that's how I became involved in that and I did the script writing part And they used my journals right up to the end of Series 1, the most successful. The problem with the end of Series 1 was that all of a sudden the governor was killing people and the general manager was kidnapping and I.
00:05:24
Speaker 2: Was like, I don't want to be part of this. Wentworth could have carried itself on its own.
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Speaker 3: We wanted to show where women come from, how they got to prison, their crimes and their life beforehand.
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Speaker 1: I do a lot of consulting with scripted police type TV shows. And I'm always at pains to tell the writers, you don't have to have multiple murders. You don't have to have car chases, explosions, shootouts. Just the interaction between the people involved. in a murder investigation, the emotion and all that is enough to carry a show with the intrigue and the fascination, and that's where the real story is. Yes. I get the sense that's what you're saying about with the prison. You don't have to make it dramatic. There's not a murder there every day, and the governor's not here.
00:06:11
Speaker 3: And there's not, there wasn't, you know, and with Wentworth, there's enough going on, new characters coming to prison, you know, characters being released, some on remand. You know, we could show all of that and we did. The first season was the most successful.
00:06:26
Speaker 1: Did you get to meet the actors and actresses and get a sense of telling them how to play certain roles and different things?
00:06:36
Speaker 2: I did. I met Nicole De Silva, who played Frankie.
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Speaker 3: You know, I met with her a couple of times because she was, her character was about to leave prison and she wanted to know how that felt.
00:06:49
Speaker 2: And I knew.
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Speaker 3: Just how devastating that can feel and frightening it can feel.
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Speaker 2: So I met with her quite a few times.
00:06:58
Speaker 3: The rest of the characters, no, I didn't have anything to do with them. The script was pretty much already already written by then. It was a lot of fun. Um, pro at the same time I was, I was writing my own stage play, which was part of my PhD. Um, and it was a one woman stage play at La Mama's Comedy Courthouse Theatre. And, um, and it was a, an hour-long play, one-woman play. I was the star.
00:07:25
Speaker 1: Well, you may as well be if it's a best-performing actress. Did you get an award at the end of each show for the best performance of the night? No. That was called Revlon and Razor.
00:07:37
Speaker 2: Revlon and Razor, why?
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Speaker 3: Because I thought that was quite unique. I used to always wear lipstick in prison and initially everyone would go, ooh, who are you wearing lipstick for? And I'd be like, oh, fuck off. I'm not listening to this shit. I'm not going into the prison code stuff.
00:07:51
Speaker 2: I'm not, you know.
00:07:52
Speaker 3: And then, of course, the razor wire, that was, and that was what I wanted my book to be called, but. You know, basically, you know, Penguin, rightfully so, said, well, you know, that's not going to, you know, pop out straight away as a prison story. So, you know, I followed their lead. But I was always a writer, you know, so I really enjoyed going through– Particularly as we were writing the scripts in the sense I would say you can't do that because if you do that, that character will have to go to protection and then she's out of the picture.
00:08:23
Speaker 1: Yeah.
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Speaker 3: Or they wouldn't say that. This is how they'd say it. You know, all of the sort of language around prison, you know, the drunk's lagging and, you know, sweet. You know, all of the language I absolutely hated but used, you know, when I needed to.
00:08:40
Speaker 1: Well, I think that's a, you know, That gives you the skill of communicating in all different environments because I'm sure when you left prison and were in the academic world, you're not using that type of language. But in prison, that's a way to communicate and the words and the way that they talk and carry themselves. Look, we've moved forward. I want to talk– we've jumped too far forward, so let's wind it back. You're talking like you're already out of prison. We just sent you to prison.
00:09:08
Speaker 2: Like, just– Sorry, I'm just trying to forget.
00:09:12
Speaker 1: I've just arrived. Wind it back a little bit.
00:09:16
Speaker 2: You asked me a question that was way ahead.
00:09:18
Speaker 1: This is not iCatchKillers about your play and your TV career.
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Speaker 2: Should be.
00:09:27
Speaker 1: All right. When you're in prison. You highlighted when you're in the holding cells in police custody, your ability to write letters and give a voice to the people in the prison, in custody. When you went to prison, jail, whatever you want to call it, it's a new environment. You're in a contained environment. There's different rules. It's a different world. And you can upset people there. Were you fearful when you went from the custody situation into the prison population? Yeah, I was.
00:10:02
Speaker 3: When I first arrived there, the prison was locked down, so it was dark. And the beds were filled. We'd been brought out there just to fill up the last couple. And I was taken over to a cell, a unit. I had no idea what it was. But what I do remember is that it had– a mattress, it had a blanket, it had sheets and a pillow and I was in heaven. Um, it had a shower that I didn't have to keep pressing the button on the wall.
00:10:28
Speaker 2: And I thought, this is fabulous.
00:10:29
Speaker 3: And I got up next morning, opened the door, really concerned, not knowing where I was looking for my friends, you know, and, um, And this woman, she would have been probably seven foot tall if she was an inch. She's just almost grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and said, come on newbie, come and I'll show you around. And I said, yeah, I'd love to. I was a very agreeable person at that time. And she took me over to these two women. She said, this is Bomber. She likes to blow up airports and courthouses and things like that.
00:11:02
Speaker 2: And I was like, oh, nice to meet you, Bomber.
00:11:05
Speaker 3: And then she said, this one's Sparky. And I looked at her and I said, she's not an electrician.
00:11:09
Speaker 2: Is she?
00:11:09
Speaker 3: She said, no, no, she lights big fires, big motherfucker fires. And I was like, Oh, hello, Sparky. You know, I went racing back to the office, to where the offices were. I said to this woman, give me a minute. I went racing back over there like some idiot. And I said, oh, hello, my name's Kerry. I arrived last night like I'm at school camp. I just thought I'd introduce myself.
00:11:35
Speaker 2: But am I in the right unit?
00:11:37
Speaker 3: Because all of these women look really, you know, and they said, you're in the unit for the criminally insane.
00:11:43
Speaker 2: And I went, oh, no, he was right. I am insane. Like, you know, and I thought, oh, my God. And he looked at me.
00:11:50
Speaker 3: He looked at the terror on my face and he said, no, no, no. He said, there's just been no beds available. So you're just here. for a couple of nights and then you'll be going down to the remand unit. And I was like, you know, I'd never been more thankful in my life to know that I was only there for a couple of days.
00:12:09
Speaker 1: You can laugh about it, but I can't think of a more scary situation to be in.
00:12:13
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:12:14
Speaker 1: You know, criminally insane. You talk about your skills of reading the room, but insanity is a little bit hard to read sometimes and someone can be smiling one moment and then– Yeah, in a fit of rage straight after.
00:12:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I learnt very, very quickly. You know, I was– from that day I was hypervigilant. You know, I was always– I was listening to somebody but watching somebody over the– you know, over my shoulder. So, you know, and I also found very quickly that just– Respect and kindness would, you know, earn me many, many, many, many favours. You know, I had no issues with, well, not, well, I did with some, but, you know, no issues with the majority of women because they knew that I, you know, I gave a damn.
00:13:03
Speaker 1: Yeah. And that carries you through. I've spoken to a few people in prison and said that kindness helped them get through too. Yeah. Not having conflict, treating people, and it's sort of, they're used to bridging up, like confrontation, confrontation all the time. But if someone just takes a sting out of it, and I'm not saying it works all the time, but majority of the time you can de-escalate a situation.
00:13:30
Speaker 3: I found, I went to the remand unit, which is a holding cell, 52 women that first arrive in prison. So no one wants to be there. It's like walking through, you know, a Bosnian minefield and hoping something wouldn't blow up. I found it quite refreshing, to tell you the truth. My first night there.
00:13:50
Speaker 1: Maybe you are in science.
00:13:53
Speaker 2: I actually found, yeah, probably. I'd been married. Nothing scares me anymore.
00:13:59
Speaker 3: But I found it quite, I saw women there, if they're withdrawing from drugs, they have to do it by themselves. And it's just dreadful. And I was the healthiest woman there. The first night I was there, this woman come up to me. It was a time when you could smoke. And she came up to me and she said, give us your smokes. And I was like, ha, no, I'm pretty happy to have one myself. And bullies are always bigger. She was about six foot. And she's standing there. Then all of a sudden there's 50 women standing around going, oh, look at the newbie, you know. This woman, I didn't, she turned out to have come from a major crime family, but I didn't know that at the time. She's going, let's go outside. And I went, no, no, no, no, I want to have a smoke. And I just looked at her and she said, you know, I said, it's cold outside. She said, right, we're going outside. And I just looked at her and I thought in that flash of moment, I thought I've lost my house, my kids, you know, I've hurt my family. I've lost my self-respect. I've lost everything. You can't go any lower than that. And I actually just looked it up and I gave in and I just said to her, yep, come on, let's go outside. I said, I've never been in a fight before and you're going to win this, but you're as sure as shit going to know you've been in a fight. And she looked at me and she just stopped for a minute and then just went, oh, you're crazy and walked off. And I'm thinking, oh, thank God. Another woman come over to me and she said, hey newbie, that was cool. I said to her, I saw it in a Mel Gibson movie once and I thought it was probably a good time to use it.
00:15:28
Speaker 1: And it worked.
00:15:29
Speaker 3: But that also gave me the insight that bullies don't like being made a fool of and I had a quick enough mouth to be able to do that. And so they avoided conflict with me in case the tough ones were made look like an idiot, you know. And if I ever had any sort of hard discussions, it was out of the way where they couldn't be made a fool of, never out in the main compound. So that worked in my favour as well. I'm certainly no fighter or anything, but I'm no shrinking violet either.
00:15:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. But they're the little tests that you get in prison and it could dictate the whole way you spend your time in prison, how you react to that first, yeah, give us your smokes situation. And you managed to talk your way out of it, which was quite clever. And it was pretty tough. Yeah, you might beat me, but you're going to know you're in a fight.
00:16:20
Speaker 3: I was, yeah, I was like, I'm so done. You know, I might as well just give it my best shot. And it's sort of, everything just goes through your mind. Like if she knocks my teeth out, I'm in prison, so who cares? If I get a black eye, I'm in prison, who cares? You know, it was just, you know, I didn't want a broken nose because I thought that would hurt, but I sort of weighed up all these things at the last minute thinking, well, I've just got to get into this life.
00:16:45
Speaker 1: Well, I suppose when you're at rock bottom and, you know, when you're talking prison, life, and we're going to talk about the impact of your relationship with your daughters at the time and You've lost everything. You really, you get to that point where who gives a fuck? What are you going to do to me? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let's go. That type of thing. I would imagine a bit of that kicks in. The skills that you adopted in the custody sort of lent itself to helping people. You turned up with the reputation of, yeah, tough talking, smart letter writer.
00:17:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, with muscles.
00:17:23
Speaker 1: Then if she had a bike in here, she'd win the, yeah, because she's been doing spin classes. How did that play out? Because that really shaped your whole outlook on your time in prison. It got you a reputation with fellow inmates, a reputation with the prison guards. Tell us about how that evolved.
00:17:46
Speaker 3: It started off with the parole board goes out to the prison, or this prison anyway, twice a year, and they usually see about 40 girls. And I was watching the girls come out of where that parole board was, and they'd be like, you know, the maggot wouldn't give me my parole, and they just weren't getting their parole. And as they're coming out, I could tell they were saying this while they were in there. So I sort of started, after I got my computer and everything, I just sort of started to settle in. I'd gotten to know the women quite well. And I said, if I can convince, you know, the general manager to write your parole letter, that you take it into the parole hearings. And just give it to the judge.
00:18:27
Speaker 2: Don't open your mouth. And we'll go from there.
00:18:31
Speaker 3: Because, you know, they'd ask questions of the girls and the girls are sort of, some of them are illiterate and they're.
00:18:37
Speaker 2: Sort of like, I've already been a child, you know, maggot, you know. And so... So they were very hostile.
00:18:44
Speaker 3: So I got to know them all very well, which is a really big deal because they told me their past, you know, what contributed to their crime, where they come from, what, you know, and I found that most of the women there didn't get their parole because they didn't do a particular program. And when I investigated it, the program wasn't even running at the women's prison. So I also felt that, you know, If the judge says, like, your top sentence is like mine, seven years, bottom sentence is five years. The judge then says you're in prison for five years and you come out for two years, you know, on parole. That's how he wants it. So I felt the women have done their time. They should, you know, done the crime, done the time. They should have every opportunity to get out. So I'd started doing their letters, all of their letters. And because of the recidivism, they'd come back over and over. I'd just recall them from a disc that I had. And I ended up having quite, you know, parole time, I'd have seven or eight, maybe nine, ten women lining up outside my room that very quickly become an office. And it went from none getting parole to nearly none. you know, to I think 38 was my lowest of women getting parole. So then it become, if it wasn't just parole letters, you know, it was letters to the judge or it was family court letters or things like that. And I got to know the women very, very well and understand them very well. Because in prison, to give away your vulnerabilities is a really.
00:20:11
Speaker 2: Big deal, you know.
00:20:13
Speaker 3: Came in handy a couple of times with some, you know, ruthless ones in there. But other than that, I'd sort of cemented my place. I'd come full circle in there.
00:20:23
Speaker 2: And I relied on the officers a lot too.
00:20:25
Speaker 3: I used to say to the girls, you know, they'd say you can't, You can't talk to the officers and I'm like, I'm not getting into this bullshit, you know. Women should do their own sentences. I'm not getting into the crim code here. So every morning I'd see the officers, you know, good morning, Mr.
00:20:39
Speaker 2: Brown, good morning, Mr. this, that and the other.
00:20:41
Speaker 3: When I talked to the women, I'd say, you know, I'd call them screws, you know, but never to them and whatnot. So, yeah, the letter writing sort of got me on the way.
00:20:54
Speaker 1: And it's a difficult situation. I can see the benefits, the reputation that you get within the– because a lot of prison is about reputation, isn't it, how you do your time? It's the reputation. It's amazing. Some people that rise in prison or other people are treated like dogs, literally. Reputation is a big thing. It is.
00:21:16
Speaker 2: It is.
00:21:17
Speaker 3: And I knew– I got to know the prison and the women very, very well. And I sussed out everything, you know, and, you know, I knew I had to make myself a mover in prison.
00:21:29
Speaker 2: I wanted to.
00:21:31
Speaker 3: But I wasn't coming from in prison, in women's prison anyway, we had someone that sort of run the drug trade, someone that would sort of run the violent trade, the standover trade, and I was neither of those. So that's where I made myself being, you know, like the jail lawyer, so to speak. But it was sort of much more than that and I really– You know, it really made a big difference for the women in there.
00:21:58
Speaker 2: And as I said, I got to know them very.
00:21:59
Speaker 1: Very well. Tell me about the women in there because, yeah, I know in conversations with you and aspects I've read in the book, you obviously had empathy for them. And I think it would be fair to say you were shocked by what people had experienced before they came to prison. They were victims of crime as much as they were criminals. And they've ended up inside. Tell us about the type of people that the general public mightn't realise are in prison.
00:22:28
Speaker 2: I think, you know, you're very right.
00:22:30
Speaker 3: Most women in prison were victims of crime before they ever became perpetrators.
00:22:34
Speaker 2: And that's really important.
00:22:35
Speaker 3: That's not, you know, that's not trying to get out of anything.
00:22:38
Speaker 2: That's a fact, you know. And again.
00:22:41
Speaker 3: You know, a lot of the women when I'd sit and do their parole letters, you know, or if I'm talking to them as a group, they'd just sit there and go, yeah, I remember the first time I was raped I was six and they'd go, oh, no, I was seven. You know, and it was or someone would go ten, you know, and I'm sitting there thinking, my God, my God, you know. And they were saying it like it was just, well, you know, I get that.
00:23:01
Speaker 2: It's happened. You're a kid, you move on sort of thing.
00:23:04
Speaker 3: And they just, women just took it on the chin. They just, that was their life. They couldn't change it. They moved on and here we are now. You know, and I would challenge any person that has gone through that sort of trauma not to become, you know, a drug addict, you know, to try and cope with what's happened. 60, probably 70% of the women when I was in prison were drug addicts. They were a nuisance to society. They weren't a threat to society and they shouldn't be there. You know, we need prisons. I'm a reformist, not an abolitionist. We need prisons, but we need better ones. We need them to run better. So I think, you know, if you took all of the– because drugs in prison will always be there. Sending a drug addict to prison doesn't make them automatically a non-drug addict. And it's ingenious how– women get their drugs because they always will.
00:23:55
Speaker 2: I didn't care about that, you know. So a whole.
00:23:59
Speaker 3: Lot of the women in there, probably, you know, three quarters of the prison shouldn't be there. They should be in, you know, a custodial health system, you know, for drugs and whatnot. That way you could concentrate on the ones that should be there, you know, people that have, you know, murderers, conspiracy to commit murder, you know, there are a lot of, sort of violent armed robbers in there and whatnot. You could focus on them.
00:24:26
Speaker 1: We need to protect society from those people, yeah.
00:24:29
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely.
00:24:31
Speaker 3: But I have a lot of empathy for the drug girls who are just trying to get by. They've been shit on all their lives, you know, and usually been thrown out of home after some sort of incest or whatnot. You know, I can't begin to tell you how many people girls went to their mum because, you know, their new dad is molesting them or whatever else and got thrown out in the streets.
00:24:53
Speaker 1: I really, and I've been trying to champion the cause or at least speak about it, that child sexual abuse, how many people are in prison. And it's not just the female prison. No. It's the male prisons as well. I thought pedophiles were, you know, called rock spiders and everything else and they're a lower pecking order in the prisons. Because of the nature of the crime. But what I found out when I did a podcast series in a maximum security prison, it was because a lot of prisoners in there have been sexually assaulted as kids.
00:25:26
Speaker 2: That's right.
00:25:28
Speaker 1: You're into advocacy and prison reform and all that. I look at crime, how we reduce crime. I think we could do a big thing on crime if we protected our children.
00:25:38
Speaker 3: Oh, I couldn't agree with you more. You know, it's such a sad, and what's happening is I had a government, what was actually the shadow minister, contact me and said, you've got some ideas about prison. Let's hear them. So we met for lunch. I said to him, this is great, but I'm still not going to vote for you.
00:25:58
Speaker 1: I said, but.
00:26:00
Speaker 3: I'd like to be able to chat to you. I told him, you know, how the prisons work, how this and the other. And he just, once he, I said, put the drug addicts, nonviolent offenders, three and six month sentences, well, they shouldn't be there anyway, but put them into a custodial health system, white coats, not corrections officers, blah, blah, blah, rebuild these women.
00:26:20
Speaker 2: You know, he didn't want to hear it.
00:26:21
Speaker 3: He said, well, the community won't like it. And I said, well, someone's got to finally say, I don't care what the community thinks, you know, It's not working now.
00:26:29
Speaker 2: We need to change it.
00:26:30
Speaker 3: We're still staying within the parameters of keeping the community safe but the community doesn't get to have two bites of the cherry with everything when it comes to how we're going to reform prisons because when I was in prison, 350 women populated that prison.
00:26:46
Speaker 2: It's over 900 now.
00:26:47
Speaker 3: They just keep building beds and, you know, I just can't see how that helps anybody.
00:26:54
Speaker 1: Well, the rate of recidivism that we've got in this country, in female prisons, male prisons across the country, is ridiculous. Yeah, yep. I think, you know, if something is not working, what have we got to change? We all say, we're not little do-gooders that go, oh, we don't need prisons. Bullshit, we need prisons for some people. Of course we do. Society needs to be protected. But if it's not working, if we can– help people become out of prison a better person than when they went in, reduce, so they don't reoffend, that means less victims. It's not, you know, it's getting smart on crime.
00:27:33
Speaker 3: The knock-on effect is enormous. Like, as you've said, you know, it's less victims. And my theory too is that, you know, every woman that arrives in prison should immediately start a program the next day that is around rebuilding her addressing the crime so that she leaves the best person she could possibly be because she's going to come out and quite possibly live next door to you.
00:27:52
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:27:53
Speaker 3: You know, why the community think at different, I've heard it so many times, you know, that they go to prison and they get all these luxuries and whatever else and it's just so far from the truth, you know. And the other thing is if you want, you know, people need to understand that the sentence is The loss of your freedom is huge and it's enough.
00:28:14
Speaker 2: It's enough.
00:28:15
Speaker 3: You can't then turn around and go, well, we want them to break rocks as well. We don't want them to watch TV because there's nothing worse than an already angry crim coming out of prison as a pissed off one, you know, because that helps nobody. People respond to kindness and empathy, you know, and rebuilding them. And I think that's how we have to look at, you know, moving forward, certainly how we look at running prisons with half the population that they have.
00:28:44
Speaker 1: Kerry, you speak so much truth there, and I agree with you 100%. And, you know, we've got to get this mindset away from people that going to prison, if they're allowed to, you know, do study or they're allowed to watch TV or they get books, that's not fair. They should be punished. Trust me, the really bad ones in prison will get punished because they won't embrace the kindness. They won't embrace the opportunity. So people will get what they want. But the punishment is... been taken away from society.
00:29:16
Speaker 2: That's right.
00:29:16
Speaker 1: That's what the punishment is.
00:29:19
Speaker 2: And it's huge. It's huge.
00:29:21
Speaker 3: Everything falls into that. Your kids' lives. It may well be, like in my situation, it may well be my fault. Absolutely it was. But the pain is still there. So it's very, very real. Watching my kids grow up, I become auntie mum. You know, fractured relationships with everybody. You know, your ability to earn a living, your assets, everything falls into that great big hole and it's enough.
00:29:49
Speaker 1: I think the fact that you had the– understanding that you needed to put yourself in with the girls because I could imagine you walking around like day one when you're in there, could you keep that prisoner away from me? No, you are the prisoner. But a little bit of advice like that, yeah, it's just showing a bit of kindness in a very unkind world, isn't it? It means a lot to people.
00:30:14
Speaker 2: It is.
00:30:15
Speaker 3: I sat there one day with a girl and I said to her, you know, I said, well, you're going to be okay, sweetheart.
00:30:20
Speaker 2: It's the first time you've been here. She was about 20.
00:30:22
Speaker 3: She's in on attempted murder, you know, and I said to her, you know, it's okay, you know, I'm going to be here with you for the first couple of days, maybe the first month or so. You know, I want to make sure you're okay. She burst into tears and said to me, you're the nicest person I've ever met. And I thought to myself, it really stuck with me because I thought, I've just said about five sentences to you, sweetheart.
00:30:44
Speaker 1: And that's the most love and kindness she's had in her life. Exactly.
00:30:47
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I followed her through her sentence, you know, because I just wanted to make sure and touch base with her. But that happened quite a lot, you know, that ability to be able to connect, you know, particularly with really wounded people.
00:31:00
Speaker 1: Your situation with your kids, tell us on that, the impact that that had on you. And I see how it just becomes so hard and the visits and how painful it is. How did you deal with that situation? I had....
00:31:16
Speaker 3: You know, we had family court so I was only allowed two phone calls a week, 12-minute phone calls. So six minutes for one and six minutes for the other all in the one call and then it hangs up, it disconnects.
00:31:29
Speaker 2: And visits. The visits with the kids got.
00:31:32
Speaker 3: Further and further apart the more my ex-husband, you know, sort of wanted to move on with everything and plus I didn't realise how far away geographically, I didn't even know where I was in the Western suburbs. I'd never been out there before. I've never driven out there before.
00:31:50
Speaker 2: And I arrived in a van.
00:31:52
Speaker 3: So they were as far on the Eastern suburbs as I was in the Western. So, you know, petrol, the kids getting car sick, you know. At one point there, I just had to let it be, you know, just let it be. But what I did was I used to sit back and think, you know, I don't want to become, you know.
00:32:09
Speaker 2: A shadow of their life.
00:32:11
Speaker 3: So I'd buy a card each from the canteen every day and I'd write a joke and I'd go, my darling Shannon, today I thought of you 101 times and I'd put a joke in it and then to Sarah, my darling Sarah, right up until I was writing, my darling Shannon, today I thought of you 1,763 times and put a joke in. You know, the girls told me about six months ago that they've still got the boxes of them And they used to run to the mailbox to get the joke and all that sort of stuff. So it was one way of me being able to connect to them. The phone calls, I would have sold my soul for, I never did anything wrong in prison, but I absolutely would have sold my soul for a mobile phone. Because in the men's prisons, the phones are inside their units, so they can ring all night. The women's prisons, the mother's, The phones are outside the unit. So at 5 o'clock in the winter and 7 o'clock in the summer, once you're locked in, you can't make a phone call, you know. And 12-minute phone calls, by the time, you know, I grew up with my little girls' voices. To this day I can still know if something's going on, that they're not telling me just through making them talk, you know.
00:33:23
Speaker 2: And it'd start off with, you know, hello, sweetheart, how are you going?
00:33:26
Speaker 3: And the first one on the phone was so quiet and I'm sitting there thinking, come on, come on, come on, the minute's a ticking away. You know, and then about six minutes they'd go, I'm good, and it'd be like, oh, God, put the other one on, you know.
00:33:38
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:33:38
Speaker 3: And you'd go through that, you know, and it started off with these tiny little, you know, hello, mummy, tiny little whispers up to when they were sort of becoming teenagers with, you know, yo, how's things? So, you know, I have a very good ear for what's going on.
00:33:54
Speaker 1: And keeping that connection's important. I know at Macquarie Correctional Centre– prison up in Wellington in New South Wales where they're trying something a little bit different from the traditional prison and giving prisoners more access to communicating with their families and whether it be in the visits or just being able to contact them more often. I think that's important because the one thing that helps a lot of prisoners when they get out of prison is if they've got a community or a family or people that they can come back to that they haven't lost connection with. Oh, yeah.
00:34:30
Speaker 2: I couldn't agree more.
00:34:32
Speaker 3: The more you feel that you're still part of something, then, you know, the more you're going to feel more inclined to be, you know, to sort of contribute to the community and not break community laws. If you're telling people we don't want you in the community, why on hell should they, you know, abide by community laws? It's, again, how people are treated. And, you know, I just think one of the hardest things, you know, when I was in prison I sort of counted down to the day you know, to get out and be with my girls because in prison time stood still for me. But they'd moved on, you know, and the very last prison visit I had with them, you know, I've sort of come in and I've gone, you know, oh, mummy's coming home, you know, this is our last prison visit here and whatnot. And they looked at me and said, you know, don't cry, mum, but we don't want to live with you when you come home.
00:35:25
Speaker 2: And I just, I couldn't react.
00:35:28
Speaker 3: You know, but the floor just opened up, you know, and I just thought, my God, you know.
00:35:34
Speaker 2: And, you know, they, and that was fair enough.
00:35:37
Speaker 3: They didn't trust that I wasn't going to disappear from their lives again.
00:35:40
Speaker 2: And, you know, it was very, very difficult. Leaving prison was very difficult for me.
00:35:46
Speaker 1: Before we have you leave in prison, you've started studying. You were doing a master's at prison and you met someone from the university that came out that became a bit of a mentor and role model for you in prison. Talk us through that and your journey.
00:36:04
Speaker 2: There.
00:36:05
Speaker 3: I was always annoyed that they removed doing what they called HSC, which is a platform for everyone to bounce off of. they removed it for women in prison, you know, and it was just like, you know, guys, what, what's the sense is that, you know? So there was a woman, a Japanese woman in prison who was doing a Master of Arts through Swinburne University.
00:36:27
Speaker 2: And she, I got to know her quite well.
00:36:29
Speaker 3: And she asked Swinburne if they, if she could continue doing it in prison. And they sort of said, well, you know, why don't we get a couple of other women to see if they want to do it as well? So The four of us that ended up doing it were there long enough to be able to complete the three-year Master of Arts. We were all sort of fairly articulate, you know, we'd all probably had degrees beforehand. And so the prison said, yes, you know, let's give it a go. On the understanding that no one felt that we'd do it. So, and it was very, I say again, this to the community. They think that, you know, education in prison is, you know, we just get all these luxuries.
00:37:08
Speaker 2: Well, it's not. It's a privilege. You know, you've got to earn it.
00:37:11
Speaker 3: But also it is the best thing for rehabilitation in prison. But also I left there with a $ 36, 000 HECS debt. You know, we had to pay for it just like every other student and we did it hard.
00:37:23
Speaker 2: We didn't have the internet. We had nothing.
00:37:26
Speaker 3: So the tutor from Swinburne would come out every Friday and she'd bring out reams and reams of paper for us to study and But then we could only keep it in our cells for six days because it'd become a fire hazard.
00:37:38
Speaker 2: So we did it very, very hard. And we graduated.
00:37:44
Speaker 3: And it's the first Australian university graduation that was brought out to the prison. So the vice chancellor came out. You know, we had all of the academics. Everyone was gowned up. They went through being frisked, you know. And even a lot of the officers, you know, they came in on their day off. And congratulated us. And when we went back onto the other side of the wall, there was almost a guard of honour there from all the crims, you know, saying, you know, they were so happy that we'd actually proved everyone wrong and we graduated. So it was very, very important because had I not had any education, I would have got a job at Coles, you know, when I got out.
00:38:23
Speaker 1: But education can offer so much more than just the education. It's the way you start to look at things, think about things, think about yourself. There's so many benefits from education.
00:38:35
Speaker 3: You know, it just teaches, it just opens your eyes to possibilities. It gives you that leg up to be able to, you know, further yourself when you get out.
00:38:44
Speaker 2: And again, you've got a captive audience. You know, why not teach?
00:38:48
Speaker 3: You know, I used to almost blackmail women to teach To, you know, to go to education, to learn how.
00:38:54
Speaker 1: To read and write, basically. This is what I've been digging for, the standover situations in prison. You get them in the yard and you make them read and write. I knew it. That's a dark side.
00:39:05
Speaker 2: I'd sit there, sit them in the corner and read.
00:39:09
Speaker 3: But, you know, and there are a lot of women that did leave and, you know, they'd learnt to read and write.
00:39:13
Speaker 2: But the education system was so small there. It was such.
00:39:16
Speaker 3: a tiny part of, of the whole thing that is prison. To me, it should have been half of it, you know? But, you know, at any given time, even then, 350 women, probably only four were allowed.
00:39:31
Speaker 2: In the visit centre.
00:39:33
Speaker 3: So, yeah, it's a big missed chance, big missed opportunities there to help women.
00:39:39
Speaker 1: And the different corrective services officers, and we flagged it in part one, you know, good cops, bad cops, good corrective services, bad corrective services. My observation in prison is like a good officer, the amount of difference they can make to the inmates, the way they handle situations. Would you agree on that?
00:40:03
Speaker 2: Oh, look, absolutely.
00:40:04
Speaker 3: In prison, there's a big difference between a corrections officer and a policeman, you know. Corrections officers are just civilians that have done a six-week training course.
00:40:14
Speaker 2: And it shows, you know.
00:40:16
Speaker 3: Um, they, they, they talk to you. They don't want to shoot you. You know, they're, they're, they're very, very good. The dog squad used to come in with the police and it was just, you know, you could just feel the chill in the air. It's, it's two different things, you know, and, you know, again, we had the, uh, the general manager, uh, Mr. Brendan Money was there when I was there and he, he was, uh, he made such a difference to so many people's lives, including my own in the sense that he knew how the system worked.
00:40:47
Speaker 1: He knew the women.
00:40:48
Speaker 3: I watched him for the first month I was there trying to work out who he was sort of. And he'd walk through the main compound. He'd address every woman by name. He'd ask about their kids by name. And I was like, this is a man that knows his stuff and is empathetic. And so I got to know him very well. He gave me so many opportunities. And I wrote the children's book in there for, for women. It's still in circulation today. I sort of said to him, I'm going to have to write a children's book in here and, uh, you're going to have to pay for it and publish it.
00:41:20
Speaker 2: And he's gone, all right.
00:41:22
Speaker 3: You know, um, the last six months of my sentence, I worked in a law firm in Werribee, you know, three days a week. He was instrumental in, in, in doing that. But, um, he gave me so many opportunities that I was never not going to respect that. And to this day, you know, I thank him and have the utmost respect. You know, we still talk, we're, we're friends and he made a difference in my life. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for him. And I know of many, many other women's lives too, because again, he recognized that your sentence is enough. Let's, let's sort of deal with women on their own level whilst inside the prison.
00:42:01
Speaker 2: Extraordinary man.
00:42:02
Speaker 1: Well, I'm glad you said good things about him because I've got some quotes here that he said about you, and it would have been a bit embarrassing if you were saying some bad things, but so you've made this easier. This is a former head of Victorians Women's Prisons, Brendan Money, says, and talking about Kerry. In 27 years working in prisons, I haven't come across any prisoner quite like Kerry. She used her time in prison so effectively she not only changed her life, but left a legacy that has changed the lives of many other women since. She encouraged the culture of education in the prison, which had a significant impact on the health and wellbeing of the prisoners. There are women who turned their lives around because she made them feel that they could learn. Some women who could not read or write, who had been in and out of jail all their lives, began to learn. And that's a remarkable achievement. Wow. That's a Do you get, do you get chills when, uh, yeah, this is, this is, yeah, head of women's prison and that's what he's looking at your time in prison, making the most of it and the impact that you've had.
00:43:10
Speaker 3: I sort of, I, I, I sort of, I sort of do. Um, what I feel in Moore is just appreciation. When I hear that, I feel, okay, I did my job properly then. I, every opportunity he gave me, I did it properly. And he's thankful for that. So I feel really appreciative that he sees it that way.
00:43:32
Speaker 2: Because, you know, we, yeah, we.
00:43:34
Speaker 3: Worked really well together to make things, you know, a better, because his way forward was also the same as me, you know, in let's try this, you know. Let's try and do this. It might just work out for the women in a better way. Or he might just say, that's just ridiculous, Kerry. You don't come back tomorrow. That sort of stuff. I was always at his heels in prison with one thing or another. And he was always there.
00:44:01
Speaker 1: Challenges when you were released from prison. Accommodation. Initially, the story of where they put you first up, but you ended up living on the uni campus. And talk us through the challenges that you faced upon release.
00:44:17
Speaker 3: For my situation, and particularly after hearing the girls didn't want to live with me, you know, Brendan Money came and saw me the night before. When long-termers leave prison, they have a barbecue, you know, sort of stuff, and everyone gets together to say goodbye and walk into the front gate. I'd sort of said to everyone, I'm inviting the officers to the barbecue as well, and some of them were sort of like, well, we're not coming then.
00:44:39
Speaker 2: I'll be like, oh, see you.
00:44:41
Speaker 3: You know, so it was sort of– and then Brendan Money came up to see me and sat me down and said he wanted to thank me for– everything that I'd done. And I burst into tears and I said to him, you know, can I stay? And he's just looked at me and he's gone, what? I said, I don't have to go, you know, can I stay? And, you know, I'm quite happy to stay. And he said, no, no, Kerry, you know, your time is here. You need to move on. And I burst into tears even more. And it was very– it was very frightening because I was somebody in prison.
00:45:13
Speaker 2: I had a place in prison. I made a difference in prison.
00:45:16
Speaker 3: And I mean a real world difference to someone coming up and saying, you're so kind, you're so nice sort of thing. Or, you know, not just I'll pick up the milk and bread for you. This was really big, big difference in people's lives. So it was very difficult for me. And what they'd sort of done was when I left, they had organized accommodation for me, but it was in Ascot Vale and it was in a a place where everyone that's doing drugs comes out of prison and goes to. I was the only female there, non-drug user, and surrounded by men knocking on the door all night, you know, wanting to score. And so I did a run of the next morning and thought, oh, I hope the parole board come looking for me because they'll send me back to prison and I'm fine with that.
00:46:01
Speaker 2: But I wasn't staying there.
00:46:03
Speaker 3: And so then, yeah, the tutor that I dealt with through Swinburne at the time organised– accommodation on the.
00:46:10
Speaker 2: Student village at Swinburne.
00:46:13
Speaker 3: So, you know, one of the hardest things is finding out where you fit back into community because you don't. And I had to work out where I fit in my children's lives. I was very much, you know, auntie mum. So I had to be very, very, I don't know, patient, patient with the girls to earn their trust.
00:46:34
Speaker 2: It's extremely difficult.
00:46:35
Speaker 3: I went from leaving prison on a Friday lunchtime To lecturing at a university on the Monday. You know, that's enormous privilege, one I'm so very thankful for, and I still had enormous trouble, even with family support. So it goes to show how difficult it is leaving one community that you're completely accepted in. to a community that, you know, no one really wants you. It's one of the hardest things possible. Leaving prison with a drug habit or going out to another drug habit, you know, it's just impossible.
00:47:09
Speaker 1: And also you carry with you, as you found out, thankfully people accepted, there's a stigma that's attached. Where have you been? I've been in prison. Okay. And people, you know, take a step away. So you carry that. It's a hard road. It is.
00:47:25
Speaker 3: One of the things I felt when I left there was, again, falling back to the thing that I'd done my prison hard. I had done that. So I felt very, very capable of saying, look, you can judge me. That's not a problem. I understand that. I absolutely do. But I've earned my right to be here. I felt very comfortable that I'd showed everything I needed to to be able to come back into the community as a contributing member of the community, non-criminal.
00:47:58
Speaker 1: Have you found the purpose in your life post-prison? We haven't got time to go all through the things that you've achieved. Even lecturing on a fraud conference, I thought that was interesting.
00:48:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, I do a lot of fraud conferences.
00:48:13
Speaker 1: Okay. Well, it makes sense, but your advocacy work and your academic studies, all the things that you're doing, you're really making a difference.
00:48:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the biggest, still the biggest, um, the biggest thing for me, you know, daily are my daughters. Shannon's 30, um, Sarah's 28 and Sarah's just given birth to our first grandchild, um, uh, granddaughter, Anastasia. So, You know, the girls are very, very close and naturally with my granddaughter now it's a whole new different thing. But I'm still, you know, sort of on the circuit. Prison will always be prison and I'll always have an opinion about how to make it better for women in prison and the community in general. You know, so I'll always, you know, I always want to contribute to that, you know, particularly about moving things into the health system as well. Um, you know, I work full time, you know, I'm a student engagement manager at a, you know, academic campus. So, you know, I'm, I'm busy, but Prism will always be a big part of me. Um, and, and the thought process that one day we can make it a whole lot better, particularly for women. My experience is in women, so I can't really talk to men's prisons, but across the board, I think we could do a whole lot better.
00:49:30
Speaker 1: Well, I, and look, whether it's men's prison or women's prison, it's, yeah, all needs, uh, the attention on it and how, how it can be improved. But, uh, I think women's prisons, and I've only learnt this, you know, since I've been out of the cops, get left behind in a lot of things. Yeah. Because people don't, when you talk prisons, you think, okay, group of men walking around the yard, that's prison. You're not thinking of women in prison. But look, maybe, yeah, it's funny how life plays out, isn't it? Yeah. It is, yeah. Your lowest point has turned into giving you a purpose and a direction in life. Yeah. if it's about balancing the ledges from your crime, and I don't say this lightly, but to me, like you're giving back to the community and we should be listening to your thoughts and on ideas that can make a difference.
00:50:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think, you know, apart from the time away from my children, I wouldn't trade my time you know, living in that prison and in that environment for anything. You know, it's given me a platform and a voice for others that don't have a voice, particularly, you know, coming from the side of the tracks that was quite judgmental. You know, I fall on my sword, you know, for that every day. And I'm still very fond of most of the women there. You know, I don't see them socially but I keep in touch, you know, with, you know, a lot of them have passed, you know, from overdose and whatnot. So it will always be a big part of my life because prison is here to stay. It's not sort of fluid like everything else. It's just going to always be here. And the more we struggle to just make it work, the more it won't. And I think there's a whole different way that we could look at helping people. They do their sentence. That's all that's required of them. And we need the media to be in line with that too. I don't know how many times I see The media say they got out early, you know, and it's sort of like in Victoria and I'm sure Australia as well, no one gets out early, you know.
00:51:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
00:51:37
Speaker 3: What they do is the top sentence, seven years, bottom sentence, five. That's the time that the judge wanted in there. But if someone gets out at five, they go, well, actually they got a sentence of seven, so they've gotten out early. And it just alarms the community. Again, it makes the prisoners look as though, you know, they've gotten off lightly and whatnot. The only way you're getting out of prison before the judge says your release date is if you die. It's just that simple. So we need, you know, the media to start toeing the line.
00:52:07
Speaker 1: There is a benefit to parole that people don't understand too in that it keeps some degree of control. Otherwise, you finish a sentence, you walk out the door, you're not obliged to do anything. parole can check in on you. So there are benefits, but yeah, I do think the media need to get behind, but yeah, we've got to worry every time there's a state election and there's a law and order issue, we're going to get tough on crime and we're going to increase the police and we're going to make mandatory sentences. I get sick of it. I got sick of hearing that narrative when I was in the cops and certainly out of it. We've got to look at, okay, let's be smart. Oh, totally.
00:52:44
Speaker 3: And mandatory sentences are the thing of the dark ages, for God's sake. Every person should be dealt with, you know, for the circumstances of that particular crime.
00:52:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree. I agree. Now, one other thing, well, there's lots of other things. I mentioned your book, The Prisoner, and I've got to say it's a great read, and we have only just scraped the surface on the stuff that's covered in the book. But I One thing that sort of blew me away, and I had to check it with you to make sure I was reading it correctly, because I haven't heard of this happening before. So in November 2000, yeah, I'm choking on the words because you can actually do this. I've got a criminal record. I wonder if this could, I could go for this.
00:53:28
Speaker 2: In 10 years, if you're in Victoria, yours would be spent automatically.
00:53:31
Speaker 1: 10 years. Um, In November 2024, in recognition of Kerry Tucker's 20 years service to prison reform, education and fraud awareness, her criminal and prison record was spent and removed in the Magistrates Court of Victoria. This was with the endorsement and support of the Victorian Chief Commissioner of Police, the Attorney General of Victoria, the Assistant Commissioner of Corrections and the Chief Magistrate of the Magistrates Court of Victoria. My understanding of this... is that your criminal history, I'm not talking to a criminal here now. It's been spent.
00:54:08
Speaker 2: Well, you know, I don't like to ever.
00:54:12
Speaker 3: I felt pretty comfortable in that role for a long time. But, yes, that was all spent.
00:54:19
Speaker 1: Under the news. And spent, sorry, spent is just because that's a word that I hadn't heard used before, but spent as in it's done. It's gone, yeah. It's gone. Yeah, I like it. Yep.
00:54:28
Speaker 3: So it's if you're– If your crime was more than 10 years ago, you haven't re-offended, so on and so forth, and it wasn't custodial, it was automatically spent in the Spent Sentences Act. If you've had a prison sentence, it rarely ever happens. But there was a gentleman by the name of Glenn Broome, who I've been on the circuit with, who got his spent through this system because he's done an enormous.
00:54:58
Speaker 2: Amount of work in the community. And he sort of said to me, Kerry, you should do it as well.
00:55:04
Speaker 3: And so I applied and it went through all the normal channels. And yes, it was spent. It was very successful. And I was thrilled. It made me feel like everything had been worth it. My girls actually said, you know, we couldn't be prouder. You know, it was just full circle and sort of recognition.
00:55:24
Speaker 2: I'm also incredibly humbled by it too. It's a big deal.
00:55:27
Speaker 3: I did spend time, you know, a long sentence in prison, you know. I'll never, ever deny that.
00:55:33
Speaker 1: So.
00:55:34
Speaker 3: You know, it's great being spent, but you've only got to Google me, you know, and it's there.
00:55:39
Speaker 2: So, you know, it is part of me.
00:55:42
Speaker 1: Well, I think, yeah, all jokes aside, it's like recognition of what you've done from the time that you were the first arrested by police and what you've done since then. And full credit to you. Yeah. What else can we, seriously, what else can we ask of someone than to do what you've done and turn things around? So, You're an example of when the system actually works, but full credit to you because you had to drive that pathway that you found.
00:56:15
Speaker 2: Oh, thank you. Thank you.
00:56:17
Speaker 3: It's been a journey. It's nearly 20 years now.
00:56:21
Speaker 1: Long time. I've enjoyed having the chat. One more thing I just want to ask you is that Now that you've seen the workings on the inside of prison, would you suggest spin class or a creative writing course that you should do in preparing yourself for prison?
00:56:37
Speaker 2: I think both.
00:56:38
Speaker 3: I think both would work really well, although I don't know about a bike in prison.
00:56:44
Speaker 2: That could be classed as a weapon.
00:56:48
Speaker 3: But I think we could do both and keep everyone very happy in there. There's nothing wrong with a few muscles here and there.
00:56:55
Speaker 1: Well, you take care. Great to chat. And let's speak again down the track.
00:57:00
Speaker 2: Thanks so much. I've really had a good time. Thank you, Gary.
Speaker 1: The public has had a long-held fascination with detectives. Detectives see a side of life the average person is never exposed to. I spent 34 years as a cop. For 25 of those years, I was catching killers. That's what I did for a living. I was a homicide detective. I'm no longer just interviewing bad guys. Instead, I'm taking the public into the world in which I operated. The guests I talk to each week have amazing stories from all sides of the law. The interviews are raw and honest, just like the people I talk to. Some of the content and language might be confronting. That's because no one who comes into contact with crime is left unchanged. Join me now as I take you into this world. In part two of my chat with Kerry Tucker, we delve deeper into the life in a women's maximum security prison. Kerry talks about a role she found for herself in prison that got her the respect from fellow inmates and even the Corrective Services officers. We also discuss how prisons could be improved, the hurdles ex-prisoners face, how Kerry has truly turned a life around through education and advocacy, and how the character of Bea Smith in the women's prison show Wentworth was actually based on Kerry. I love stories of redemption and Kerry's story is inspirational. We're back again for part two of I Catch Killers with guest Kerry Tucker. In part one, Kerry told us how she went from the sort of suburban housewife, two kids, two young kids, white picket fence and found herself in prison. We discussed the fraud-related, the white-collar crime offences that Kerry committed and And then the fact that she's owned her mistakes and pleaded guilty. She was hoping to get two years in prison. I think it came seven years. You got, Kerry?
00:02:02
Speaker 2: On top, yes. Seven on top, five on the bottom.
00:02:05
Speaker 1: Okay. So a fairly, well, not a fairly, a very lengthy sentence. We're going to talk about how you survived in prison in some more detail. In fact, survives probably underselling it. You flourished in prison. And the things that you learned and the person that you became has been the sort of cornerstone of your life since you've left prison and obtaining a PhD, education, and also advocacy for people in prison. But before we do, and we're going to get into some heavy stuff and painful stuff, before we do, let's just wind back to the end of part one, talking about how you, your story became the main character in the Wentworth TV series. which was about a woman's prison.
00:02:52
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:02:54
Speaker 3: When I was in prison, sort of I need to go forward to come to that point, but when I was in prison I ended up getting a computer. It just had Word on it because I was doing my Master of Arts in there and I diaryed everything, every day. I diaryed two to three pages handwritten and then when I got the computer I was off. I was doing three and four pages every day of writing what, what phone calls I made with the girls, what they'd said, were they happy?
00:03:23
Speaker 2: Were they crying?
00:03:24
Speaker 3: You know, if I needed to go and negotiate between two, two warring factions on the compound, I'd sit there and type it out first. Like, you know, Jenny's connected to her and she's connected to her. So I've got to be careful of her and it become a, you know, my, my best friend. And when I got out, I had about a million and a half words. And cause I did it Every single day because I knew also it was a unique experience. I did it also slightly from an academic point at times being a participant observer. Nobody else could make the observations about why is this girl behaving like this, you know, this sort of stuff. What was her crime? And then really funny stories as well. So when I got out, I'd been on Australian Story and Big Jack Productions. They had seen it and rang me, got my number and rang me and said, look, they're doing a rewrite of Prisoner, the old Prisoner, a re-imaging of Prisoner, and they wanted me to be involved as like a co-script writer.
00:04:25
Speaker 2: And I used a lot of my journals, in fact, the main.
00:04:30
Speaker 3: Character B was based around me in the sense that, you know, to make the character move forward, fraud wasn't going to cut it. Yeah. And it was sort of like, what's the next best thing you could do? And I said, kill my husband. Of course I didn't mean it. Of course I didn't mean it. I was just about to caution you.
00:04:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. Of course I didn't mean it. All in jest.
00:04:51
Speaker 3: And so that's what they went with with B. All the characters that were re-imaged from Prisoner were people that I spent time with. And it was very, very obvious because they'd say, hey, that's Wendy and, you know, that's sort of Sue. So that's how I became involved in that and I did the script writing part And they used my journals right up to the end of Series 1, the most successful. The problem with the end of Series 1 was that all of a sudden the governor was killing people and the general manager was kidnapping and I.
00:05:24
Speaker 2: Was like, I don't want to be part of this. Wentworth could have carried itself on its own.
00:05:29
Speaker 3: We wanted to show where women come from, how they got to prison, their crimes and their life beforehand.
00:05:36
Speaker 1: I do a lot of consulting with scripted police type TV shows. And I'm always at pains to tell the writers, you don't have to have multiple murders. You don't have to have car chases, explosions, shootouts. Just the interaction between the people involved. in a murder investigation, the emotion and all that is enough to carry a show with the intrigue and the fascination, and that's where the real story is. Yes. I get the sense that's what you're saying about with the prison. You don't have to make it dramatic. There's not a murder there every day, and the governor's not here.
00:06:11
Speaker 3: And there's not, there wasn't, you know, and with Wentworth, there's enough going on, new characters coming to prison, you know, characters being released, some on remand. You know, we could show all of that and we did. The first season was the most successful.
00:06:26
Speaker 1: Did you get to meet the actors and actresses and get a sense of telling them how to play certain roles and different things?
00:06:36
Speaker 2: I did. I met Nicole De Silva, who played Frankie.
00:06:39
Speaker 3: You know, I met with her a couple of times because she was, her character was about to leave prison and she wanted to know how that felt.
00:06:49
Speaker 2: And I knew.
00:06:51
Speaker 3: Just how devastating that can feel and frightening it can feel.
00:06:55
Speaker 2: So I met with her quite a few times.
00:06:58
Speaker 3: The rest of the characters, no, I didn't have anything to do with them. The script was pretty much already already written by then. It was a lot of fun. Um, pro at the same time I was, I was writing my own stage play, which was part of my PhD. Um, and it was a one woman stage play at La Mama's Comedy Courthouse Theatre. And, um, and it was a, an hour-long play, one-woman play. I was the star.
00:07:25
Speaker 1: Well, you may as well be if it's a best-performing actress. Did you get an award at the end of each show for the best performance of the night? No. That was called Revlon and Razor.
00:07:37
Speaker 2: Revlon and Razor, why?
00:07:38
Speaker 3: Because I thought that was quite unique. I used to always wear lipstick in prison and initially everyone would go, ooh, who are you wearing lipstick for? And I'd be like, oh, fuck off. I'm not listening to this shit. I'm not going into the prison code stuff.
00:07:51
Speaker 2: I'm not, you know.
00:07:52
Speaker 3: And then, of course, the razor wire, that was, and that was what I wanted my book to be called, but. You know, basically, you know, Penguin, rightfully so, said, well, you know, that's not going to, you know, pop out straight away as a prison story. So, you know, I followed their lead. But I was always a writer, you know, so I really enjoyed going through– Particularly as we were writing the scripts in the sense I would say you can't do that because if you do that, that character will have to go to protection and then she's out of the picture.
00:08:23
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:08:24
Speaker 3: Or they wouldn't say that. This is how they'd say it. You know, all of the sort of language around prison, you know, the drunk's lagging and, you know, sweet. You know, all of the language I absolutely hated but used, you know, when I needed to.
00:08:40
Speaker 1: Well, I think that's a, you know, That gives you the skill of communicating in all different environments because I'm sure when you left prison and were in the academic world, you're not using that type of language. But in prison, that's a way to communicate and the words and the way that they talk and carry themselves. Look, we've moved forward. I want to talk– we've jumped too far forward, so let's wind it back. You're talking like you're already out of prison. We just sent you to prison.
00:09:08
Speaker 2: Like, just– Sorry, I'm just trying to forget.
00:09:12
Speaker 1: I've just arrived. Wind it back a little bit.
00:09:16
Speaker 2: You asked me a question that was way ahead.
00:09:18
Speaker 1: This is not iCatchKillers about your play and your TV career.
00:09:25
Speaker 2: Should be.
00:09:27
Speaker 1: All right. When you're in prison. You highlighted when you're in the holding cells in police custody, your ability to write letters and give a voice to the people in the prison, in custody. When you went to prison, jail, whatever you want to call it, it's a new environment. You're in a contained environment. There's different rules. It's a different world. And you can upset people there. Were you fearful when you went from the custody situation into the prison population? Yeah, I was.
00:10:02
Speaker 3: When I first arrived there, the prison was locked down, so it was dark. And the beds were filled. We'd been brought out there just to fill up the last couple. And I was taken over to a cell, a unit. I had no idea what it was. But what I do remember is that it had– a mattress, it had a blanket, it had sheets and a pillow and I was in heaven. Um, it had a shower that I didn't have to keep pressing the button on the wall.
00:10:28
Speaker 2: And I thought, this is fabulous.
00:10:29
Speaker 3: And I got up next morning, opened the door, really concerned, not knowing where I was looking for my friends, you know, and, um, And this woman, she would have been probably seven foot tall if she was an inch. She's just almost grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and said, come on newbie, come and I'll show you around. And I said, yeah, I'd love to. I was a very agreeable person at that time. And she took me over to these two women. She said, this is Bomber. She likes to blow up airports and courthouses and things like that.
00:11:02
Speaker 2: And I was like, oh, nice to meet you, Bomber.
00:11:05
Speaker 3: And then she said, this one's Sparky. And I looked at her and I said, she's not an electrician.
00:11:09
Speaker 2: Is she?
00:11:09
Speaker 3: She said, no, no, she lights big fires, big motherfucker fires. And I was like, Oh, hello, Sparky. You know, I went racing back to the office, to where the offices were. I said to this woman, give me a minute. I went racing back over there like some idiot. And I said, oh, hello, my name's Kerry. I arrived last night like I'm at school camp. I just thought I'd introduce myself.
00:11:35
Speaker 2: But am I in the right unit?
00:11:37
Speaker 3: Because all of these women look really, you know, and they said, you're in the unit for the criminally insane.
00:11:43
Speaker 2: And I went, oh, no, he was right. I am insane. Like, you know, and I thought, oh, my God. And he looked at me.
00:11:50
Speaker 3: He looked at the terror on my face and he said, no, no, no. He said, there's just been no beds available. So you're just here. for a couple of nights and then you'll be going down to the remand unit. And I was like, you know, I'd never been more thankful in my life to know that I was only there for a couple of days.
00:12:09
Speaker 1: You can laugh about it, but I can't think of a more scary situation to be in.
00:12:13
Speaker 3: Yeah.
00:12:14
Speaker 1: You know, criminally insane. You talk about your skills of reading the room, but insanity is a little bit hard to read sometimes and someone can be smiling one moment and then– Yeah, in a fit of rage straight after.
00:12:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I learnt very, very quickly. You know, I was– from that day I was hypervigilant. You know, I was always– I was listening to somebody but watching somebody over the– you know, over my shoulder. So, you know, and I also found very quickly that just– Respect and kindness would, you know, earn me many, many, many, many favours. You know, I had no issues with, well, not, well, I did with some, but, you know, no issues with the majority of women because they knew that I, you know, I gave a damn.
00:13:03
Speaker 1: Yeah. And that carries you through. I've spoken to a few people in prison and said that kindness helped them get through too. Yeah. Not having conflict, treating people, and it's sort of, they're used to bridging up, like confrontation, confrontation all the time. But if someone just takes a sting out of it, and I'm not saying it works all the time, but majority of the time you can de-escalate a situation.
00:13:30
Speaker 3: I found, I went to the remand unit, which is a holding cell, 52 women that first arrive in prison. So no one wants to be there. It's like walking through, you know, a Bosnian minefield and hoping something wouldn't blow up. I found it quite refreshing, to tell you the truth. My first night there.
00:13:50
Speaker 1: Maybe you are in science.
00:13:53
Speaker 2: I actually found, yeah, probably. I'd been married. Nothing scares me anymore.
00:13:59
Speaker 3: But I found it quite, I saw women there, if they're withdrawing from drugs, they have to do it by themselves. And it's just dreadful. And I was the healthiest woman there. The first night I was there, this woman come up to me. It was a time when you could smoke. And she came up to me and she said, give us your smokes. And I was like, ha, no, I'm pretty happy to have one myself. And bullies are always bigger. She was about six foot. And she's standing there. Then all of a sudden there's 50 women standing around going, oh, look at the newbie, you know. This woman, I didn't, she turned out to have come from a major crime family, but I didn't know that at the time. She's going, let's go outside. And I went, no, no, no, no, I want to have a smoke. And I just looked at her and she said, you know, I said, it's cold outside. She said, right, we're going outside. And I just looked at her and I thought in that flash of moment, I thought I've lost my house, my kids, you know, I've hurt my family. I've lost my self-respect. I've lost everything. You can't go any lower than that. And I actually just looked it up and I gave in and I just said to her, yep, come on, let's go outside. I said, I've never been in a fight before and you're going to win this, but you're as sure as shit going to know you've been in a fight. And she looked at me and she just stopped for a minute and then just went, oh, you're crazy and walked off. And I'm thinking, oh, thank God. Another woman come over to me and she said, hey newbie, that was cool. I said to her, I saw it in a Mel Gibson movie once and I thought it was probably a good time to use it.
00:15:28
Speaker 1: And it worked.
00:15:29
Speaker 3: But that also gave me the insight that bullies don't like being made a fool of and I had a quick enough mouth to be able to do that. And so they avoided conflict with me in case the tough ones were made look like an idiot, you know. And if I ever had any sort of hard discussions, it was out of the way where they couldn't be made a fool of, never out in the main compound. So that worked in my favour as well. I'm certainly no fighter or anything, but I'm no shrinking violet either.
00:15:59
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. But they're the little tests that you get in prison and it could dictate the whole way you spend your time in prison, how you react to that first, yeah, give us your smokes situation. And you managed to talk your way out of it, which was quite clever. And it was pretty tough. Yeah, you might beat me, but you're going to know you're in a fight.
00:16:20
Speaker 3: I was, yeah, I was like, I'm so done. You know, I might as well just give it my best shot. And it's sort of, everything just goes through your mind. Like if she knocks my teeth out, I'm in prison, so who cares? If I get a black eye, I'm in prison, who cares? You know, it was just, you know, I didn't want a broken nose because I thought that would hurt, but I sort of weighed up all these things at the last minute thinking, well, I've just got to get into this life.
00:16:45
Speaker 1: Well, I suppose when you're at rock bottom and, you know, when you're talking prison, life, and we're going to talk about the impact of your relationship with your daughters at the time and You've lost everything. You really, you get to that point where who gives a fuck? What are you going to do to me? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Let's go. That type of thing. I would imagine a bit of that kicks in. The skills that you adopted in the custody sort of lent itself to helping people. You turned up with the reputation of, yeah, tough talking, smart letter writer.
00:17:19
Speaker 2: Yeah, with muscles.
00:17:23
Speaker 1: Then if she had a bike in here, she'd win the, yeah, because she's been doing spin classes. How did that play out? Because that really shaped your whole outlook on your time in prison. It got you a reputation with fellow inmates, a reputation with the prison guards. Tell us about how that evolved.
00:17:46
Speaker 3: It started off with the parole board goes out to the prison, or this prison anyway, twice a year, and they usually see about 40 girls. And I was watching the girls come out of where that parole board was, and they'd be like, you know, the maggot wouldn't give me my parole, and they just weren't getting their parole. And as they're coming out, I could tell they were saying this while they were in there. So I sort of started, after I got my computer and everything, I just sort of started to settle in. I'd gotten to know the women quite well. And I said, if I can convince, you know, the general manager to write your parole letter, that you take it into the parole hearings. And just give it to the judge.
00:18:27
Speaker 2: Don't open your mouth. And we'll go from there.
00:18:31
Speaker 3: Because, you know, they'd ask questions of the girls and the girls are sort of, some of them are illiterate and they're.
00:18:37
Speaker 2: Sort of like, I've already been a child, you know, maggot, you know. And so... So they were very hostile.
00:18:44
Speaker 3: So I got to know them all very well, which is a really big deal because they told me their past, you know, what contributed to their crime, where they come from, what, you know, and I found that most of the women there didn't get their parole because they didn't do a particular program. And when I investigated it, the program wasn't even running at the women's prison. So I also felt that, you know, If the judge says, like, your top sentence is like mine, seven years, bottom sentence is five years. The judge then says you're in prison for five years and you come out for two years, you know, on parole. That's how he wants it. So I felt the women have done their time. They should, you know, done the crime, done the time. They should have every opportunity to get out. So I'd started doing their letters, all of their letters. And because of the recidivism, they'd come back over and over. I'd just recall them from a disc that I had. And I ended up having quite, you know, parole time, I'd have seven or eight, maybe nine, ten women lining up outside my room that very quickly become an office. And it went from none getting parole to nearly none. you know, to I think 38 was my lowest of women getting parole. So then it become, if it wasn't just parole letters, you know, it was letters to the judge or it was family court letters or things like that. And I got to know the women very, very well and understand them very well. Because in prison, to give away your vulnerabilities is a really.
00:20:11
Speaker 2: Big deal, you know.
00:20:13
Speaker 3: Came in handy a couple of times with some, you know, ruthless ones in there. But other than that, I'd sort of cemented my place. I'd come full circle in there.
00:20:23
Speaker 2: And I relied on the officers a lot too.
00:20:25
Speaker 3: I used to say to the girls, you know, they'd say you can't, You can't talk to the officers and I'm like, I'm not getting into this bullshit, you know. Women should do their own sentences. I'm not getting into the crim code here. So every morning I'd see the officers, you know, good morning, Mr.
00:20:39
Speaker 2: Brown, good morning, Mr. this, that and the other.
00:20:41
Speaker 3: When I talked to the women, I'd say, you know, I'd call them screws, you know, but never to them and whatnot. So, yeah, the letter writing sort of got me on the way.
00:20:54
Speaker 1: And it's a difficult situation. I can see the benefits, the reputation that you get within the– because a lot of prison is about reputation, isn't it, how you do your time? It's the reputation. It's amazing. Some people that rise in prison or other people are treated like dogs, literally. Reputation is a big thing. It is.
00:21:16
Speaker 2: It is.
00:21:17
Speaker 3: And I knew– I got to know the prison and the women very, very well. And I sussed out everything, you know, and, you know, I knew I had to make myself a mover in prison.
00:21:29
Speaker 2: I wanted to.
00:21:31
Speaker 3: But I wasn't coming from in prison, in women's prison anyway, we had someone that sort of run the drug trade, someone that would sort of run the violent trade, the standover trade, and I was neither of those. So that's where I made myself being, you know, like the jail lawyer, so to speak. But it was sort of much more than that and I really– You know, it really made a big difference for the women in there.
00:21:58
Speaker 2: And as I said, I got to know them very.
00:21:59
Speaker 1: Very well. Tell me about the women in there because, yeah, I know in conversations with you and aspects I've read in the book, you obviously had empathy for them. And I think it would be fair to say you were shocked by what people had experienced before they came to prison. They were victims of crime as much as they were criminals. And they've ended up inside. Tell us about the type of people that the general public mightn't realise are in prison.
00:22:28
Speaker 2: I think, you know, you're very right.
00:22:30
Speaker 3: Most women in prison were victims of crime before they ever became perpetrators.
00:22:34
Speaker 2: And that's really important.
00:22:35
Speaker 3: That's not, you know, that's not trying to get out of anything.
00:22:38
Speaker 2: That's a fact, you know. And again.
00:22:41
Speaker 3: You know, a lot of the women when I'd sit and do their parole letters, you know, or if I'm talking to them as a group, they'd just sit there and go, yeah, I remember the first time I was raped I was six and they'd go, oh, no, I was seven. You know, and it was or someone would go ten, you know, and I'm sitting there thinking, my God, my God, you know. And they were saying it like it was just, well, you know, I get that.
00:23:01
Speaker 2: It's happened. You're a kid, you move on sort of thing.
00:23:04
Speaker 3: And they just, women just took it on the chin. They just, that was their life. They couldn't change it. They moved on and here we are now. You know, and I would challenge any person that has gone through that sort of trauma not to become, you know, a drug addict, you know, to try and cope with what's happened. 60, probably 70% of the women when I was in prison were drug addicts. They were a nuisance to society. They weren't a threat to society and they shouldn't be there. You know, we need prisons. I'm a reformist, not an abolitionist. We need prisons, but we need better ones. We need them to run better. So I think, you know, if you took all of the– because drugs in prison will always be there. Sending a drug addict to prison doesn't make them automatically a non-drug addict. And it's ingenious how– women get their drugs because they always will.
00:23:55
Speaker 2: I didn't care about that, you know. So a whole.
00:23:59
Speaker 3: Lot of the women in there, probably, you know, three quarters of the prison shouldn't be there. They should be in, you know, a custodial health system, you know, for drugs and whatnot. That way you could concentrate on the ones that should be there, you know, people that have, you know, murderers, conspiracy to commit murder, you know, there are a lot of, sort of violent armed robbers in there and whatnot. You could focus on them.
00:24:26
Speaker 1: We need to protect society from those people, yeah.
00:24:29
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely.
00:24:31
Speaker 3: But I have a lot of empathy for the drug girls who are just trying to get by. They've been shit on all their lives, you know, and usually been thrown out of home after some sort of incest or whatnot. You know, I can't begin to tell you how many people girls went to their mum because, you know, their new dad is molesting them or whatever else and got thrown out in the streets.
00:24:53
Speaker 1: I really, and I've been trying to champion the cause or at least speak about it, that child sexual abuse, how many people are in prison. And it's not just the female prison. No. It's the male prisons as well. I thought pedophiles were, you know, called rock spiders and everything else and they're a lower pecking order in the prisons. Because of the nature of the crime. But what I found out when I did a podcast series in a maximum security prison, it was because a lot of prisoners in there have been sexually assaulted as kids.
00:25:26
Speaker 2: That's right.
00:25:28
Speaker 1: You're into advocacy and prison reform and all that. I look at crime, how we reduce crime. I think we could do a big thing on crime if we protected our children.
00:25:38
Speaker 3: Oh, I couldn't agree with you more. You know, it's such a sad, and what's happening is I had a government, what was actually the shadow minister, contact me and said, you've got some ideas about prison. Let's hear them. So we met for lunch. I said to him, this is great, but I'm still not going to vote for you.
00:25:58
Speaker 1: I said, but.
00:26:00
Speaker 3: I'd like to be able to chat to you. I told him, you know, how the prisons work, how this and the other. And he just, once he, I said, put the drug addicts, nonviolent offenders, three and six month sentences, well, they shouldn't be there anyway, but put them into a custodial health system, white coats, not corrections officers, blah, blah, blah, rebuild these women.
00:26:20
Speaker 2: You know, he didn't want to hear it.
00:26:21
Speaker 3: He said, well, the community won't like it. And I said, well, someone's got to finally say, I don't care what the community thinks, you know, It's not working now.
00:26:29
Speaker 2: We need to change it.
00:26:30
Speaker 3: We're still staying within the parameters of keeping the community safe but the community doesn't get to have two bites of the cherry with everything when it comes to how we're going to reform prisons because when I was in prison, 350 women populated that prison.
00:26:46
Speaker 2: It's over 900 now.
00:26:47
Speaker 3: They just keep building beds and, you know, I just can't see how that helps anybody.
00:26:54
Speaker 1: Well, the rate of recidivism that we've got in this country, in female prisons, male prisons across the country, is ridiculous. Yeah, yep. I think, you know, if something is not working, what have we got to change? We all say, we're not little do-gooders that go, oh, we don't need prisons. Bullshit, we need prisons for some people. Of course we do. Society needs to be protected. But if it's not working, if we can– help people become out of prison a better person than when they went in, reduce, so they don't reoffend, that means less victims. It's not, you know, it's getting smart on crime.
00:27:33
Speaker 3: The knock-on effect is enormous. Like, as you've said, you know, it's less victims. And my theory too is that, you know, every woman that arrives in prison should immediately start a program the next day that is around rebuilding her addressing the crime so that she leaves the best person she could possibly be because she's going to come out and quite possibly live next door to you.
00:27:52
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:27:53
Speaker 3: You know, why the community think at different, I've heard it so many times, you know, that they go to prison and they get all these luxuries and whatever else and it's just so far from the truth, you know. And the other thing is if you want, you know, people need to understand that the sentence is The loss of your freedom is huge and it's enough.
00:28:14
Speaker 2: It's enough.
00:28:15
Speaker 3: You can't then turn around and go, well, we want them to break rocks as well. We don't want them to watch TV because there's nothing worse than an already angry crim coming out of prison as a pissed off one, you know, because that helps nobody. People respond to kindness and empathy, you know, and rebuilding them. And I think that's how we have to look at, you know, moving forward, certainly how we look at running prisons with half the population that they have.
00:28:44
Speaker 1: Kerry, you speak so much truth there, and I agree with you 100%. And, you know, we've got to get this mindset away from people that going to prison, if they're allowed to, you know, do study or they're allowed to watch TV or they get books, that's not fair. They should be punished. Trust me, the really bad ones in prison will get punished because they won't embrace the kindness. They won't embrace the opportunity. So people will get what they want. But the punishment is... been taken away from society.
00:29:16
Speaker 2: That's right.
00:29:16
Speaker 1: That's what the punishment is.
00:29:19
Speaker 2: And it's huge. It's huge.
00:29:21
Speaker 3: Everything falls into that. Your kids' lives. It may well be, like in my situation, it may well be my fault. Absolutely it was. But the pain is still there. So it's very, very real. Watching my kids grow up, I become auntie mum. You know, fractured relationships with everybody. You know, your ability to earn a living, your assets, everything falls into that great big hole and it's enough.
00:29:49
Speaker 1: I think the fact that you had the– understanding that you needed to put yourself in with the girls because I could imagine you walking around like day one when you're in there, could you keep that prisoner away from me? No, you are the prisoner. But a little bit of advice like that, yeah, it's just showing a bit of kindness in a very unkind world, isn't it? It means a lot to people.
00:30:14
Speaker 2: It is.
00:30:15
Speaker 3: I sat there one day with a girl and I said to her, you know, I said, well, you're going to be okay, sweetheart.
00:30:20
Speaker 2: It's the first time you've been here. She was about 20.
00:30:22
Speaker 3: She's in on attempted murder, you know, and I said to her, you know, it's okay, you know, I'm going to be here with you for the first couple of days, maybe the first month or so. You know, I want to make sure you're okay. She burst into tears and said to me, you're the nicest person I've ever met. And I thought to myself, it really stuck with me because I thought, I've just said about five sentences to you, sweetheart.
00:30:44
Speaker 1: And that's the most love and kindness she's had in her life. Exactly.
00:30:47
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I followed her through her sentence, you know, because I just wanted to make sure and touch base with her. But that happened quite a lot, you know, that ability to be able to connect, you know, particularly with really wounded people.
00:31:00
Speaker 1: Your situation with your kids, tell us on that, the impact that that had on you. And I see how it just becomes so hard and the visits and how painful it is. How did you deal with that situation? I had....
00:31:16
Speaker 3: You know, we had family court so I was only allowed two phone calls a week, 12-minute phone calls. So six minutes for one and six minutes for the other all in the one call and then it hangs up, it disconnects.
00:31:29
Speaker 2: And visits. The visits with the kids got.
00:31:32
Speaker 3: Further and further apart the more my ex-husband, you know, sort of wanted to move on with everything and plus I didn't realise how far away geographically, I didn't even know where I was in the Western suburbs. I'd never been out there before. I've never driven out there before.
00:31:50
Speaker 2: And I arrived in a van.
00:31:52
Speaker 3: So they were as far on the Eastern suburbs as I was in the Western. So, you know, petrol, the kids getting car sick, you know. At one point there, I just had to let it be, you know, just let it be. But what I did was I used to sit back and think, you know, I don't want to become, you know.
00:32:09
Speaker 2: A shadow of their life.
00:32:11
Speaker 3: So I'd buy a card each from the canteen every day and I'd write a joke and I'd go, my darling Shannon, today I thought of you 101 times and I'd put a joke in it and then to Sarah, my darling Sarah, right up until I was writing, my darling Shannon, today I thought of you 1,763 times and put a joke in. You know, the girls told me about six months ago that they've still got the boxes of them And they used to run to the mailbox to get the joke and all that sort of stuff. So it was one way of me being able to connect to them. The phone calls, I would have sold my soul for, I never did anything wrong in prison, but I absolutely would have sold my soul for a mobile phone. Because in the men's prisons, the phones are inside their units, so they can ring all night. The women's prisons, the mother's, The phones are outside the unit. So at 5 o'clock in the winter and 7 o'clock in the summer, once you're locked in, you can't make a phone call, you know. And 12-minute phone calls, by the time, you know, I grew up with my little girls' voices. To this day I can still know if something's going on, that they're not telling me just through making them talk, you know.
00:33:23
Speaker 2: And it'd start off with, you know, hello, sweetheart, how are you going?
00:33:26
Speaker 3: And the first one on the phone was so quiet and I'm sitting there thinking, come on, come on, come on, the minute's a ticking away. You know, and then about six minutes they'd go, I'm good, and it'd be like, oh, God, put the other one on, you know.
00:33:38
Speaker 1: Yeah.
00:33:38
Speaker 3: And you'd go through that, you know, and it started off with these tiny little, you know, hello, mummy, tiny little whispers up to when they were sort of becoming teenagers with, you know, yo, how's things? So, you know, I have a very good ear for what's going on.
00:33:54
Speaker 1: And keeping that connection's important. I know at Macquarie Correctional Centre– prison up in Wellington in New South Wales where they're trying something a little bit different from the traditional prison and giving prisoners more access to communicating with their families and whether it be in the visits or just being able to contact them more often. I think that's important because the one thing that helps a lot of prisoners when they get out of prison is if they've got a community or a family or people that they can come back to that they haven't lost connection with. Oh, yeah.
00:34:30
Speaker 2: I couldn't agree more.
00:34:32
Speaker 3: The more you feel that you're still part of something, then, you know, the more you're going to feel more inclined to be, you know, to sort of contribute to the community and not break community laws. If you're telling people we don't want you in the community, why on hell should they, you know, abide by community laws? It's, again, how people are treated. And, you know, I just think one of the hardest things, you know, when I was in prison I sort of counted down to the day you know, to get out and be with my girls because in prison time stood still for me. But they'd moved on, you know, and the very last prison visit I had with them, you know, I've sort of come in and I've gone, you know, oh, mummy's coming home, you know, this is our last prison visit here and whatnot. And they looked at me and said, you know, don't cry, mum, but we don't want to live with you when you come home.
00:35:25
Speaker 2: And I just, I couldn't react.
00:35:28
Speaker 3: You know, but the floor just opened up, you know, and I just thought, my God, you know.
00:35:34
Speaker 2: And, you know, they, and that was fair enough.
00:35:37
Speaker 3: They didn't trust that I wasn't going to disappear from their lives again.
00:35:40
Speaker 2: And, you know, it was very, very difficult. Leaving prison was very difficult for me.
00:35:46
Speaker 1: Before we have you leave in prison, you've started studying. You were doing a master's at prison and you met someone from the university that came out that became a bit of a mentor and role model for you in prison. Talk us through that and your journey.
00:36:04
Speaker 2: There.
00:36:05
Speaker 3: I was always annoyed that they removed doing what they called HSC, which is a platform for everyone to bounce off of. they removed it for women in prison, you know, and it was just like, you know, guys, what, what's the sense is that, you know? So there was a woman, a Japanese woman in prison who was doing a Master of Arts through Swinburne University.
00:36:27
Speaker 2: And she, I got to know her quite well.
00:36:29
Speaker 3: And she asked Swinburne if they, if she could continue doing it in prison. And they sort of said, well, you know, why don't we get a couple of other women to see if they want to do it as well? So The four of us that ended up doing it were there long enough to be able to complete the three-year Master of Arts. We were all sort of fairly articulate, you know, we'd all probably had degrees beforehand. And so the prison said, yes, you know, let's give it a go. On the understanding that no one felt that we'd do it. So, and it was very, I say again, this to the community. They think that, you know, education in prison is, you know, we just get all these luxuries.
00:37:08
Speaker 2: Well, it's not. It's a privilege. You know, you've got to earn it.
00:37:11
Speaker 3: But also it is the best thing for rehabilitation in prison. But also I left there with a $ 36, 000 HECS debt. You know, we had to pay for it just like every other student and we did it hard.
00:37:23
Speaker 2: We didn't have the internet. We had nothing.
00:37:26
Speaker 3: So the tutor from Swinburne would come out every Friday and she'd bring out reams and reams of paper for us to study and But then we could only keep it in our cells for six days because it'd become a fire hazard.
00:37:38
Speaker 2: So we did it very, very hard. And we graduated.
00:37:44
Speaker 3: And it's the first Australian university graduation that was brought out to the prison. So the vice chancellor came out. You know, we had all of the academics. Everyone was gowned up. They went through being frisked, you know. And even a lot of the officers, you know, they came in on their day off. And congratulated us. And when we went back onto the other side of the wall, there was almost a guard of honour there from all the crims, you know, saying, you know, they were so happy that we'd actually proved everyone wrong and we graduated. So it was very, very important because had I not had any education, I would have got a job at Coles, you know, when I got out.
00:38:23
Speaker 1: But education can offer so much more than just the education. It's the way you start to look at things, think about things, think about yourself. There's so many benefits from education.
00:38:35
Speaker 3: You know, it just teaches, it just opens your eyes to possibilities. It gives you that leg up to be able to, you know, further yourself when you get out.
00:38:44
Speaker 2: And again, you've got a captive audience. You know, why not teach?
00:38:48
Speaker 3: You know, I used to almost blackmail women to teach To, you know, to go to education, to learn how.
00:38:54
Speaker 1: To read and write, basically. This is what I've been digging for, the standover situations in prison. You get them in the yard and you make them read and write. I knew it. That's a dark side.
00:39:05
Speaker 2: I'd sit there, sit them in the corner and read.
00:39:09
Speaker 3: But, you know, and there are a lot of women that did leave and, you know, they'd learnt to read and write.
00:39:13
Speaker 2: But the education system was so small there. It was such.
00:39:16
Speaker 3: a tiny part of, of the whole thing that is prison. To me, it should have been half of it, you know? But, you know, at any given time, even then, 350 women, probably only four were allowed.
00:39:31
Speaker 2: In the visit centre.
00:39:33
Speaker 3: So, yeah, it's a big missed chance, big missed opportunities there to help women.
00:39:39
Speaker 1: And the different corrective services officers, and we flagged it in part one, you know, good cops, bad cops, good corrective services, bad corrective services. My observation in prison is like a good officer, the amount of difference they can make to the inmates, the way they handle situations. Would you agree on that?
00:40:03
Speaker 2: Oh, look, absolutely.
00:40:04
Speaker 3: In prison, there's a big difference between a corrections officer and a policeman, you know. Corrections officers are just civilians that have done a six-week training course.
00:40:14
Speaker 2: And it shows, you know.
00:40:16
Speaker 3: Um, they, they, they talk to you. They don't want to shoot you. You know, they're, they're, they're very, very good. The dog squad used to come in with the police and it was just, you know, you could just feel the chill in the air. It's, it's two different things, you know, and, you know, again, we had the, uh, the general manager, uh, Mr. Brendan Money was there when I was there and he, he was, uh, he made such a difference to so many people's lives, including my own in the sense that he knew how the system worked.
00:40:47
Speaker 1: He knew the women.
00:40:48
Speaker 3: I watched him for the first month I was there trying to work out who he was sort of. And he'd walk through the main compound. He'd address every woman by name. He'd ask about their kids by name. And I was like, this is a man that knows his stuff and is empathetic. And so I got to know him very well. He gave me so many opportunities. And I wrote the children's book in there for, for women. It's still in circulation today. I sort of said to him, I'm going to have to write a children's book in here and, uh, you're going to have to pay for it and publish it.
00:41:20
Speaker 2: And he's gone, all right.
00:41:22
Speaker 3: You know, um, the last six months of my sentence, I worked in a law firm in Werribee, you know, three days a week. He was instrumental in, in, in doing that. But, um, he gave me so many opportunities that I was never not going to respect that. And to this day, you know, I thank him and have the utmost respect. You know, we still talk, we're, we're friends and he made a difference in my life. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for him. And I know of many, many other women's lives too, because again, he recognized that your sentence is enough. Let's, let's sort of deal with women on their own level whilst inside the prison.
00:42:01
Speaker 2: Extraordinary man.
00:42:02
Speaker 1: Well, I'm glad you said good things about him because I've got some quotes here that he said about you, and it would have been a bit embarrassing if you were saying some bad things, but so you've made this easier. This is a former head of Victorians Women's Prisons, Brendan Money, says, and talking about Kerry. In 27 years working in prisons, I haven't come across any prisoner quite like Kerry. She used her time in prison so effectively she not only changed her life, but left a legacy that has changed the lives of many other women since. She encouraged the culture of education in the prison, which had a significant impact on the health and wellbeing of the prisoners. There are women who turned their lives around because she made them feel that they could learn. Some women who could not read or write, who had been in and out of jail all their lives, began to learn. And that's a remarkable achievement. Wow. That's a Do you get, do you get chills when, uh, yeah, this is, this is, yeah, head of women's prison and that's what he's looking at your time in prison, making the most of it and the impact that you've had.
00:43:10
Speaker 3: I sort of, I, I, I sort of, I sort of do. Um, what I feel in Moore is just appreciation. When I hear that, I feel, okay, I did my job properly then. I, every opportunity he gave me, I did it properly. And he's thankful for that. So I feel really appreciative that he sees it that way.
00:43:32
Speaker 2: Because, you know, we, yeah, we.
00:43:34
Speaker 3: Worked really well together to make things, you know, a better, because his way forward was also the same as me, you know, in let's try this, you know. Let's try and do this. It might just work out for the women in a better way. Or he might just say, that's just ridiculous, Kerry. You don't come back tomorrow. That sort of stuff. I was always at his heels in prison with one thing or another. And he was always there.
00:44:01
Speaker 1: Challenges when you were released from prison. Accommodation. Initially, the story of where they put you first up, but you ended up living on the uni campus. And talk us through the challenges that you faced upon release.
00:44:17
Speaker 3: For my situation, and particularly after hearing the girls didn't want to live with me, you know, Brendan Money came and saw me the night before. When long-termers leave prison, they have a barbecue, you know, sort of stuff, and everyone gets together to say goodbye and walk into the front gate. I'd sort of said to everyone, I'm inviting the officers to the barbecue as well, and some of them were sort of like, well, we're not coming then.
00:44:39
Speaker 2: I'll be like, oh, see you.
00:44:41
Speaker 3: You know, so it was sort of– and then Brendan Money came up to see me and sat me down and said he wanted to thank me for– everything that I'd done. And I burst into tears and I said to him, you know, can I stay? And he's just looked at me and he's gone, what? I said, I don't have to go, you know, can I stay? And, you know, I'm quite happy to stay. And he said, no, no, Kerry, you know, your time is here. You need to move on. And I burst into tears even more. And it was very– it was very frightening because I was somebody in prison.
00:45:13
Speaker 2: I had a place in prison. I made a difference in prison.
00:45:16
Speaker 3: And I mean a real world difference to someone coming up and saying, you're so kind, you're so nice sort of thing. Or, you know, not just I'll pick up the milk and bread for you. This was really big, big difference in people's lives. So it was very difficult for me. And what they'd sort of done was when I left, they had organized accommodation for me, but it was in Ascot Vale and it was in a a place where everyone that's doing drugs comes out of prison and goes to. I was the only female there, non-drug user, and surrounded by men knocking on the door all night, you know, wanting to score. And so I did a run of the next morning and thought, oh, I hope the parole board come looking for me because they'll send me back to prison and I'm fine with that.
00:46:01
Speaker 2: But I wasn't staying there.
00:46:03
Speaker 3: And so then, yeah, the tutor that I dealt with through Swinburne at the time organised– accommodation on the.
00:46:10
Speaker 2: Student village at Swinburne.
00:46:13
Speaker 3: So, you know, one of the hardest things is finding out where you fit back into community because you don't. And I had to work out where I fit in my children's lives. I was very much, you know, auntie mum. So I had to be very, very, I don't know, patient, patient with the girls to earn their trust.
00:46:34
Speaker 2: It's extremely difficult.
00:46:35
Speaker 3: I went from leaving prison on a Friday lunchtime To lecturing at a university on the Monday. You know, that's enormous privilege, one I'm so very thankful for, and I still had enormous trouble, even with family support. So it goes to show how difficult it is leaving one community that you're completely accepted in. to a community that, you know, no one really wants you. It's one of the hardest things possible. Leaving prison with a drug habit or going out to another drug habit, you know, it's just impossible.
00:47:09
Speaker 1: And also you carry with you, as you found out, thankfully people accepted, there's a stigma that's attached. Where have you been? I've been in prison. Okay. And people, you know, take a step away. So you carry that. It's a hard road. It is.
00:47:25
Speaker 3: One of the things I felt when I left there was, again, falling back to the thing that I'd done my prison hard. I had done that. So I felt very, very capable of saying, look, you can judge me. That's not a problem. I understand that. I absolutely do. But I've earned my right to be here. I felt very comfortable that I'd showed everything I needed to to be able to come back into the community as a contributing member of the community, non-criminal.
00:47:58
Speaker 1: Have you found the purpose in your life post-prison? We haven't got time to go all through the things that you've achieved. Even lecturing on a fraud conference, I thought that was interesting.
00:48:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, I do a lot of fraud conferences.
00:48:13
Speaker 1: Okay. Well, it makes sense, but your advocacy work and your academic studies, all the things that you're doing, you're really making a difference.
00:48:24
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the biggest, still the biggest, um, the biggest thing for me, you know, daily are my daughters. Shannon's 30, um, Sarah's 28 and Sarah's just given birth to our first grandchild, um, uh, granddaughter, Anastasia. So, You know, the girls are very, very close and naturally with my granddaughter now it's a whole new different thing. But I'm still, you know, sort of on the circuit. Prison will always be prison and I'll always have an opinion about how to make it better for women in prison and the community in general. You know, so I'll always, you know, I always want to contribute to that, you know, particularly about moving things into the health system as well. Um, you know, I work full time, you know, I'm a student engagement manager at a, you know, academic campus. So, you know, I'm, I'm busy, but Prism will always be a big part of me. Um, and, and the thought process that one day we can make it a whole lot better, particularly for women. My experience is in women, so I can't really talk to men's prisons, but across the board, I think we could do a whole lot better.
00:49:30
Speaker 1: Well, I, and look, whether it's men's prison or women's prison, it's, yeah, all needs, uh, the attention on it and how, how it can be improved. But, uh, I think women's prisons, and I've only learnt this, you know, since I've been out of the cops, get left behind in a lot of things. Yeah. Because people don't, when you talk prisons, you think, okay, group of men walking around the yard, that's prison. You're not thinking of women in prison. But look, maybe, yeah, it's funny how life plays out, isn't it? Yeah. It is, yeah. Your lowest point has turned into giving you a purpose and a direction in life. Yeah. if it's about balancing the ledges from your crime, and I don't say this lightly, but to me, like you're giving back to the community and we should be listening to your thoughts and on ideas that can make a difference.
00:50:23
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think, you know, apart from the time away from my children, I wouldn't trade my time you know, living in that prison and in that environment for anything. You know, it's given me a platform and a voice for others that don't have a voice, particularly, you know, coming from the side of the tracks that was quite judgmental. You know, I fall on my sword, you know, for that every day. And I'm still very fond of most of the women there. You know, I don't see them socially but I keep in touch, you know, with, you know, a lot of them have passed, you know, from overdose and whatnot. So it will always be a big part of my life because prison is here to stay. It's not sort of fluid like everything else. It's just going to always be here. And the more we struggle to just make it work, the more it won't. And I think there's a whole different way that we could look at helping people. They do their sentence. That's all that's required of them. And we need the media to be in line with that too. I don't know how many times I see The media say they got out early, you know, and it's sort of like in Victoria and I'm sure Australia as well, no one gets out early, you know.
00:51:36
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
00:51:37
Speaker 3: What they do is the top sentence, seven years, bottom sentence, five. That's the time that the judge wanted in there. But if someone gets out at five, they go, well, actually they got a sentence of seven, so they've gotten out early. And it just alarms the community. Again, it makes the prisoners look as though, you know, they've gotten off lightly and whatnot. The only way you're getting out of prison before the judge says your release date is if you die. It's just that simple. So we need, you know, the media to start toeing the line.
00:52:07
Speaker 1: There is a benefit to parole that people don't understand too in that it keeps some degree of control. Otherwise, you finish a sentence, you walk out the door, you're not obliged to do anything. parole can check in on you. So there are benefits, but yeah, I do think the media need to get behind, but yeah, we've got to worry every time there's a state election and there's a law and order issue, we're going to get tough on crime and we're going to increase the police and we're going to make mandatory sentences. I get sick of it. I got sick of hearing that narrative when I was in the cops and certainly out of it. We've got to look at, okay, let's be smart. Oh, totally.
00:52:44
Speaker 3: And mandatory sentences are the thing of the dark ages, for God's sake. Every person should be dealt with, you know, for the circumstances of that particular crime.
00:52:53
Speaker 1: Yeah, I agree. I agree. Now, one other thing, well, there's lots of other things. I mentioned your book, The Prisoner, and I've got to say it's a great read, and we have only just scraped the surface on the stuff that's covered in the book. But I One thing that sort of blew me away, and I had to check it with you to make sure I was reading it correctly, because I haven't heard of this happening before. So in November 2000, yeah, I'm choking on the words because you can actually do this. I've got a criminal record. I wonder if this could, I could go for this.
00:53:28
Speaker 2: In 10 years, if you're in Victoria, yours would be spent automatically.
00:53:31
Speaker 1: 10 years. Um, In November 2024, in recognition of Kerry Tucker's 20 years service to prison reform, education and fraud awareness, her criminal and prison record was spent and removed in the Magistrates Court of Victoria. This was with the endorsement and support of the Victorian Chief Commissioner of Police, the Attorney General of Victoria, the Assistant Commissioner of Corrections and the Chief Magistrate of the Magistrates Court of Victoria. My understanding of this... is that your criminal history, I'm not talking to a criminal here now. It's been spent.
00:54:08
Speaker 2: Well, you know, I don't like to ever.
00:54:12
Speaker 3: I felt pretty comfortable in that role for a long time. But, yes, that was all spent.
00:54:19
Speaker 1: Under the news. And spent, sorry, spent is just because that's a word that I hadn't heard used before, but spent as in it's done. It's gone, yeah. It's gone. Yeah, I like it. Yep.
00:54:28
Speaker 3: So it's if you're– If your crime was more than 10 years ago, you haven't re-offended, so on and so forth, and it wasn't custodial, it was automatically spent in the Spent Sentences Act. If you've had a prison sentence, it rarely ever happens. But there was a gentleman by the name of Glenn Broome, who I've been on the circuit with, who got his spent through this system because he's done an enormous.
00:54:58
Speaker 2: Amount of work in the community. And he sort of said to me, Kerry, you should do it as well.
00:55:04
Speaker 3: And so I applied and it went through all the normal channels. And yes, it was spent. It was very successful. And I was thrilled. It made me feel like everything had been worth it. My girls actually said, you know, we couldn't be prouder. You know, it was just full circle and sort of recognition.
00:55:24
Speaker 2: I'm also incredibly humbled by it too. It's a big deal.
00:55:27
Speaker 3: I did spend time, you know, a long sentence in prison, you know. I'll never, ever deny that.
00:55:33
Speaker 1: So.
00:55:34
Speaker 3: You know, it's great being spent, but you've only got to Google me, you know, and it's there.
00:55:39
Speaker 2: So, you know, it is part of me.
00:55:42
Speaker 1: Well, I think, yeah, all jokes aside, it's like recognition of what you've done from the time that you were the first arrested by police and what you've done since then. And full credit to you. Yeah. What else can we, seriously, what else can we ask of someone than to do what you've done and turn things around? So, You're an example of when the system actually works, but full credit to you because you had to drive that pathway that you found.
00:56:15
Speaker 2: Oh, thank you. Thank you.
00:56:17
Speaker 3: It's been a journey. It's nearly 20 years now.
00:56:21
Speaker 1: Long time. I've enjoyed having the chat. One more thing I just want to ask you is that Now that you've seen the workings on the inside of prison, would you suggest spin class or a creative writing course that you should do in preparing yourself for prison?
00:56:37
Speaker 2: I think both.
00:56:38
Speaker 3: I think both would work really well, although I don't know about a bike in prison.
00:56:44
Speaker 2: That could be classed as a weapon.
00:56:48
Speaker 3: But I think we could do both and keep everyone very happy in there. There's nothing wrong with a few muscles here and there.
00:56:55
Speaker 1: Well, you take care. Great to chat. And let's speak again down the track.
00:57:00
Speaker 2: Thanks so much. I've really had a good time. Thank you, Gary.
