FROM PRISONER TO PHD
KERRY SPENT NEARLY FIVE YEARS IN A MAXIMUM SECURITY VICTORIAN PRISON. THIS IS HOW IT CHANGED HER LIFE
Sitting in her lounge room as police officers swarmed around her, Kerry Tucker offered to make them a cup of coffee. But they weren’t interested in niceties. They had a job to do.
“I said I was going to pop to the toilet,” Kerry, who is now 55, remembers. “An officer jumped up and said, ‘not without me you’re not’. And that’s when I realised, this is it. My life had changed. I was utterly powerless.”
That day in 2003, the police weren’t there to assist the middle-class mum of two young daughters. They were there to arrest her and ransack her home in the hunt for evidence against her.
She was charged with fraud and was eventually found guilty of stealing almost $2 million from her employers, a local logging mill.
“It took getting caught to see how bad it was,” Kerry tells New Idea. “I’d just wanted to make things easier in my family life. I had two gorgeous kids, the white picket fence I’d not had as a child and I wanted to prolong that dream. It’s how I justified it in my mind and after a while it
became a way of life. After six years I couldn’t get out.”
But Kerry lived in a small town and the police were circling. And shortly after they struck, Kerry suddenly realised the true horror of her crime.
“My girls, who were five and seven at the time, came to visit me in jail for the first time,” she tells New Idea. “I’ll never forget their screams as they walked out. ‘Come with us Mummy. Look after us Mummy.’ It’s that simple thing which still breaks me as a mother.”
Early on Kerry knew she wanted to make her daughters, Sarah and Shannyn, now 23 and 21, proud of her again. It was that determination that carried her through the four and a half years spent in Victoria’s maximum security prison for women, alongside criminal names such as Mokbel, Moran and Herman.
“It was very hard. The only thing that mattered was to stay relevant in my children’s lives, but I only had two phone calls a week to do that,” she says. “I’d ask them how their day was and in their tiny voices they’d just say ‘good’. And I’d be watching the clock ticking down.”
“Afterwards I’d journal everything they said. Those tiny snapshot conversations were all I had of their growing years.”
As life went on and her girls got older Kerry says their relationship did fracture.
It was the same for other inmates, many of whom became close friends. But she says they didn’t talk about their kids.
“It would make me cry and I was scared I’d break down and never get back up again,” Kerry sighs.
Instead, she worked on getting a degree and became a peer educator, reaching out to other prisoners.
When she eventually got out in 2008, feeling like she’d at last reached the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, it wasn’t quite the joyful reunion she’d hoped for.
“I’d expected it to be: ‘Mummy’s home,’ and we could pick up where we left off, but my little girls weren’t little girls anymore. I had to realise they didn’t want to come and live with me straight away. I had to sit back and be patient.”
While she waited, Kerry threw herself back into life on the outside, using her degree and the knowledge she’d gained behind bars.
“I wanted to advocate for women in jail. When I left, the women told me not to forget about them and I wasn’t about to,” Kerry says. “It was time for me to give back.”
She went on to complete a PHD focusing on women in prison and became a guest speaker at events across Australia talking about domestic violence and advocating for programmes for victims.
She also made her journal into a book.
“I committed a crime 15 years ago and I’ve been making amends for it to the two most important people in my life since then,” Kerry says.
It was recently that she realised she’d achieved that.
“I was the host for Melbourne Inspiration Day,” she remembers. “Sarah was meant to be in the audience but she couldn’t make it so I spoke more freely than usual, saying how I had motivation from someone better than myself, that my girls had shown such dignity and grace and humour. Suddenly I heard sniffling in the audience. Sarah had snuck in and heard everything.”
Standing up, Sarah added to her mum’s speech.
“She said ‘I couldn’t be more proud of my mother’. At last she could say, ‘that’s my mum’ and not be embarrassed by me,” Kerry smiles. “It is an ongoing process and I will strive for the rest of my life but it’s been so worth it.”
“MY GIRLS CAME TO VISIT ... I’LL NEVER FORGET THEIR SCREAMS AS THEY WALKED OUT”